WikiLeaks and Bitcoin: the 2010 blockade, Satoshi’s plea, and the donations that followed

In December 2010 the payment companies walked away from WikiLeaks

In late November 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing a large cache of leaked United States diplomatic cables, the release it called Cablegate. Within days the companies that moved its money stopped. PayPal suspended its account, saying WikiLeaks had broken a policy against funding activity that encourages illegal acts. Mastercard cut off payments on 6 December. Visa Europe followed on 7 December, saying it was suspending acceptance pending an investigation into whether the site broke its rules. Amazon and a domain-name provider had already dropped the site, briefly forcing it offline.

WikiLeaks’ own account, on a page it titled “Banking Blockade,” names Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union, dates the start of the blockade to 7 December 2010, and says it destroyed 95 percent of the organization’s revenue. The same page notes that in January 2011 the US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said there were no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks argued the companies had acted outside any accountable public process, with no court order behind them.

That is the context for everything that follows. Bitcoin was not yet two years old and its creator was still posting on the forum. A group of its users looked at a publisher that had just lost its access to cards and PayPal and saw the obvious customer for a payment system with no company in the middle.

Bitcoin users saw an opening. Satoshi asked them to stop

The idea surfaced on the BitcoinTalk forum in a thread called “Wikileaks contact info?”, where users discussed reaching the organization and suggesting it accept bitcoin. One poster, writing as RHorning, put it bluntly: “Basically, bring it on. Let’s encourage Wikileaks to use Bitcoins and I’m willing to face any risk or fallout from that act.”

On 5 December 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto replied. “No, don’t ‘bring it on’,” he wrote. “The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

Read it slowly, because it is one of the clearest statements he made about how he thought Bitcoin should grow. He did not say WikiLeaks was wrong to want money nobody could block. He said the software was not ready, that the sums involved would be trivial, and that the heat would arrive long before the network could take it. The full run of his forum posts and emails is collected in our correspondence archive.

A PCWorld article, and the hornet’s nest

The attention arrived anyway. On 10 December 2010, PCWorld published a piece by Keir Thomas titled “Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?” It introduced Bitcoin to a mainstream audience as a decentralized currency with no single point of weakness, one that nobody could stop or censor “short of turning off the entire Internet,” and it noted that a bitcoin was then trading for roughly 20 cents.

Forum users opened a thread about the article on 11 December. That night Satoshi posted a two-sentence reply that has been quoted ever since: “It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”

The metaphor is precise. WikiLeaks had provoked governments and financial companies; the “swarm” was the scrutiny that might now turn toward a small open-source project that had been content to be ignored. What became of Satoshi’s account after that is covered in Satoshi Nakamoto’s last messages. What matters here is that on the WikiLeaks question his position never changed: not yet.

WikiLeaks waited six months, then took the coins

WikiLeaks listened. In a 2014 question-and-answer session on Reddit, reported by CoinDesk, Julian Assange said the organization had read Satoshi’s analysis, agreed with it, and put off launching a bitcoin donation channel until the currency had become more established. It began accepting bitcoin on 14 June 2011.

The address WikiLeaks published that day is one of the best-documented donation addresses in Bitcoin’s history, and it has its own page in our library: WikiLeaks’ 2011 donation address. By 12 November 2016, according to Bitcoin Magazine, it had received its 4,000th bitcoin across more than 25,000 transactions, most of them arriving in 2011 and 2012 when a bitcoin traded for less than $10.

The heat Satoshi feared did not destroy the project. The network was six months older, the price had risen, and the donations were no longer pocket change. Assange later argued the two projects had helped keep each other alive: WikiLeaks got money that could not be blocked, and Bitcoin got a demonstration that it worked for exactly the purpose its design promised.

The donation page observed on 2 October 2026

The donation page retrieved on 2 October 2026 listed a native SegWit address, a version-0 SegWit format beginning “bc1q,” alongside Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Zcash, Monero and Ethereum. The page is a dated observation of published payment details, which may change. We track that address at WikiLeaks’ current donation address. If the different address formats are new to you, our guide to Bitcoin address types explains them.

The same page lists card and PayPal donation options, routed through the Wau Holland Foundation, and bank transfers are listed for accounts in Germany, Australia, Iceland and France. Those listings describe the options published at the retrieval date.

Why a donation button from 2011 still matters

The WikiLeaks episode is an early documented example of Bitcoin being proposed as an alternative when payment intermediaries refused service. The white paper describes a payment system that works without a trusted third party. In December 2010 the trusted third parties, acting within their own rules, refused to serve a customer, and there was no appeal. Bitcoin offered a way around that, and PCWorld’s readers could see it at once.

It is also the clearest record of how cautious Bitcoin’s creator was. Satoshi wanted the project to grow slowly, strengthened release by release, before anyone tried to use it for something that would draw fire. WikiLeaks waited half a year and then did it anyway, and the network held. Whether the delay mattered is impossible to know. That both sides of the exchange are preserved, word for word, is what makes this history rather than legend. Our dossier on how Bitcoin gained acceptance picks up what came next.