Bitcoin, WikiLeaks, and a Film the Streamers Wouldn’t Touch: Jack Dorsey and Eugene Jarecki Make Their Case

Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin, WikiLeaks, and a Film the Streamers Wouldn’t Touch: Jack Dorsey and Eugene Jarecki Make Their Case Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki and tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey took the stage Wednesday to discuss The Six Billion Dollar Man, Jarecki’s documentary on Julian Assange, and the role the bitcoin community may play in getting it to the public — a conversation that stretched from censorship and surveillance to Satoshi Nakamoto and the original principles of the internet. Dorsey joined the panel virtually. The setting itself carried weight: Jarecki told the crowd that the casino sitting close to where he stood had ties to the private security firm that spied on Assange while he lived inside London’s Ecuadorian Embassy — a revelation the documentary places at the center of its surveillance narrative. Dorsey: Bitcoin embodies a gatekeeper-free, open network Jarecki said he went to Dorsey first for money. He needed help distributing a film that, despite premiering at Cannes and earning recognition on the festival circuit, found no takers among major streaming platforms. Dorsey shifted the conversation. Rather than write a check, he told Jarecki that the bitcoin community represented something larger than a funding source — a constituency built around the same principles Assange had fought to defend. “Bitcoin is an open protocol for money transmission,” Dorsey said. “It routes around the gatekeepers — Visa, Mastercard, the banks.” He described the community as one that views Assange as a hero, someone who stood for the idea that information should remain free and open, values he traced back to the founding culture of the internet itself. Dorsey pointed to 2011 as a proof of concept. After financial institutions cut off WikiLeaks from donation channels under pressure from the U.S. government, bitcoin stepped in as the only payment rail that could not be blocked. He called WikiLeaks adopting bitcoin out of necessity one of the most significant moments in ...