The Evil Empire has done everything it can to shut down donations to WikiLeaks, and it’s been pretty successful. I decided to try making a donation of $100 using one of the alternative methods available: Bitcoin. This was a multi-step process. First, I had to transfer money from my checking account to Dwolla, which took four days. From there, I transferred the money to Mt. Gox, which took another day. Once it was there I purchased $100 worth of bitcoins, which was about 7.14 at the time. Finally, I sent those bitcoins to the donation address for WikiLeaks. The last two steps took just a few minutes, most of which was spent dealing with the Mt. Gox interface.
Overall, this was rather inconvenient due to the hassle involved in actually getting the bitcoins. I expect this will only get worse in the future, as Bitcoin is something of a competitor for Dwolla. Paypal has a long-standing policy of cutting off businesses which are in any way involved with alternative currencies (stealing their balances in the process)–we saw that with e-gold well before they were attacked by the Evil Empire. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Dwolla either adopted an anticompetitive policy themselves, or else were ordered to by Gestapo agents.
The good news that once I actually got my hands (figuratively) on the bitcoins, it was trivial to bypass the blockade on WikiLeaks.
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