With the arrest of Julian Assange in London, some of us have been reminded that some crypto investors of an early statement made by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto on the bitcointalk forums, where he commented on a PC World article that spoke about Bitcoin as a payments system for WikiLeaks.
Back in 2010, Nakamoto said, “It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”
The anonymous pseudonym that is Satoshi Nakamoto seems to be the kind of person (group?) that goes into matters with a calm and level head. The alleged Bitcoin creator was commenting on the fact that the spotlight on WikiLeaks was increasing and would eventually attract a lot of unfavourable attention to Bitcoin itself.
It seems that Nakamoto was hoping for Bitcoin to grow naturally and not attract unwanted attention through associations with a body like WikiLeaks, which has rustled governments and authorities. The website initially started accepting donations in Bitcoin and this seems to remove the need for payment platforms like PayPal.
One Reddit user:
“Wikileaks announced that they were accepting Bitcoin donations because they were kicked off of every other major payment platform. Wikileaks was all over the news for publishing confidential military documents and the first time many people ever heard of Bitcoin was when it was mentioned in association with Wikileaks.”
Assange himself has even spoken quite bullishly on Reddit in regards to Bitcoin saying, “There’s lots on bitcoin in my book – on my thoughts on it, and on WikiLeaks’ history with it. [Google’s] Eric Schmidt and I conversed for a while about it, and I also included a lot of notes to expand on my views. It’s a fascinating and complex subject, so I can’t possibly go through all of it.”
The popular Edward Snowden took to Twitter to condemn the arrest and called it a ‘dark moment’. You can see his tweet below:
Images of Ecuador's ambassador inviting the UK's secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of--like it or not--award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books. Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom. https://t.co/ys1AIdh2FP— Edward Snowden @Snowden 11 April 2019
