Text｜Dave Operation｜Gai Yao Editor｜Liang Chen
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
A silent fundraiser is taking place on the Bitcoin network.
Hundreds of donations of 0.00626 BTC, 7.89 BTC, 0.062 BTC all flocked to one address: 39o6E2qascmB5rNwFtJU6ug5PXZx5K2ED3.
This is the WikiLeaks fundraising address.
On April 11, British police entered the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK and arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
After seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy, the world-renowned leaker will be brought to court and may well be in jail.
Since its establishment in 2006, WikiLeaks has successively released a considerable number of confidential documents, including the killing of civilians by the US military in Iraq, extrajudicial executions in Kenya, and toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire.
Because of the disclosure of secrets in many countries, Assange has been traveling in many countries, living in no fixed place, and occasionally appearing in public. Assange also expresses his opinions on press freedom, censorship and investigative journalism. He was the recipient of the Amnesty International Media Award in 2009 and the Economist's Free Speech Award in 2008.
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Triggered shocks in the encryption world
If it weren't for that photo, no one would have thought of Assange's current appearance. Prior to this, he had spent seven years in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK.
Seven years is enough to turn a handsome gentleman into a gray-haired old man, although his actual age is 48 years old.
"UK must resist!" (UK must resist)
On April 11th, when Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK by five big men, he kept babbling this sentence. The tall Australian, with his signature gray eyes and tousled white hair, still stands out from the crowd.
"This is the darkest hour for press freedom," Edward Snowden tweeted. Six years ago, Snowden announced the PRISM program (PRISM) on WikiLeaks.
Assange, the investigative reporter who had been reclusive for seven years, reemerged from oblivion, his reclusive life began on June 19, 2012, and his Twitter status was frozen at a later date, March 3, 2013 day.
In the real world, people have not forgotten him. What he and WikiLeaks stand for is freedom of speech and freedom of the press as opposed to the powerful.
In the blockchain world, Assange is also constantly releasing energy.
There are comments that Assange is a big bitcoin player.
According to CNBC reports, in 2017, Assange said on social media that his company had invested in Bitcoin since 2010 and had made 500 times the profit in six years, all thanks to the US government.
And "Assange's arrest" is considered to be the "culprit" that caused Bitcoin to fall. Some YouTube commentators speculated that the decline in Bitcoin this time stemmed from the fact that Assange knew of his arrest in advance and dumped his coins to trigger the decline.
On April 12, Beijing time, according to non-small data, almost all of the top 100 currencies showed a decline, of which BTC was quoted at $4,900, a 24-hour drop of 6.24%.
Just a day earlier, British police had arrested Assange at the British embassy in Ecuador.
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Satoshi Nakamoto's Last Words
There is little in the cryptocurrency circle that does not know about Assange.
On December 5, 2010, WikiLeaks angered the U.S. authorities because of the leak of U.S. diplomatic cables, and was suspended from traditional donation channels such as bank cards. At this time, they thought of Bitcoin.
But this was strongly opposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, who said; "No, don't put it on WikiLeaks, this project needs to grow gradually so that the software can remain strong along the way. I hereby appeal to WikiLeaks not to Use Bitcoin! Bitcoin is still a small social experiment in its infancy. It is micropayments at best, and the heat you bring may destroy us at this stage."
A week after posting this post, Satoshi completely disappeared from the world.
However, WikiLeaks still announced that it will use Bitcoin as a method of fundraising, and later also accepted Zcash.
Currently, WikiLeaks’ official website shows that in addition to traditional methods such as credit card, Paypal, and bank card transfer, its donation methods also support virtual assets such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Monero, and Ethereum.
Assange's connection to the blockchain world doesn't stop there. Assange prefers to be called "cyberpunk", which is how he defines himself.
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born turbulent
Assange was born in Townsville on Australia's northeast coast in 1971. Assange, who just turned 14 and has moved 37 times because of his parents, has been unable to receive an uninterrupted education, sometimes homeschooling, taking correspondence classes and informally studying with some university professors.
Assange once told the New Yorker reporter: "During my childhood, I was mostly like Tom Sawyer. I had my own horses, built my own rafts, went fishing, drilled mines and tunnels."
At 16, Assange got his first modem, which allowed him to turn his Commodore computer into a portal to an electronic haven.
In this paradise, Assange calls himself Mendax (Mendax), whose name is taken from the ancient Roman poet Horace's "Splendide mendax", which means noble falsehood.
Assange married his girlfriend informally when he was 18, and their son was born shortly after.
At the age of 20, Assange hacked into the main terminal of the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel (Nortel) in Melbourne, and accosted the Nortel administrator: "I have taken control of the system and have a good time in your system. We did not disturb, Even made a written improvement, please don't notify the Australian Federal Police".
The Australian police still came to the door. The police seized 63 bundles of evidence from his home and sued Assange. At that time, his wife left him with their young son.
"We're all paranoid schizophrenics," says a person who has worked with Assange.
"Underground" wrote about Assange's fear of being arrested: "Mendax dreamed that the police would come to attack at any time. He dreamed that footsteps sounded in front of his door, and in the darkness before dawn, policemen with live ammunition were in front of them. Breaking into the back door of his house at five o'clock in the morning."
Underground, a book co-authored by Assange and author Celit Dreyfuss, outlines the golden rule of the hacker subculture: "Do not damage (including crash) computer systems that you have broken into; do not alter information on those systems (except for changelogs to cover their tracks); share information obtained."
Claire has said Assange was never treated for PTSD. In 1999, after more than thirty hearings and the above, Assange reached a custody agreement with his wife.
In order to earn as much money as possible to support his son, Assange worked various jobs, he even worked as a computer security consultant and went to the University of Melbourne to study physics.
He once thought that deciphering the secret laws behind the universe would bring intellectual stimulation and dispel the urge to be a hacker. From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne.
In 2005, Assange represented the University of Melbourne in the Australian National Physics Competition.
At a 2006 meeting of the Australian Physical Society attended by 900 professional physicists, Assange found that "the organization is run by conformists who weep in terror and have utterly inferior personalities".
Assange has come to understand that the human struggle is not between left and right, or faith and reason, but between individuals and institutions.
He believes that institutional hierarchies undermine truth, creativity, love, and compassion. When the channels of communication within a regime are disrupted, the flow of information between conspirators is bound to shrink, and when information exchange approaches zero, the conspiracy ceases.
Demystification is a tool of information warfare. Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 in a house near the University of Melbourne.
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Legendary "Editor-in-Chief"
On April 5, 2010, in Washington, USA, Assange played a video on the podium to 40 reporters attending the press conference-several U.S. troops carried out operations in Baghdad in Apache helicopter gunships to attack the "insurgents" on the ground. Go crazy shooting. Two Reuters employees (a photographer and his driver) and more than a dozen Iraqi civilians were killed.
The video, "Collateral Murder," begins with Assange quoting George Orwell: "The job of political language is to make a lie sound sincere, murder noble, Seriously."
Assange is one of the nine members of WikiLeaks' advisory group and the main spokesperson of WikiLeaks, but he has been avoiding being called the "founder" and instead called himself the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. The document review work has the final decision.
What Assange claims is scientific journalism, he once told a New Yorker reporter that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an objective world record. Collateral Murder brought in more than $200,000 in donations to WikiLeaks. Assange wrote on Twitter: "News media have a new profit model: try to change."
"WikiLeaks has released more classified aircraft documents than all other news media in the world combined." Assange said, "I am not trying to say how successful WikiLeaks is, but that the world's media is in crisis. A five It is a disgrace (to the media industry) that individual teams have released more classified documents than the rest of the media combined."
He compared news reports to physics papers, "Physics papers can only be published if the experimental content and results are clearly written, and the journalism industry should adopt similar standards."
On the other hand, Assange's behavior is also quite controversial.
A cypherpunk who did not want to be named said that Assange's revelations were selective, "Look who speaks for him, only RT (television station), which is equivalent to Russia's CCTV."
"Assange can't solve the problem of personal freedom for a long time, so he needs to lean towards certain forces. So I can only say that I admire him, but I don't agree with the specific approach." He revealed.
"In addition, the consequences of his actions are also difficult to predict. Whether it is really freedom and whether it will put more people in danger, I have become more and more uncertain over the years." The person added.
When arrested by the British police, Assange was holding a book called "National Security History" (written by American writer Gore Vidal, the main content is to criticize the US security agencies)
References:
References:
1. The New Yorker's 20,000-word report on Assange: NO SECRET!
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lnvNw9GdlZzkr7owIL2aRA
2. Twitter commentator: Assange's arrest is the reason for Bitcoin's decline?
https://www.31qu.cn/news/5cb0149e1c25b5de59/?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0
