This article appears in Bitcoin Magazine. “The question of registration.” Click here to get your annual subscription to Bitcoin Magazine.
For most of its life, Bitcoin has been seen as a monetary network, through which users can send and receive the native BTC token. Given the tremendous price appreciation since its creation in 2009, the monetary good also became a store of value: a means through which someone could store their valuable hours of work so as not to degrade them and instead experience an increase. of purchasing power rather than a loss.
However, not all users are the same. Despite the popularity of these monetary narratives, some marginalized people have used Bitcoin for all sorts of purposes over time. In particular, Julian Assange, now famous journalist and political prisoner, creator of WikiLeaks, used Bitcoin for different reasons, including as a proof-of-life mechanism and verifiable proof of publication. For Assange, Bitcoin was and remains much more than a distributed monetary system that solves the double spending problem inherent to digital cash. For the journalist, Bitcoin can serve much more, and while he fights for his life, others have joined him in that mission.
Now, before we delve into the complexities of what Bitcoin is and can be for Assange and his followers, let's take a step back and see what the journalist has done with this digital currency since his NGO first adopted Bitcoin.
In 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks' release of US diplomatic cables in the infamous Chelsea Manning leaks, Assange's organization was banned from the global banking system when Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal stopped providing services to the bank. online platform. That reality led Assange to adopt bitcoin, and in June 2011 the WikiLeak Twitter account announced that they would begin accepting bitcoin donations.
Interestingly, WikiLeaks expressed interest in adopting bitcoin long before June 2011, and according to posts on the then-popular BitcoinTalk forum, Satoshi dissuaded Assange from going that route in December 2010. His reason? “Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would get nothing but pocket change and the heat you would bring would probably destroy us right now.” WikiLeaks patiently waited another six months before accepting bitcoins.
Ironically, Assange would later praise the US government for allegedly launching this coordinated attack, which of course led WikiLeak to adopt bitcoin and subsequently resulted in capital appreciation in dollar terms of over a thousand percent. It is both interesting and comical that WikiLeaks being excluded from the mainstream financial system for simply publishing leaked documents would lead to them in a much better financial situation, one in which they would not need to ask permission and could enjoy large monetary gains. in dollar terms. Poetic.
In September 2014, Assange would begin hinting at the other possible use cases he saw for Bitcoin, which, given his tone and delivery, leads one to believe that he was much more passionate about that than financial speculation, however great the profits might be. with the monetary use case:
“Bitcoin is an extremely important innovation, but not in the way most people think. The true innovation of Bitcoin is a globally verifiable proof of publication at a given time. The entire system is based on that concept and many other systems can also be built on top of it. The blockchain marks history, breaking Orwell's saying of 'He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.'”
A couple of years later, the use of Bitcoin as a timestamp server for WikiLeaks documents began to emerge, although it was unclear whether it was WikiLeaks doing the timestamps or grassroots activists. A Reddit user posted on r/WikiLeaks that someone had timestamped the hashes of some WikiLeaks torrent files, probably using OpenTimestamps, an open source tool created by Bitcoin developer Peter Todd for this purpose.
Gabriel Shipton, film producer and brother of Assange, spoke with Bitcoin Magazine about the early days of his brother's interactions with bitcoin:
“Julian recognized in 2011 the power of bitcoin to build 'an intellectual scaffolding' for civilization, a protocol that would allow any reference to human intellectual contributions to be independently verified, without depending on any organization. “Bitcoin excited him greatly not only because it was the most censorship-resistant form of publishing possible, but also because of what it offered: the ability to build a great marvel of knowledge, a crucial tool in humanity's fight against ignorance.”
Assange's thought process on Bitcoin use cases is significant not only because it sheds light on a totally novel use of the decentralized network, but also because of how early they were pronounced. Assange saw this potential over a decade ago, but it wouldn't be until the release of Ordinals that this use case would become significantly popular.
Ordinals, launched on the Bitcoin mainnet in early 2023, allows anyone to effortlessly add arbitrary data to a Bitcoin block at any given time. Once that data is added, it inherits the immutability and security of Bitcoin, and can achieve Assange's vision of verifiable proof of publication at that time. Registrations go even further. In addition to simply hosting a timestamp that allows for proof of publishing, which users attempted with torrent trace files as early as 2016, Ordinals allows direct publishing of the data to Bitcoin. Not only is there an immutable record of the time and date in terms of block height, but now there is also the ability to publish the actual content of the article or torrent link. A new era of block space usage for Bitcoin.
Naturally, we have seen that the launch of this new protocol resulted in the publication of a large number of JPEG files in blocks. At first, some were just random memes, but not long after their release, registrants began to get sophisticated, developing recursion techniques, and even teleburning collections of Ethereum-based NFTs. Now, almost a year later, Ordinals has created an entirely new ecosystem on Bitcoin, allowing all kinds of artistic and software developments to occur on the “mother chain.”
However, some projects trying to fulfill Assange's vision have started to emerge since 2014. These projects vary in shape, size and shape, but they all seem to be looking for Bitcoin and the possibilities generated by Ordinals to do more than just speculate on the images and videos. published about Bitcoin.
In particular, in October 2023 a project emerged that sought to allow anyone in the world to add to Bitcoin the cables published in the leaks that originally locked WikiLeaks out of the global financial system in 2010. Thanks to Ordinals, this project was able to allow no not only the time stamping of the cables, but also the registration and storage of the unadulterated content. Project Spartacus turned Bitcoin into a sort of Library of Alexandria, one that cannot be altered or destroyed, no matter how powerful the adversary.
In this case, the leaks expose war crimes committed by the US military and government, and expose facts that contrast sharply with the main narratives pushed by the media and the government itself about what was happening on the ground in the wars. of Iraq and Afghanistan. .
Thirteen years after those cables turned a journalist into a political prisoner, this grassroots project emerged to show solidarity with Assange and affirm: “I am Assange.” In allusion to the famous “I am Spartacus” scene from the 1960 film. SpartacusProject Spartacus invites Bitcoin users around the world to say “I am Assange” and inscribe those wires that powered it all into Bitcoin.
Project Spartacus aims to take a stance in favor of freedom of information and knowledge, making it impossible for anyone to alter the data that Assange risked his life to make public. The journalist is currently facing possible extradition to the United States, despite being an Australian citizen and not having committed the alleged crimes on American soil. The outcome of the extradition process remains uncertain and concerns continue to grow about his future and whether he will ever regain his freedom.
The Project Spartacus website provides a public interface through which anyone can “register” (ordinal slang for adding data to Bitcoin) a war log. There appear to be no fees associated with this action other than network fees, a necessary component for any transaction sent to the Bitcoin network. The page also features a “donate” button, which opens a panel through which users can optionally send bitcoins to Assange's cause. The donations are said to go to support the following organizations: Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Information Rights Project and Reporters Without Borders.
Bitcoin Magazine spoke with the anonymous creators of the technology behind Project Spartacus, who shed some light on the process and mission:
“Each war log a user registers through Project Spartacus is a file containing the original content of one of the 76,911 Afghan War Diary records. We chose the Ordinals protocol because of its widespread adoption, even in its infancy, as a standard for immutable data storage, and simply because we believe Bitcoin is the most immutable and uncensored technology for this use case. As each record is enrolled, its data is embedded in Bitcoin to be easily propagated and found by any of the many Bitcoin and Ordinals clients. We consider this use case for Bitcoin to be fundamental to human rights and freedom, and we hope that you will support Julian Assange by storing this sensitive data in Bitcoin with us.”
Upon navigating to the website, the user finds a huge rectangular button on the home page that says “Publish War Log.” Clicking activates the war record registration process. The user has the option to choose how many records to enroll, with a maximum of 300 war records per transaction. The user can then select the transaction fee, based on which the total payment amount is calculated. Pressing “continue” presumably redirects the user to make the payment.
The creators of Project Spartacus gave the files a graphical treatment by choosing SVG files, which still contain the raw log data as a comments field, while giving the user a way to easily view the information. The project pivots Ordinals' popular digital artifact use case to focus on the full purpose of data in a decentralized information chain, managed by tens of thousands of nodes in hundreds of different jurisdictions around the world.
In this sense, as Assange once imagined, Bitcoin has become more than just a financial asset: it is now a beacon of hope for those fighting against the suppression of truth and the distortion of history.
This article appears in Bitcoin Magazine. “The question of registration.” Click here to get your annual subscription to Bitcoin Magazine.
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