Wikileaks Boycotts Too Big To Fail With Bitcoin
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.