In late 2010, WikiLeaks, the organization founded by Julian Assange that published classified government documents, was under intense financial pressure. After releasing a trove of U.S. diplomatic cables, the organization was cut off by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Bank of America. These payment processors refused to handle donations to WikiLeaks, effectively imposing an extrajudicial financial blockade. Without money, WikiLeaks could not pay for servers, legal fees, or basic operations.
Someone in the Bitcoin community suggested that WikiLeaks accept Bitcoin donations. The idea was perfect. Bitcoin was censorship-resistant by design. No bank or credit card company could block a transaction. For the first time, there was a currency that could slip through the cracks of traditional financial infrastructure.
But Satoshi Nakamoto was alarmed. In one of his final forum posts, in December 2010, he publicly opposed the idea. “No, don’t bring it on,” he wrote. “The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
Satoshi’s warning was prescient. If Bitcoin became too closely associated with WikiLeaks, governments might crack down before the network was strong enough to resist. WikiLeaks held off for several months, but in June 2011, they began accepting Bitcoin donations. The floodgates opened. Over the years, WikiLeaks would receive thousands of bitcoins in donations.
The WikiLeaks moment was Bitcoin’s first real test as a political tool. It proved that the censorship-resistance promise was real. It also demonstrated the double-edged nature of that promise: the same property that protected WikiLeaks from payment blockades would, in years to come, make Bitcoin attractive to criminals, sanctions evaders, and anyone else who needed to move money outside government-approved channels. Bitcoin had become political — whether Satoshi wanted it or not.
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