– Assange will be sentenced today for breaching a British court order seven years ago, when he took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden.
So it was a natural fit for Wikileaks to use bitcoin due to its uncensorable nature, with Assange once commenting that “bitcoin is the real Occupy Wall Street”.
This included not only the “rogue’s gallery” Assange described in a 2010 speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum , but also the states that controlled the financial and trade apparatus that ran the world’s financial system, one where deviation and dissent was routinely punished with sanctions and exclusion.
This is the harshest prison in the United Kingdom, usually reserved for violent repeat offenders, many of whom have committed rape or murder — it is hard to justify why a non-violent activist would be here aside from sadistic extension of state power.
I sat down and spoke with Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s half-brother, to discuss the case and what is happening with it.
People who support bitcoin should be concerned about Assange’s imprisonment not only because it reflects the betrayal of bitcoin’s ideals in the specific case of Assange — states tying themselves into pretzel knots in order to undermine a non-violent disseminator of information — it also makes vulnerable the principles of true transaction neutrality that underpin bitcoin, creating the most pressing version of the “wrench attack”.
Dissidents around the world are using bitcoin now: some are using it to avoid censorship in Nigeria by the ruling economic elites against police brutality protests that have involved the murder of civilians by the ruling class.
The point isn’t trying to determine whether or not any of these individual causes is more worthy or not, or which ones align with our geopolitical views.
Yet the hope remains, as Assange himself noted, that new technologies will be able to mediate the unblunted power of many states — rather than consolidating their ability to control the discussion and their citizenry at scale.
Just as we’ve seen bitcoin hash power migrate after a crackdown from the second most powerful state in the world — we’ve also seen bitcoin work even under sustained attack from the political elite of many countries, including the preeminent political and economic power in the world.
I was one of the first writers in 2014 to write about the intersection of cryptocurrencies in remittance payments and drug policy with VentureBeat and TechCrunch.