The Daily Stormer is a “white nationalist” blog replete with meme culture, poor grammar, and the expected, constant barrage of sexist and racist remarks. Over the years it has continually had its domains yanked, hosting revoked, and, of course, most normal funding services like PayPal refuse to allow it to do business on their platforms.
Daily Stormer Uses Bitcoin to Crowdfund Operations
As such, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies present a unique solution for the blog. Many cryptonaughts inherently eschew censorship and laud free speech, and bitcoin is by nature censorship resistant. (Note that bitcoin is not inherently anonymous, but certainly, there are a number of blockchain products which can help it to be, and there are privacy coins built on the same idea as bitcoin which aim to be by default.) The old saying, in this author’s opinion, rings especially true with a group like the Daily Stormer: popular speech needs no protection due to its popularity. It’s the unpopular, perhaps in some cases reprehensible, speech that needs to be protected.
That doesn’t mean people have to do business with hate groups, and as noted, several companies have decided not to. The site’s founder, Andrew Anglin, has opted to avoid advertising, likely more because few if any companies could survive the backlash of advertising on such a platform.
According to the donations page, Anglin and company do what they do “to preserve Western Civilization,” which includes such high-minded pursuits as Holocaust denial. And apparently, according to the Bitcoin blockchain, their efforts are far from fruitless.
Over 47 Bitcoins Received to DateThe Daily Stormer’s bitcoin wallet received its first donation in January 2017. The initial opening balance was just 0.0015 BTC. From there, they have received more than 1,100 more deposits, totaling over 47 BTC at time of writing. With an average beginning of the month (when bills are due) price of $8,950 over the past 12 months, this means they’ve probably netted somewhere in the neighborhood $420,000 over the past nearly two years. It’s hard to determine exactly what sort of realization they’ve made from the contributions, but the point is that it hasn’t been small.
Their highest balance has been just over 13.5 BTC, in February 2017, probably as they were still figuring out how to utilize the funds. At the time, the value would have been around $13,805.
These days, the address seems to spend funds pretty regularly, but small donations continue to roll in. It appears no one has told owner Andrew Anglin about the potential dangers of address reuse. Certainly, there are plenty of people who’d like to know where all these donations are coming from, and companies like Chainalysis wouldn’t have much difficulty determining such information with an address reused this many times.
CCN |
https://www.ccn.com/hate-pays-neo-nazi-site-daily-stormer-has-raised-surprising-amount-of-bitcoin/
