Julian Assange "thanked" the US government for the growth of savings in bitcoins 50 times

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, "thanked" in his Twitter for the US government and financial institutions for the persecution of Wikileaks, which forced the organization to switch to bitcoin in 2010. In his publication Assange notes that the accumulation of Wikileaks in the crypto currency grew by more than 50 000%. On October 14, Julian Assange expressed his "deepest gratitude to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for forcing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, AmEx, Moneybookers and other payment systems to organize the illegal banking blockade of Wikileaks in 2010." Assange said that the financial embargo "forced Wikileaks to invest in bitcoin, due to which the organization increased its investments by more than 50 000%."

Wikileaks was the victim of a financial blockade after the organization published in 2010 the classified American diplomatic messages concerning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in November of the same year. As a result, Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union refused to provide Wikileaks financial services. Because of this, Wikileaks was forced to include bitcoin in its financial operations, in particular for private donations.
The prospect that Wikileaks will use bitcoin has been met by conflicting key community members. In response to the comment "... forward. Let's support Wikileaks "on the bitcointalk.org forum, Satoshi Nakamoto, the bitcoin creator, asked the organization to refrain from using crypto currency. This message was his penultimate record on the forum.
On December 5, 2010, Satoshi wrote: "No, you do not need to use it. The project should grow gradually, like software. I appeal to Wikileaks with a call not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community that is in its infancy. You will not be able to raise funds more than pocket expenses, and the undesirable attention to which you have exposed us can destroy the community at this stage of development. "
As a result, Wikileaks did not accept donations in Bitcoin until June 2011.
In August 2012 it was reported that Wikileaks collected more than 1,100 bitcoins - at the time it was more than 32,000 dollars. In total for the year of collection of donations Wikileaks received at its disposal 3 200 BTC at the rate of 10 dollars per coin. In November 2016, the organization owned 4,000 BTC.
Last week, the price of bitcoin exceeded $ 5,000 for the first time, before setting a new record of $ 5,920 on Bitfinex. A serious take-off followed several weeks of consolidation after a sudden correction of the rate by almost 40%, which was the result of the closure of the crypto-exchange exchanges in China.