The release of the Afghan War Logs by Julian Assange in 2010, revealing classified US military operations in Afghanistan, is about to gain another layer of permanence.
The Block recently reported on a new project, Project Spartacus, which aims to keep the logs as accessible as they are today by inserting them into the Bitcoin blockchain. The project seeks to encode 76,911 files from the Afghan War Diary into Bitcoin’s decentralised ledger using the Ordinals protocol to stop censorship or data loss.
Assange’s supporters and family are leading the effort with WikiLeaks. However, WikiLeaks says the initiative affirms its work and history using Bitcoin to create a resilient and transparent realm.
Filed under the name Afghan War Logs, these documents published in 2010 are about the war from 2004 to 2010, especially related to civilian casualties and how they were interrogated. The records were publicly available, but their politically sensitive nature continued to risk suppression or erasure.
Counterintuitively, Project Spartacus wants to use OrdinalsBot, a tool for blockchain inscription, to make the logs permanent on Bitcoin’s ledger so they are accessible for future generations.
Impact of Storing Sensitive Data on the Bitcoin Blockchain
The Afghan War Logs, first released by Julian Assange in 2010, have been forever inscribed onto the Bitcoin blockchain, signalling the ever-expanding reach of decentralised networks. Unlike traditional storage dependent on centralised servers, Bitcoin’s global network of thousands of nodes makes data nearly impossible to alter or delete.
Project Spartacus will mint the 76,911 Afghan War Diary files on December 12, 2024. Projectspartacus.org is free to join, and activities are moved onto the OrdinalsBot marketplace, Trio. Due to the amount of data involved, the process will take several Bitcoin blocks, and as such, it is an ambitious and technically complex undertaking for blockchain history.
For years, Bitcoin has been well-known as WikiLeaks’ lifeline. Bitcoin donations helped fund WikiLeaks during a financial blockade in the 2010s, which saw major payment processors cut them off services. Furthermore, they showed that decentralised systems could survive state-level suppression.
He also became an early champion of Bitcoin, and Satoshi Nakamoto, the person behind cryptocurrency, took notice. In 2010, Nakamoto expressed worries that WikiLeaks might use Bitcoin to attract unwanted attention to the nascent technology. But Bitcoin did become WikiLeaks’ cornerstone, driving home its reputation as a sturdy transparency tool.
