Wikileaks goes bitcoin

Wikileaks Boycotts Too Big To Fail With Bitcoin

Silver Vigilante,

21 August, 2012

In his most recent article at Forbes on Bitcoin, Jon Matonis details that, more than 600 days into the financial sanctions against WikiLeaks by Bank of America, VISA, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union that eliminated 95% of Wikileaks’ revenue – basically ensuring the whistleblower service would whither from dehydration under “economic medicine” – Wikileaks has accumulated more than $33,000 on its public bitcoin address in over 1,100 bitcoin donations since the blockade began. Wikileaks is showing the world how they can back up their trashtalk of Too Big To Fail by steering around the dominant financial system:

What’s likely, however, is that the amount in donations is even higher, as the aforementioned figure cannot include bitcoin addresses WikiLeaks provides for donors upon their request. As can be seen at the public Wikileaks Bitcoin Address, most of the donations are under 5 bitcoin or $50 USD with the majority of those around 1 bitcoin.

Although Wikileaks has been accepting the dominant financial system’s payment schemes again, there is very little keeping the leak-service from going all bitcoin. For example, here is listed the top bitcoin balances on the web. Although public, one cannot tell who the owner of each account is. The most recent largest account is worth about $4 million.

Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists?

Liberty Blitzkrieg,

22 August, 2012

Although I have followed Bitcoin over the years a bit, I am admittedly pretty ignorant on the subject. What really caught my eye in the last couple of days was an article in Forbes detailing the fact that when the big financial institutions initiated a blockade on Wikileaks, the whistleblowing organization was still able to accept donations via Bitcoin.

From Forbes:

It used to be that people had secrets and the government was transparent; now it’s the people that lack privacy and the government has secrets. Freedom of payments is an extension of financial privacy and digital cash-like transactions without financial intermediaries become a critical piece of that foundation. Money was never intended to act as a form of identity tracking or payments restriction and this is why the option for anonymous and untraceable transactions is so vital as society moves to a world of digital currency.

 

 

To those that don’t support freedom of payments, consider this financial blockade invoked in the name of political correctness before you dismiss the inherent value of a nonpolitical unit of account and of a decentralized medium of exchange. It should be offensive to most free-minded people that you are not the final arbiter of how and where you spend your money. Bitcoin restores the balance.

I don’t think Bitcoin is THE answer. It could be part of a solution. Gold could do it. Silver could do it. They key point; however, is that in a world in which payment is increasingly digital we need more options for a medium of exchange. Governments themselves should arguably get out of the money businesses entirely and let people and business transact with each other however they deem appropriate.

One thing that each and every one of us needs to agree on is that the ability to buy and sell certainly shouldn’t be in the hands of these TBTF (too big to fail) financial terrorist institutions. These institutions, which have raped and pillaged this country in the last several years, shouldn’t even exist let alone have this kind of power. The mere existence of these institutions is an insult to every single American alive today and an embarrassment to the memory of our ancestors who aggressively guarded the liberty and freedom this current generation of leaders is so willing to give away. As Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General for TARP, so eloquently put it today:

As I saw first hand while providing oversight of the bank bailouts as the Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and as I detail in my recently released book Bailout, this perception was embraced by both Bush and Obama Treasury officials, who repeatedly turned away my efforts to impose conditions, restrictions and transparency on the banks. They declared such measures unnecessary because the banks “would never risk their reputations” by putting profit over the public interest.

Two years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, and in the wake of the recent proliferation of scandals involving the largest banks, many are now embracing this cinematic truth, with even the banker’s Dr. Frankenstein himself, Sandy Weil (whose Citigroup was the founding model of the megabanks of today), picking up a pitchfork and joining the growing mob of academics, regulators, former bank executives, Occupiers and Tea Partiers in calling for the monster to be torn apart.

Read the Forbes article on Bitcoin HERE.

Read Barofsky’s piece on the bipartisan support for the financial terrorists HERE.