WikiLeaks' 2011 Bitcoin address, published over Satoshi's objection

WikiLeaks dates the launch of Cablegate to 29 November 2010 and says the blockade "came into force within ten days". Its own account lists PayPal discontinuing service on 3 December, Visa and MasterCard stopping payments on 7 December, Bank of America on 18 December, and Western Union adding it to an "Interdiction List" on 21 December. WikiLeaks dates the blockade as a whole to 7 December 2010, says it destroyed 95% of its revenue, and says the organisation ran on cash reserves for eleven months. The same page records that on 13 January 2011 the US Treasury found no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks. The money stayed blocked.

Bitcoin's creator did not want the association. On 5 December 2010, in a bitcointalk thread about contacting WikiLeaks, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: "No, don't 'bring it on'." He argued the project needed to grow gradually, called Bitcoin "a small beta community in its infancy", said WikiLeaks would not stand to get more than pocket change, and warned that the resulting heat would likely destroy the project at that stage. Six days later, replying to a PC World article that had already linked the two, he wrote that WikiLeaks "has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us." That was 11 December 2010 at 23:39 UTC. It was not his final word: he posted once more the next day, a routine release note about DoS limits and the 0.3.19 build, and then stopped.

WikiLeaks published 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v as a donation address on 14 June 2011. The chain shows no prior history whatsoever. The address's two oldest transactions — payments of 0.44 BTC and 0.05 BTC — both confirmed in block 130,863, mined at 23:23 UTC the same day.

The address has since appeared in 26,717 transactions, with cumulative receipts of about 4,043 BTC. Bitcoin Magazine reported it took delivery of its 4,000th bitcoin on 12 November 2016, across more than 25,000 incoming transactions over five years. That understates total giving, because WikiLeaks also let donors generate one-off addresses. Academic work reflects the same split: the UCSD team behind "A Fistful of Bitcoins" tagged the organisation by donating both to the public address and to two one-time addresses generated for them via WikiLeaks' IRC channel.

The address then acquired a second life it did not choose. In April 2013 an anonymous party pushed the 2.5 MB Cablegate archive into the blockchain across 130 transactions, running from block 230,010 on 6 April to block 230,136 on 7 April. Ken Shirriff, who catalogued the episode, found each of those transactions carried a 0.00000001 BTC payment to the donation address; both endpoint transactions confirm it. The published donation address is therefore wired into one of the earliest large data-embedding episodes on Bitcoin, connected in the transaction graph to material nobody at WikiLeaks chose to put there.

On 14 October 2017 a tweet from the Defend Assange Campaign account thanked the US government and Senators McCain and Lieberman for the blockade, saying it "caused us to invest in Bitcoin — with > 50000% return". Fortune reported it. The figure is Assange's own claim and has never been independently audited; a year earlier he had told Bitcoin Magazine the return was more than 8,000 percent over three years. WikiLeaks has since published a message at wikileaks.org/btc-proof.txt asking donors not to use the 2011 address, directing them to 36EEHh9ME3kU7AZ3rUxBCyKR5FhR3RbqVo instead.