[2017-10-16] Wikileaks founder Assange claims he made 50,000% return on bitcoin

[Eric Cartman]

Wikileaks founder Assange claims he made 50,000% return on bitcoin thanks to the US government

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claims his organization has made a 50,000 percent return on bitcoin after investing in the cryptocurrency in 2010 — and it's all thanks to the U.S. government.

In a tweet over the weekend, Assange posted a screenshot of bitcoin prices on July 18, 2010 and October 14, 2017 on industry website CoinDesk. In this period, the price of bitcoin went from $0.06 to around $5,814. This represents a 9,689,900 percent increase.

Assange, however, said that he has made a 50,000 percent return, presumably investing in bitcoin over the six-year period.

And the Wikileaks founder said this was because the U.S. government forced payment companies like Visa and MasterCard to carry out "an illegal banking blockade" against his organization.

In 2010, MasterCard blocked its products being used to pay WikiLeaks. Paypal also restricted the account used by WikiLeaks after it said the group has violated its policy.

Assange said that this is the reason WikiLeaks invested in bitcoin. The cryptocurrency allows anonymous payments and can be moved around the world easily. It is, however, very volatile.

Wikileaks is notorious for publishing classified government documents. Assange was fighting a legal battle with Swedish prosecutors who accused him of rape, a claim he denied. Earlier this year, Sweden dropped its investigation into Assange.

In 2012, Assange was granted asylum in the Ecuador embassy in London and has holed up there ever since.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/wikileaks-julian-assange-bitcoin-50000-percent-return-thanks-to-us-government.html

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[rindo]

Yes, ironically, the United States hunt to the wikileaks founder Jullian Assange had a positive economical turnover, for him. After the denial, from the United States, to Wikileaks establish any financial relation in the country, made that wikileaks had all there funds invested on Bitcoin until today. So that just made the market capital of the company to grow a long with Bitcoin since 2010.... Thx USA.  

[Kprawn]

Jullian Assange crossed paths with Bitcoin in the early days, when everything linked to him was blocked. Bitcoin once again

came to the rescue and saved the day. This is one of the advantages of using Bitcoin. {borderless & pseudo-anonymous} I

sometimes wonder how many people made tons of money on Backpage, when Bitcoin was the only method of payment on

that platform too? { We gained a lot of new people, when Credit card companies blocked Backpage users Credit cards } 

[tyz]

Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have been all over the news in the last couple of years. The most recent leaks published by  Wikileaks were the 2016 DNC email leaks, which according to political experts, heavily influenced the 2016 U.S. elections. In a recent tweet, the founder of the prominent website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, expressed that he is deeply thankful for “forcing” Wikileaks to accept Bitcoins as a donation method.
http://bitcoinist.com/wikileaks-donations-now-worth-22-million-thanks-recent-bitcoin-price-surge/

[richardsNY]

I am not exactly the type of person praising Julian Assange for what he did or didn't do. I just like the fact that he demonstrated that Bitcoin is always there to be used in circumstances where you don't have any other traditional option left (i.e. have been blocked by centralized entities). Imagine how things could have been in case something as Bitcoin was never invented. Bitcoin is the path to freedom, and I am sure that people are slowly but surely noticing that -- these kind of articles do help a lot.