Julian Assange's Endorsement

[indolering]

I was revisiting Julian Assange's meeting with Eric Schmidt but I thought I remembered Julian Assange specifically endorsing Namecoin and the .bit TLD. However, I google find any mention of Namecoin or .bit on Wikileaks.org

Can anyone provide a link? I need it for a grant application....

[domob]

I was revisiting Julian Assange's meeting with Eric Schmidt but I thought I remembered Julian Assange specifically endorsing Namecoin and the .bit TLD. However, I google find any mention of Namecoin or .bit on Wikileaks.org

Can anyone provide a link? I need it for a grant application....

I've never heard of him endorsing Namecoin. But possibly I was not yet around at that time. If it is true, that would indeed be an important information and citation to have.

[foglight]

was just skimming it its an interesting read for sure.... and while they do talk about bitcoin and domain names, i couldn't find a direct nmc reference...

heres some snippits...


JA- ....OK, so, once you have a system of currency that is easy to use like that, then you can start to use it for things that you want to be scarce. What is the example of some things that we want to be scarce? Well, domain names. Names. We want names to be scarce. We want short names to be scarce, otherwise if they are not scarce, if it doesn't take work to get them, as soon as you have a nice naming system, some arsehole is going to come along and register every short name themselves.

ES - Right. That's very interesting.

JA - So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is precisely what I wanted and what I was theorizing about, which is not a DNS system, but rather short names... short bit of text to long bit of text tuple registering service. Cause that is the abstraction of domain names and all these problems solved. Yes, you have some something that you want to register that is short, and you want to couple that to something that is unmemorable and longer. So for example, the first amendment, that phrase, the "US first amendment", is a very short phrase, but it expands to a longer bit of text. So you take the hash of this text, and now you have got something that is intrinsically coupled to that which is unmemorable. But then you can register "US First Amendment" coupled to the hash. And that then means you have a structure where you can tell whether something has been published or unpublished, you can... one piece of human intellectual information can cite another one in a way that... can't be manipulated, and if it is censored the censorship can be found out. And if one place is censored, well you can scour the entire world for this hash, and no matter where you find you know it is what you wanted precisely!

[georgem]

There is another conversation with julian assange and one Hans Ulrich Obrist where julian talks about domains a lot, but again without specifically mentioning namecoin or the bit-domain:

http://wikileaks.org/In-Conversation-with-Julian.html

[georgem]

As it seems there is a nearly 3 year old twit from a twitteraccount named "wikileaks" (don't know if official) where they talk about namecoin and bitcoin being revolutionary:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/78906603948093440

Maybe that's the source of this rumour.

[indolering]

There was something right after the wikileaks.org censorship debacle. Maybe Khal remembers.

[biolizard89]

was just skimming it its an interesting read for sure.... and while they do talk about bitcoin and domain names, i couldn't find a direct nmc reference...

heres some snippits...


JA- ....OK, so, once you have a system of currency that is easy to use like that, then you can start to use it for things that you want to be scarce. What is the example of some things that we want to be scarce? Well, domain names. Names. We want names to be scarce. We want short names to be scarce, otherwise if they are not scarce, if it doesn't take work to get them, as soon as you have a nice naming system, some arsehole is going to come along and register every short name themselves.

ES - Right. That's very interesting.

JA - So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is precisely what I wanted and what I was theorizing about, which is not a DNS system, but rather short names... short bit of text to long bit of text tuple registering service. Cause that is the abstraction of domain names and all these problems solved. Yes, you have some something that you want to register that is short, and you want to couple that to something that is unmemorable and longer. So for example, the first amendment, that phrase, the "US first amendment", is a very short phrase, but it expands to a longer bit of text. So you take the hash of this text, and now you have got something that is intrinsically coupled to that which is unmemorable. But then you can register "US First Amendment" coupled to the hash. And that then means you have a structure where you can tell whether something has been published or unpublished, you can... one piece of human intellectual information can cite another one in a way that... can't be manipulated, and if it is censored the censorship can be found out. And if one place is censored, well you can scour the entire world for this hash, and no matter where you find you know it is what you wanted precisely!

Assange was talking about Namecoin in that conversation, I'm 95% sure. The conversation took place a couple weeks after WikiLeaks endorsed Namecoin on Twitter. There was no other Bitcoin DNS product at the time.

[midnightmagic]

Assange was talking about Namecoin in that conversation, I'm 95% sure. The conversation took place a couple weeks after WikiLeaks endorsed Namecoin on Twitter. There was no other Bitcoin DNS product at the time.

He didn't specifically name{/b] it though.. Why was that?

[snailbrain]

afaik,

they just accepted donations on the wikileaks site in both bitcoin and namecoin

don't remember julian assange talking about it. but maybe he did.

[biolizard89]

Assange was talking about Namecoin in that conversation, I'm 95% sure. The conversation took place a couple weeks after WikiLeaks endorsed Namecoin on Twitter. There was no other Bitcoin DNS product at the time.

He didn't specifically name{/b] it though.. Why was that?

I think he didn't name it because he was talking to people who weren't even familiar with Bitcoin, and for whom the name Namecoin wouldn't have meant anything.

By the way, I tried to ask WikiLeaks via Twitter whether Assange was talking about Namecoin; they haven't answered yet. (I'm sure they get a lot of Tweets; I'm guessing I'm not well-known enough to merit their attention.)