BITCOIN DONATIONS.
WikiLeaks announced that it would accept Bitcoin donations in June 2011 during a payment blockade.
In the artwork, a woman brings one small coin to an open donation hatch. Three larger payment doors are chained shut behind her. There was no such stone arcade: its scale makes a financial blockade visible, while the coin draws the eye to the route that remained available.
By late 2010, several conventional payment services had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. On 14 June 2011, WikiLeaks publicly announced that it was accepting Bitcoin donations and posted a receiving address. Its announcement called them “anonymous Bitcoin donations.” That was the organization's description at the time, not a promise the card makes to anyone donating.
A person with Bitcoin could send it to a published address without those particular card and payment processors completing the transfer. This offered another route for contributions, but it did not remove every practical obstacle to obtaining or using Bitcoin. Transactions also leave a public record. Researchers studying the network in 2011 warned that donations to a public address could be linked to other activity or to people.
The moment matters because a small, experimental payment network became a practical alternative in a public dispute over access to financial services. The picture holds the two ideas together: the closed doors are formidable, and the donation is modest. The opening is real as a choice; the illustrated hatch is a metaphor.
Sources & the artist’s interpretation
The contemporary Forbes report records the 14 June announcement and the payment restrictions. WikiLeaks' banking-blockade account gives its later account of affected services. Reid and Harrigan's 2011 research paper reproduces the original announcement and examines the limits of anonymity around a public donation address. “BITCOIN DONATIONS.” is a short continuous excerpt of the preserved announcement, with presentation case and punctuation normalized. The donor, arcade, hatch, chains, receipt and borrowed 001 letter are illustrated metaphors. The category-sign colours and circles need separate commercial-rights review before printing.
