Faced with growing risks of censorship, WikiLeaks is launching a major initiative to preserve Afghan war records on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Spartacus project, unveiled on December 5, 2024, aims to permanently register more than 70,000 confidential documents on the Bitcoin network.
WikiLeaks secures Assange's Afghan archives via blockchain
It was at WikiLeaks headquarters in London that the Spartacus project was announced this Thursday by Gabriel Shipton, brother of Julian Assange. The initiative consists of burning 76,911 classified documents on the Bitcoin blockchain via the Ordinals protocol, a technology for indelibly writing data on the network.
This approach aims to sustainably protect these sensitive archives which revealed the extent of civilian losses in Afghanistan and the controversial practices of the American army during Operation Enduring Freedom. “ This information should last forever“, says Gabriel Shipton in an exclusive interview.
THE project relies on OrdinalsBot, a renowned infrastructure in the Bitcoin ecosystem, capable of managing massive data registrations. Toby Lewis, its founder, specifies that the operation will extend over several blocks of the blockchain due to the considerable volume of documents to be processed.
Bitcoin and WikiLeaks, a strengthened historic alliance
The choice of Bitcoin to preserve these archives is not trivial. Indeed, the relationship between WikiLeaks and the first crypto dates back to 2010, the year when the organization began accepting donations in Bitcoin in the face of the global banking blockade.
This historic decision marked a turning point, even provoking a reaction from the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who expressed concern at the sudden attention paid to his creation. “ WikiLeaks kicked the hornet's nest“, he wrote on the Bitcointalk forum in December 2010.
Over the years, bitcoin has become a crucial financial pillar for WikiLeaks, helping to reap a significant portion of the $30 million in legal fees needed to defend Assange.
The archive preservation initiative on the Bitcoin blockchain once again demonstrates the ability of this technology to resist state censorship, thus embodying its creator's original vision of a truly free financial and information system.
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