Dorsey announces Bitcoin-only premiere of Assange doc

Dorsey Backs Bitcoin-Only Premiere of Julian Assange Documentary

At the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jack Dorsey and filmmaker Eugene Jarecki announced plans for a Bitcoin-exclusive global watch party to premiere “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” a Golden Globe-winning documentary about Julian Assange that no streaming platform or mainstream media outlet has been willing to distribute.youtube

A Film No Streamer Would Touch

Jarecki, who directed the documentary tracing the U.S. government’s 15-year campaign against the WikiLeaks founder, told the conference audience that despite winning the L’Œil d’or Grand Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and the first-ever Golden Globe Award given to a documentary filmmaker, the film has been effectively shut out by legacy media. “It didn’t matter what we won,” Jarecki said from the Nakamoto Stage. “If our narrative didn’t fit what the media gatekeepers believe is their narrative, we were going to face a media blackout. No streamer will touch the film and no mainstream media outlet will go near it”.wikipedia

The documentary examines classified revelations brought to light by WikiLeaks, including the 2007 “collateral murder” footage showing U.S. military personnel targeting civilians in Iraq, and chronicles the legal proceedings that culminated in Assange’s 2024 plea deal and return to Australia. Jarecki has said the U.S. government was prepared to spend $6 billion in its pursuit of Assange, which forms the film’s central thesis.deadline

Bitcoin as a Distribution Tool

Dorsey, co-founder of Block, framed the initiative as a natural extension of Bitcoin’s history with WikiLeaks. He noted that WikiLeaks became one of the first major organizations to accept Bitcoin in 2011 after Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal cut off donations to the site under U.S. government pressure. “I saw the film. I thought it was critical that more people saw the film and I thought there was natural resonance with the Bitcoin community,” Dorsey said, adding that the effort was “not in a way just to view it but also in a way to help distribute it as far and as wide as possible”.youtube

The pair described the release as a pay-per-view event open to the Bitcoin community, with ticket purchasers receiving an official credit on the film. Dorsey called it “a synchronous global viewing party” and “a way to crowdfund the movie to the next tier of folks that could see it,” adding that while the project starts with this one film, “it might be something that we see more of in the future”.youtube

Routing Around the Gatekeepers

The presentation drew a line from WikiLeaks’ 2011 banking blockade through Edward Snowden’s exile to what Jarecki called a broader crisis for press freedom. The filmmaker showed never-before-seen footage, including an interview with Snowden filmed in Moscow, and detailed how a security company operating out of a Las Vegas casino allegedly spied on Assange inside Ecuador’s London embassy on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies.youtube

“We cannot trust the power structure. We cannot trust legacy media and those in government that control legacy media,” Jarecki told the audience of more than 40,000 conference attendees. “We have to take matters into our own hands.”maxim