Julian Assage Taunts US Government For Forcing Wikileaks To Invest In Bitcoin (facebook.com)

Saturday's tweet from Julian Assange says it all: "My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, AmEx, Moneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return."
Assange's tweet was accompanied by a graph showing the massive spike in the price of bitcoin -- though most of that growth occurred in the last year.

Comments

Re:Mooning the giant

[Gussington]

Word is that the President of Ecuador is getting pretty tired of this guy and is thinking about ejecting him from the London embassy.

We've been hearing that since 2 minutes after he entered the Ecuadorian embassy. Unless you are the President of Ecuador, or one of his aides, I suggest you stop believing the headlines...

It's probably not a good idea to point this out

[rsilvergun]

right now it's largely illegal activities (drugs, money laundering, gambling, randomware) that are driving up the value of bitcoin. That value goes poof the moment the government clamps down on it. It's not like bitcoin is even anonymous. What I'm saying is taunting genuinely powerful people and bringing the main way you're funding your organization to their attention when they have a history of blocking your funding methods is just plain arrogance.

Then again, he did pretty much side with the current administration during the election and, well his man won. So he might be in a position to taunt McCain. Especially since McCain doesn't get along well with said administration.

End of Visa Mastercard Duopoly

[ghoul]

Visa, Master and Swift have been abused so badly in pursuit of political goals in US Primaries that people all over the world have lost faith. Case in point - Sanctions against Iran a country which does not promote Wahabbism whil allowing full trae with Saudi. People have realized that depending on American and Western money networks opens you up to financial blackmail whenever American politicians want to do some dog whistling.
Russia has created its own payment network and making it difficult for Visa and Master to operate there in order to drive adoption. China most transactions are moving to Baidu's network. India is now using PayTM. As more and more major economies start moving away from western payment systems the West's power to use sanctions as a policy tool will go away. Since money still needs to move between the competing monetary systems cryptocurrencies will become the interface currency

Re:ASSSANGGGE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your source?

The accusations against Assange sound exactly what the United States government and its allies would concoct to try to destroy Wikileaks and its credibility. The US government has always infiltrated and destroyed credible opposition groups and protest movements from within.

Re:ASSSANGGGE!!!!

[The Cynical Critic]

Did you pay any attention at all when he locked himself into the embassy? He never went there because he had an active extradition request on himself, but because of the real risk that if he's arrested, the U.S is going to put in an extradition request, apply pressure to bypass the normal procedures to deny him any kind of due process (which the U.S has the ability to do) and finally stage a similar sham of a trial that Manning got. Try to remember that before and after locking himself into the embassy U.S intelligence did their best to try to wiretap him using, amongst other things, a stingray-type device (which they forgot to re-configure for him so it initially showed up as a south american carrier's base station in the middle of London) meaning that they clearly were looking for cause to extradite him.

With another autocrat in the white house you can't exactly blame him for not daring to come out yet...