On Dec. 5, Project Spartacus will release a free Ordinals mint of over 70,000 WikiLeaks Afghan War records.
Bitcoin was young when Julian Assange published the Afghan War Logs in 2010. This technology helped WikiLeaks survive and still does.
The collection of tens of thousands of internal U.S. military and government communications changed public perception of Operation Enduring Freedom. According to the New York Times, this “six-year stockpile of confidential papers presents an unvarnished and bleak picture of the Afghan war,” including civilian fatalities and “enhanced interrogation.”
The Afghan War Logs might be censored after being leaked to journalists and later to WikiLeaks.org. Assange and his family are preserving them so they’re always available.
OrdinalsBot will inscribe 76,911 of these documents on the Bitcoin blockchain on Thursday, completing the public archive. In December, ProjectSpartacus.org will provide a free mint to preserve the information Assange and Chelsea Manning released.
Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother and leader of the Assange Campaign, told The Block that the records might stay available even if WikiLeaks goes down and the Internet Archive is attacked.
Shipton remarked that Ordinals’ protocol use case of war logs on a global network is amazing. “This knowledge should live forever.”
A big challenge is preventing blockchain censorship of the Afghan War Logs. The massive endeavor may make it one of the most difficult mints.
OrdinalsBot inventor Toby Lewis told The Block, “There are 76,911 files, and since each inscription is by one separate person, it will span several blocks. I imagine minting will take a while—this isn’t a 10K collection. We hope this will be a ‘forever’ iconic project.”
The Project Spartacus interface lets anyone mint these assets. In 2023, the Ordinals protocol “inscribes” data on sats (BTC’s lowest unit of account), making it immutable like bitcoin.
The campaign is not directly raising donations for Assange, who is seeking a full pardon from President Joe Biden. The mint only pays miners, Lewis said.
Also Read: South Korea’s FSC rejects corporate crypto account blueprint
