🗂️ WikiLeaks on Bitcoin

When payment processors and banks cut WikiLeaks off, Bitcoin kept the lights on. 

Now, Gabriel Shipton, the activist brother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, wants to leverage Bitcoin’s decentralization for publishing with Project Spartacus.

Project Spartacus is a decentralized push to etch WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan War Logs directly onto Bitcoin, file by file, permanently as inscriptions.

As Gabriel Shipton frames it: “Project Spartacus was this idea of publishing the exact same material that Julian was being punished and persecuted for publishing, to the Bitcoin blockchain.” 

The point is solidarity and permanence. Bitcoin has no single server, which means no censorable gatekeeper. “Bitcoiners are publishing these files and nobody can stop them,” he told host Pete Rizzo.

“It's the entire document that's been inscribed onto Bitcoin, and that includes all the metadata.” 

The intent is tamper-proof history. Anyone who hosts the content on a centralized server can technically edit the documents at any time. Bitcoin fixes this. 

The target is 100% coverage, with the help of anyone willing to pay to mint the inscriptions.

“I think around 30% of the archive, around 23,000 of these war diaries have been inscribed already to the Bitcoin blockchain,” Shipton said. “I think it's a little bit over a bitcoin that is needed to publish the whole archive.”

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.

• The Winklevoss twins have donated 188.46 BTC ($21.4 million) to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, to be used for lobbying the Trump team for pro-crypto policies.

• Africa has a new Bitcoin Institute led by Anaïse Kanimba, whose father, Paul Rusesabagina, inspired the film Hotel Rwanda (Semafor).

• At last: Spot BTC and ETH ETFs have launched in Hong Kong.