Here’s what he believes about Bitcoin

Champions of free speech around the world celebrated earlier this week when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was finally released from a UK prison after five years in prison.

Assange has often relied on crypto to mount international fundraising campaigns to secure his freedom in his more than decade-long legal battle to escape persecution by multinational governments. A new video released years before Assange's arrest shows him praising cryptocurrencies as a powerful tool for freedom.

What does Julian Assange think about Bitcoin?

In a September 2014 excerpt shared by MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, Assange called Bitcoin “the most exciting intellectual development on the Internet” since the network's inception in 2009.

“Most people who have heard of Bitcoin don't really understand it,” he said at the time. “It's a cryptographically backed and largely fiat currency, which means it's very difficult for any power group… to start turning it into a rent-seeker.

Years after this speech, countries like El Salvador and companies like Strike have started using Bitcoin as a tool to send and receive cheap and fast international money transfers.

Moreover, Bitcoin and crypto have become the main tools for financing international humanitarian activities, including the military defense of Ukraine against Russia or Israel's aid to Hamas victims.

However, this is not even one of Bitcoin's primary benefits, according to Assange. One of the best features of the network, he says, “is its ability to protect itself or the people who use it.”

Bitcoin Breaking Orwell's Dictum

“Another fundamental underlying technology is proof-of-print at some point,” he continued. Since Bitcoin's blockchain's ledger of real events is immutable, the network could break the “Orwellian dichotomy” by arguing that “he who controls the present controls the past.”

Indeed, Bitcoin has been repeatedly used as a tool to circumvent sanctions imposed by national governments – for better or for worse. In the year In 2022, a Canadian truck convoy turned to Bitcoin to raise funds to protest nationwide vaccination mandates when traditional payment platforms like GoFundMe blocked donations.

After his arrest in the UK, Assange himself turned to crypto for funding, including more than $54 million in ETH through AssangeDao.

Assange said: “This is the big expansion that we're going to see with Bitcoin – it all starts from this basic premise. “You can verify that a particular contract has occurred globally at a particular time.”