Julian Assange: ‘Bitcoin is the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years’

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who leaked damning government documents over the past few years, spoke through a WeChat Livestream at the Net Prophet technology conference Tuesday. He delved into a number of topics, including the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency bitcoin.

Assange espoused that he believes the technological advancement behind the digital currency will help establish a global consensus. In most cases, Assange explains, there needs to be laws in place to help monitor and enforce legal financial transactions, but bitcoin is modifying that behavior.

The Wikileaks head thinks that innovation in the field of financial services will exceed those from the past in the next few years. The current conventional banking model has failed and bitcoin might be the remedy to those problems.

“Bitcoin is the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years,” Assange said.

When asked about the emergence of a single dominant player on the Internet, Assange believed it is troubling matter. “I think that is a serious question — whether most things that most people use most of the time will be eaten up by a few dominant players,” Assange stated.

He added that parties can now establish an entire financial system with hedge funds and other financial services without regulation but the regulation is a crytopgraphic agreement. This is a positive, according to Assange, because this requires the people to be a part of the agreement to communicate with each other.

Another added benefit is that there is no regulation and all of the elements in the cryptographic agreement are completed through computation. When financial services operate with cryptographic protocols then they adapt, evolve and innovate at a rapid pace.

“What we are talking about is the interaction of finance: the abstraction of relationships between organisations and individuals and the quantifications of those relationships,” noted Assange.
In the end, cryptographic agreements can produce new orders and new societal agreements and bitcoin can generate diversity instead of maintaining the present political and economic structures. The diversity factor can be found in major financial institutions across the globe, which are prohibiting their customers from transacting in bitcoin.