LIVE - Jack Dorsey & Eugene Jarecki at The Bitcoin Conference 2026

On stage for filmmaker Eugene Jarecki and off screen Jack Dorsey.

Of the situation, if we need to get into a state of permanent law, a global civil society, it is not a choice. We must live together. We must use technological means to fight fire without fire.

Hello everybody and hello Jack. Good to see you.

So I am very happy to be here today. I am probably, I must confess, the least knowledgeable person about Bitcoin that has probably ever been on this stage because I am not the Bitcoin person to begin with, a filmmaker. And I made a film about Julian Assange. More importantly, I made a film about what the US government did to destroy Julian Assange. It's called The $6 Billion Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth. And though I don't know anything about Bitcoin, Mr. Dorsey does. And it also turned out that what I learned about Jack was that he had a shared passion for Julian Assange and the cost of freedom of information that Assange stands for. And what I didn't know at the time was that there was an amazing possible harmony between the cause we were fighting for, freedom of information, and the sovereignty of finance that everybody here believed so strongly in. And so what I did is make the movie as best I could. And we did really well. We won the Sundance Film Festival with it. We even won a Golden Globe. We were the first documentary ever to get the Golden Globe and I thought, well, this is great to have the whole world see it.

Thank you. We were very proud. But what we didn't expect, and maybe we should have, was that it didn't matter what we thought. 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. And so I was suddenly faced with a huge problem. And because I had heard that Jack is very sympathetic to the cause of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, I turned to him and I said, 'Jack, what do we do? How do we get it out to people?'

Well, first I was super surprised, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, that no one wanted to carry the film and no one wanted to broadcast it any further than where you put it in. How many people do you think have seen it thus far?

So many people in the room and many, many people watching the live stream. We're here because Bitcoin represents an open protocol for money transfers. It represents routing around the gatekeepers, specifically Visa, Mastercard, the banks, local banks, the various reserves around the world. And it's a community that I think, like myself, sees Julian Assange as a hero. It goes back to the original internet principles of information wants to be free and open and he stood directly for that and sacrificed so much for it. So I felt like I thought it was pretty cool that more people saw the film and I thought there was natural resonance with the Bitcoin community, not in a way just continuing but also in a way to help distribute it as far and wide as possible.

So when Jack got to me, it was a huge light bulb that went off because I didn't know what to do with the film and he gave me this idea. Well, bring it to the Bitcoin community because the Bitcoin community once upon a time came to the rescue with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks accepted Bitcoin in 2011 when the US government blocked payments to WikiLeaks through Mastercard, Visa, the banks, etc. and it saved WikiLeaks. But as Jack taught me, it was also a kind of proof of concept of how Bitcoin could promote freedom, which it did in 2011 and allowed people around the world to receive the information that WikiLeaks was sharing. But there I was with a movie. We can see Julian Assange. He cannot be in this country. He cannot be in this room right now. And because the movie was not going to get shown, Jack had suddenly given me a chance to bring everybody into a kind of a movement, a movement to get this information to the public by getting a group of friends together to kind of help us. So that is what we're going to talk about today is this global launch party, which you'll hear a few times today. But I really want to start by sharing a clip that I put together that was my best way of reflecting what I was learning from you Jack about the merging of WikiLeaks and Bitcoin. So could we play that clip for a moment?

So, you're going to see that QR code a few times. And thank you a lot. Thank you so very much. And you're going to see that QR code a few times today. And it's really the way that you come join us for the idea that Jack gave me, which was a global watch party. Just sounded like the coolest thing that we could do, a kind of private label review just to people in the Bitcoin community. And Jack, you also shared with me some stuff that really moved me because I saw how much it moved you about Satoshi and Julian. You talked about the privacy of Satoshi and what that meant to you in the action he had taken in the world. He or she were the Phantom of Satoshi. Can you talk about that, the meaning of the two of them to you and why this captivates you in the way it does?