WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Endorses Crypto as Bitcoin Continues its Rally

noozzle (53)in #crypto • 5 years ago

“Resist!” exclaimed several times a white-bearded man. Handcuffed, he is pointing his thumb up as if he was saying, “All good, folks. Buy Bitcoin.” We decided to write about it too since the story highlights why we all need cryptocurrency.

What happened?

On Thursday, April 11th, 2019, the infamous media persona Julian Assange was escorted out the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Taken into custody by the Metropolitan Police, he is now waiting for the decision of Westminster Magistrates’ Court. After over seven years of seeking political asylum, it is likely that Great Britain will allow his extradition to the United States.

Who is Julian Assange?

Assange is the “heart and soul” of WikiLeaks, an international non-profit that releases tons of secret information, news leaks, and classified media gathered by anonymous sources. He has been its founder, spokesperson, and the original coder. Since the establishment in 2006, it made a lot of politicians unhappy and several nations announced a hunt on him.

Take, for example, an exposure of the unnecessary and savage treatment of the local population by the US troops during the war in Afghanistan, or a surprising report on a corruption investigation in Kenya. According to WikiLeaks, their goal is “to bring important news and information to the public.” They achieve this mission by publishing the original source materials to highlight the evidence and trigger public debate.

Why should I care?

There are people who devote their life and energy to saving other lives. Their methods require privacy and being censorship resistant. In April 2011, WikiLeaks released 779 secret files related to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo detention camp which spawned the requests from human rights activists. During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, the platform has released emails and related documents from the Democratic National Committee causing conspiracies around Hillary Clinton.

Little said that some people did not like that: they were outrageous! The US government kindly reminded American and international companies who’s the boss, and Visa and MasterCard unsurprisingly refused to support the donations towards WikiLeaks. To stay afloat, the organization turned to the borderless, peer-to-peer digital money that had no central authority or any censorship, the Bitcoin. Since then, the only way to support the bastion of free speech is cryptocurrency. Which means, the more oppression and incompetence from the governments we see, the sooner is the MOON.

A tweet by Julian Assange in his excitement of crypto assets as a store of value

OK, what’s up right now?

Following the Assange’s arrest in 2019, crypto donations for WikiLeaks spiked. Its two addresses received a total of more than 6 BTC or over 30,000 USD in a few days. In fact, there are other cryptocurrencies they accept ranging from ZCash (ZEC) to Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), and Ethereum (ETH).

Donations for WikiLeaks in BTC for the last 30 days, March-April 2019

Donations for WikiLeaks in ETH for the last 30 days, March-April 2019

There are many other foundations like WikiLeaks that continue their work thanks to the existence of cryptocurrency. The ever-growing interest to it gave birth to alternative projects along with altcoins. For instance:

Civic offers an innovative blockchain-enabled KYC platform to speed up verification processes and eliminate the single point of failure;
Civil is a case of a distributed journalism community;
Sia is the decentralized peer-to-peer storage.

Lots of them you are able to trade and store at Noozzle.

What the future holds?

The truth told we don’t know the destiny of Julian Assange. Analysts say he’s going to be sentenced in the US for “spying” and “cybercrimes.” On May 1st, the British court suspended his extradition hearing until the end of May 2019 and ordered to jail Assange for almost a year (50 weeks) for violating the Bail Act. The UN has followed up with criticizing the UK government for breaching his human rights.

Perhaps, we are not going to hear from him (for a while). It resembles a case of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road, at that time a convenient Amazon-like website for buying drugs and any other kind of “illegal things.” His supporters claim that Ross ultimately exploited a novel opportunity; it’s not his fault that people are still interested in shady activities. Bitcoin has just been an ultimate tool, the currency of the future: no censorship, no authority above it.

Bitcoin advocate Andreas Antonopoulos is confident there will come a time when the #1 cryptocurrency overtakes the current banking system based on fiat payments. To achieve this, average consumers must understand the advantages of Bitcoin and thoroughly explore the options for using it.

“At the moment, attempts to use Bitcoin instead of traditional banking institutions are in vain, because we are only trying to simulate the existing system with a smaller number of intermediaries and less centralization. Instead, you need to create applications that cannot function under the existing centralized financial system.”

While currently, cryptocurrency remains a kind of hobby, it is high time for investing in it profitably. Later, there will be no need to sell your bitcoins; in a similar fashion, gold and silver stepped in when national currencies failed during crises.

Final thoughts

In the end, Bitcoin will receive the necessary support and development by which it will become a powerful competitor to current payment systems, such as Visa and Mastercard. Antonopoulos confirms: “We are ready to increase its capabilities by a factor of ten thousand.” Those who will join the early adopters will use the situation to their advantage. Be among these people. Support the truth, buy crypto.