In April 2013 a transaction’s 'public keys' decoded to a WikiLeaks archive pointer. Who was the librarian?
Before OP_RETURN was standard, people hid files in fake keys. One of them pointed at Cablegate.
The appearance
Two outputs, a 0.0482 BTC fee, almost no value locked. The payloads are not HASH160s this time — they are fake public keys, the older P2PK / bare-key trick. Read as ASCII they are not keys. They are a pointer to a 7-zip of WikiLeaks’ Cablegate dump, timestamped onto a network that cannot take it down.
Case file sealed
Investigation notes, the reconstruction, and sources sit behind this seal. Open it when you have sat with the raw transaction.
Open the case file
The investigation
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01 Apertus and friends
2012–2014 was the wild period of data insertion: Apertus, CryptoGraffiti, fake keys, fake hashes, unspendable outputs used as microfilm. OP_RETURN in Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 (March 2014) was the peace treaty — a dedicated slot so people would stop poisoning the UTXO set. This transaction is from the month after, still using the old weapons.
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02 What is actually stored
Not the cables. A pointer. The chain is an expensive disk; a 7z of Cablegate does not fit in two keys. The trick is permanence of the reference: a hash, a magnet, a filename. Anyone who already has the archive can prove it existed by this date. That is the product.
Reconstruction
A political timestamp. Someone paid a miner to freeze a pointer to WikiLeaks’ Cablegate in Bitcoin’s key fields, using the pre-OP_RETURN embedding tricks. The coins on those outputs are unspendable crumbs. The document is the point. Bitquery still lists 691dd277… as the first transaction of that embedding.