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Source: Blockworks; Compilation: Tao Zhu, Bitchain Vision
It’s also a creepy to look back at the official record of five-hour secret meetings between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt released 12 years ago this week.
Schmidt collaborated with Jared Cohen, a senior global affairs mediator and then head of the internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), a book called The New Digital Age, about the intersection of American global power and social media.
The meeting was held under the pretext of studying the book, and Schmidt and Cohen visited some tech leaders at the same time.Assange published his description of the meeting in his 2014 book When Google Meets WikiLeaks .
In mid-2011, WikiLeaks remained very active despite Assange’s house arrest in rural Britain for opposing extradition to Sweden.”Schmidt digs deeper and asks me directly about WikiLeaks’ organizational and technical foundations,” Assange wrote. WikiLeaks has just begun accepting Bitcoin donations after a compelling bank blockade cut off WikiLeaks’ connections with Bank of America, Mastercard, Visa, Western Union and PayPal.
Assange didn’t have much thought about the visit at that time and thoughtSchmidt is “a Silicon Valley engineer with no political ambitions, and a relic of the beautiful old era of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast.”
But after a deep understanding of Google’s integration with U.S. foreign policy, he has a different view.“When WikiLeaks was deeply involved in releasing internal U.S. State Department files, the U.S. State Department had actually sneaked into the WikiLeaks Command Center and asked me for free lunch.”
During lunch, Bitcoin was mentioned several times.The first one is a bit awkward: When Assange asked, Schmidt, who served as the director of software engineering at Sun Microsystems, said curiously that he had never heard of Bitcoin (Cohen said he “just read this article yesterday”).
For Schmidt and Assange, the most profound impression about Bitcoin seems to be that it is just a manifestation of the technology.
Perhaps a radical reform of the global DNS system can be made to operate in a similar way as Bitcoin, thus freeing the Internet from centralized control, censorship and manipulation.Like traditional financial institutions, DNS providers are vulnerable to state scrutiny, and Assange told Schmidt that the Chinese government is actively filtering WikiLeaks content from the country’s internet.
Thus, an Internet routing system built on a global distributed ledger can allow the distribution of content published by WikiLeaks to cryptographic hash values that are always accessible on the blockchain, just like Bitcoin.
This system is especially effective during the uprising, as governments often suppress citizens’ resistance by cutting off internet access.If a true peer-to-peer communication network is decentralized enough, it will become a technology of freedom of information, just as Bitcoin is a technology of freedom of currency.
Assange was describing Namecoin, an early branch of Bitcoin, based on the concept of BitDNS originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto.
“I think we should do more research on this so that we can get a general idea of it…so we might have more questions about it,” Schmidt told Assange, then wondering if it is possible to crack the encryption of the system and completely destroy it.
Assange and WikiLeaks elaborate on the link between Google and U.S. foreign policy
Schmidt showed interest in Bitcoin’s proof of work and the scarcity of currency, thanks in large part to Assange’s clear explanation of the difficulty setting.
“Scarcity increases over time, what does this mean for people to join the Bitcoin system? It means you should join the Bitcoin system now. The sooner the better. You should be an early adopter,” Assange said.“Because one day your bitcoin will be worth a lot of money.”
certainly,Assange is right.Bitcoin has risen 5,000 times (500,000 percent) since its secret meeting with Google CEO.
A year later, Assange arrived in London and sought asylum from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was detained for seven years to avoid being extradited to Sweden on rape charges.Assange then served five years in London prison, and his team has been opposed to being extraditioned to the United States.Assange was released last June as part of a plea agreement with the federal government.
At the same time, the Internet is now under strict scrutiny by governments and businesses around the world, and in many cases even under Google itself, while Bitcoin is still free.We can only hope that the days when Assange served his sentence will make some sense in the end.
