This text is featured in Bitcoin Journal’s “The Inscription Problem”. Click on right here to get your Annual Bitcoin Journal Subscription.
Bitcoin has for many of its lifetime been seen as a financial community, whereby customers can ship and obtain the native token BTC. Given the large worth appreciation since its inception in 2009, the financial good additionally turned a retailer of worth — a way by means of which somebody may retailer their helpful work hours in order to not have them debased and as an alternative expertise a rise of buying energy relatively than a loss.
Not all customers are alike, nonetheless. Regardless of the recognition of those financial narratives, some outcasts have used Bitcoin for all types of functions all through time. Most notably, Julian Assange, a now-famous journalist and political prisoner, creator of WikiLeaks, used Bitcoin for various causes, together with as a proof-of-life mechanism and a verifiable proof-of-publishing. To Assange, Bitcoin was and nonetheless is rather more than a distributed financial system that solves the double-spending drawback inherent in digital money. For the journalist, Bitcoin can function rather more, and whereas he battles for his life, others have joined him in that mission.
Now, earlier than diving into the intricacies of what Bitcoin is and could be to Assange and his supporters, let’s take a step again and see what the journalist has executed with this digital coin because the first time his NGO embraced bitcoin.
In 2010, shortly after the publishing of U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks within the notorious Chelsea Manning leaks, Assange’s group was lower from the worldwide banking system as Financial institution of America, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal stopped serving the net platform. That actuality led Assange to undertake bitcoin, and in June 2011 WikiLeak’s Twitter account introduced they’d begin accepting bitcoin donations.
Curiously, WikiLeaks voiced curiosity in adopting bitcoin a lot sooner than June 2011, and in line with posts in then-popular discussion board BitcoinTalk, Satoshi discouraged Assange from pursuing that route in December 2010. Their purpose? “Bitcoin is a small beta neighborhood in its infancy. You wouldn’t stand to get greater than pocket change, and the warmth you’d convey would doubtless destroy us at this stage.” WikiLeaks patiently waited one other six months earlier than accepting bitcoin.
Mockingly, Assange would later reward the U.S. authorities for allegedly issuing this coordinated assault, which in fact led to WikiLeak’s embrace of bitcoin and subsequently resulted in a capital appreciation in greenback phrases of over a thousand p.c. It’s each attention-grabbing and comical that the very fact WikiLeaks received locked out of the mainstream monetary system for merely publishing leaked paperwork would make them a significantly better monetary scenario — one by which they didn’t have to ask permission and will get pleasure from nice financial good points in greenback phrases. Poetic.
In September 2014, Assange would begin hinting on the different doable use circumstances he noticed for Bitcoin, which, given his tone and supply, leads one to imagine he was rather more enthusiastic about that than monetary hypothesis — nonetheless massive the good points may very well be with the financial use case:
“Bitcoin is an especially vital innovation, however not in the way in which most individuals assume. Bitcoin’s actual innovation is a globally verifiable proof of publishing at a sure time. The entire system is constructed on that idea and plenty of different techniques can be constructed on it. The blockchain nails down historical past, breaking Orwell’s dictum of ‘He who controls the current controls the previous and he who controls the previous controls the longer term’.”
A few years later, using Bitcoin as a timestamping server for WikiLeaks paperwork started to emerge, albeit it wasn’t clear if it was WikiLeaks itself doing the timestamps or grassroots activists. A Reddit consumer posted on r/WikiLeaks that somebody had timestamped the hashes of some WikiLeaks torrent recordsdata, doubtless utilizing OpenTimestamps — an open supply software created by Bitcoin developer Peter Todd for this objective.
Gabriel Shipton, movie producer and Assange’s brother, talked with Bitcoin Journal concerning the early days of his brother’s interactions with bitcoin:
“Julian acknowledged in 2011 the facility of bitcoin to construct ‘an mental scaffold’ for civilization, a protocol that will enable any reference to human mental contributions to be independently verified, with out counting on any group. Bitcoin so tremendously excited him not solely as a consequence of it being essentially the most censorship-resistant method of publishing doable, but additionally of what it supplied: The power to assemble an amazing surprise of data, an important software in humanity’s battle towards ignorance.”
Assange’s thought course of on Bitcoin use circumstances is significant not solely as a result of they make clear a completely novel use for the decentralized community, but additionally due to how early they have been uttered. Assange noticed this potential over a decade in the past, but it surely wouldn’t be till the discharge of Ordinals that this use case could be popularized in a significant manner.
Ordinals, launched on Bitcoin mainnet at the beginning of 2023, permits anybody to effortlessly add arbitrary knowledge to a Bitcoin block at any given second. As soon as that knowledge is added, it inherits Bitcoin’s immutability and safety, and may obtain Assange’s imaginative and prescient of a verifiable proof-of-publishing at that second. Inscriptions go even additional. Along with simply housing a timestamp enabling proof-of-publishing, which customers tried with torrent tracker recordsdata as early as 2016, Ordinals allows the direct publishing of the information itself on Bitcoin. Not solely is there an immutable report of the time and date in block peak phrases, there may be now additionally the likelihood to publish the precise contents of the article or torrent hyperlink itself. A brand new period of blockspace utilization for Bitcoin.
Naturally, we’ve seen the launch of this new protocol result in a complete slew of JPEGs being revealed in blocks. Within the early days, some have been simply random memes, however not lengthy after its launch, inscribers began getting subtle, growing recursion strategies, and even teleburning Ethereum-based NFT collections. Now, practically a full yr later, Ordinals have spun a wholly new ecosystem in Bitcoin, enabling all totally different sorts of inventive and software program developments to happen on the “mom chain”.
Nevertheless, some initiatives started to emerge that attempt to cater to Assange’s imaginative and prescient from manner again in 2014. These initiatives range in form, measurement, and type, however all appear to hunt Bitcoin and the chances caused by Ordinals to truly do one thing greater than speculate on the pictures and movies revealed on Bitcoin.
Most notably, a challenge emerged in October 2023 that sought to allow anybody on the planet so as to add to Bitcoin the cables revealed within the leaks that initially locked WikiLeaks out of the worldwide monetary system again in 2010. Due to Ordinals, this challenge was capable of enable not solely the timestamping of the cables, however the precise inscribing and storing of the unadulterated content material itself. Undertaking Spartacus turned Bitcoin right into a form of Library of Alexandria — one that can not be altered or destroyed, irrespective of how highly effective the adversary.
On this case, the leaks expose warfare crimes by america army and authorities, and expose info that stand in stark distinction to the primary narratives pushed by the media and the federal government itself about what was taking place on the bottom within the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
13 years after these cables turned a journalist right into a political prisoner, this grassroots challenge emerged to face in solidarity with Assange and declare, “I’m Assange”. Alluding to the well-known “I’m Spartacus” scene within the 1960 film Spartacus, Undertaking Spartacus invitations Bitcoin customers from all around the world to say “I’m Assange” and inscribe into Bitcoin these cables that kickstarted the whole lot.
Undertaking Spartacus goals to take a stand towards freedom of data and data, making it unattainable for anybody to mess with the information that Assange risked his life to make public. The journalist at present faces potential extradition to the U.S., regardless of being an Australian citizen and never having dedicated the alleged offenses on U.S. soil. The result of the extradition course of stays unsure, and issues proceed to develop relating to his future and whether or not he’ll ever regain his freedom.
Undertaking Spartacus’ web site gives a public interface by means of which any particular person can “inscribe” –– Ordinals jargon for including knowledge to Bitcoin –– a warfare log. There appear to be no charges related to this motion aside from community charges, a crucial element to any transaction submitted to the Bitcoin community. The web page additionally encompasses a “donate” button, which opens up a panel by means of which customers can optionally ship bitcoin to Assange’s trigger. Donations are stated to go towards supporting the next organizations: Freedom of the Press Basis, The Info Rights Undertaking, and Reporters With out Borders.
Bitcoin Journal spoke with the nameless creators of the know-how behind Undertaking Spartacus, who shed some mild on the method and mission:
“Every warfare log a consumer inscribes by means of Undertaking Spartacus is a file containing the unique content material from one of many 76,911 Afghan Conflict Diary logs. We selected the Ordinals protocol for its widespread adoption, even in its infancy, as a regular for immutable knowledge storage, and just because we imagine Bitcoin is essentially the most immutable and uncensorable know-how for this use case. As every log is inscribed, its knowledge is embedded into Bitcoin to be propagated and simply discovered by any of the numerous Bitcoin and Ordinals shoppers. We see this use case for Bitcoin to be crucial for human rights and freedom, and we hope that you’ll stand with Julian Assange by storing this delicate knowledge on Bitcoin with us.”
Upon navigating to the web site, the consumer finds an enormous rectangular button on the primary web page, studying “Publish Conflict Log”. Upon clicking, the method of inscribing a warfare log is triggered. The consumer is given the choice to decide on what number of logs to inscribe, with a most of 300 warfare logs per transaction. The consumer can then choose the transaction charge, primarily based on which a complete quantity for cost is calculated. Upon hitting “proceed”, the consumer is then presumably redirected for cost.
The creators of Undertaking Spartacus gave the recordsdata a graphical therapy by selecting SVG recordsdata, which nonetheless include the uncooked log knowledge as a remark discipline, whereas giving the consumer a solution to simply view the knowledge. The challenge takes a spin on Ordinals’ well-liked use case of digital artifacts to concentrate on full knowledge finality on a decentralized chain of data, run by tens of hundreds of nodes in tons of of various jurisdictions all over the world.
On this sense, as Assange as soon as envisioned, Bitcoin has certainly grow to be greater than only a monetary asset — it’s now a beacon of hope for these preventing towards the suppression of reality and the distortion of historical past.
This text is featured in Bitcoin Journal’s “The Inscription Problem”. Click on right here to get your Annual Bitcoin Journal Subscription.