Our research

Our interest in Wikileaks’ use of Bitcoin is not arbitrary. Julian Assange, founder of the organization, has proved to have an advantage over a vast majority of the players in global politics; he understands Bitcoin as a technology and knows how to use it beyond money transactions. He has said:

“Bitcoin is an extremely important innovation, but not in the way most people think. Bitcoin’s real innovation is a globally verifiable proof [of] publishing at a certain time. The whole system is built on that concept and many other systems can also be built on it. The blockchain nails down history, breaking Orwell’s dictum of ‘He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.’” — Julian Assange

Assange went on to deny the rumors of his death, providing proof by reading the current block number #447506 of the Bitcoin Blockchain and its hash. This is not irrefutable proof, but showed Assange’s understanding of how to use the immutability of the Blockchain to provide authoritative answers without third parties.

We have found in Wikileaks’ transaction history a large number of strange micropayments that involve insignificant amounts of money (a handful of Satoshis, fractions of cents) of which Reddit users have speculated could contain text or other embedded data; or transactions to the same wallet made within a matter of hours in a fragmented way instead of being made all at once. All of this is interesting but tells us little. It does however prove above anything else that Bitcoin is a magnificent expression of what Karckhoff thought to be a principal property of good cryptography: even if every part of the system — except the key — is public, the secret is kept private.

Wikileaks’ official address is 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v—this is the one linked in their site for donations and tagged as their address by blockchain.info, a service known to be the most popular Bitcoin wallet in use. However, Bitcoin Who’s Who calculates Wikileaks’ importance in the network considering a second address: 1MaXZE92yjuy4NYjTspmdWHMRT3jQUcTf4.

Adding up the number of transactions involving these two addresses, we can see that Wikileaks is the organization with most transactions in the history of Bitcoin: something close to 50,000, which puts them #5 in the ranking of Top 50 Bitcoin Donation Addresses.

Sources

But not all transactions we find in this history are generous donations or regular transactions. In July 2015, Wikileaks wallet was the target of what in Bitcoin lingo is called a “flood attack” or “dust attack”. Simply put, if dust is an insignificant amount of Bitcoin (something like 0.00001), a dust attack consists in a thousands of extremely tiny and irrelevant amounts of Bitcoin sent by the attacker towards one address to spoil the network. The amount of dust for this huge attack was worth 30 BTC (or U$D 8,000 at the time). What made Wikileaks the target? We can only speculate. The remarkable thing about this attack is it was surprisingly timely, as stress tests were being conducted in the middle of a heated debate the Bitcoin community was having about the block size and stability of the network.

Identified IP addresses of every Wikileaks bitcoin transaction.

Blockchain.info also provides the estimated IP of the first node that broadcasted a transaction to the blockchain which allows us to map the geographical sources of the transactions that include this information and estimate the influence that either Russia 🇷🇺 or China 🇨🇳 had in the organization through Bitcoin donations. It’s worth noting that combined, former Soviet territories like Georgia 🇬🇪, Ukraine 🇺🇦 and Lithuania 🇱🇹 rank in the Top 20 countries and account for a total of 14% of the transactions we’ve been able to identify with an IP address. Another path that can be explored regarding geographical identification is to query every bitcoin address on Google (🇺🇸), Yandex (🇷🇺) and Baidu (🇨🇳) and verify if these have been effectively used by organizations in those countries.

Regarding organizations, Blockchain.info also enables the possibility to include tags in the transactions. These do not offer any kind of guarantee that are necessarily tied to an organization and can often be used simply to state a message (in this case often motivated by political reasons).

Tags included in blockchian.info for Wikileaks transactions per amount of satoshi transacted.

Transactions tagged with “Mt. Gox” are prior to the downfall of this organization, one of the first exchanges that operated the currency that eventually got hacked and filed for bankruptcy in Japan 🇯🇵. The ones mentioning “NSAGov” are clearly a pun from the donor. Among the interesting tags we’ve been able to identify, we found: