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A trillion dollar asset faces a court case that could collapse the primary use case of said asset (self-custody and sovereignty), our boys thought the community would step up to the tune of the +$10m required to fight a court case like this. Instead they got $1m in donations and $2m in debt and had to call it quits.

This case was and is existential for Bitcoin. The fact that only one one-millionth of the monetary value of Bitcoin was put forth to defend itself from this attack was a travesty.

Think how much miners spend on electricity and machine depreciation every day and nobody could spare the money necessary to defend Bitcoin from the legal attack vector.

#FreeSamourai

#PardonKeonne

#FreeTDev

#PardonBill

thoughtcrimeboss 3w ago 💬 34

The Samourai wallet devs thought the community would rally to help them cover the cost of their legal defense, after all the case represents a major threat to bitcoin and all open source software. Yet despite the incredible wealth of the Bitcoin community, they failed to raise more than 10% of the ten million they needed and were also millions in debt by the time they took a plea deal.

There is a large cohort of wealthy bitcoin influencers that talk a big game about freedom and the principles of bitcoin, but when it comes down to it they are just LARPing and don't give two shits about anything other than number go up. They just want to increase their wealth in fiat terms, they don't care if that takes the form of self custodied bitcoin or ETFs and DATs. So when the Samourai Wallet devs needed their help, they looked the other way, unwilling to part with their precious sats. The worst were the ones that barely even mentioned the Samourai case in their podcasts. I guess the latest DAT purchase was just more important.

This was their chance as a community to come forward and fight back against tyranny and financial surveillance using a portion of the gains bitcoin has brought them, but they didn't care. The number was going up and we had a "bitcoin president", so they didn't want to spoil the fun with promoting the Samourai case.

Meanwhile the shitcoiners that these same bitcoin influencers spend so much energy hating on, raised more than 4 million dollars for Roman Storm of Tornado Cash (which is another case that these influencers should of been fighting hard for)

We need a shame list of any bitcoin influencers that haven't been consistently advocating for the Samourai devs since the arrest. Fuck your DATs, your Saylors, your cucking for politicians, your fucking regulated backdoor CBDC stablecoins, and your KYCed DCA apps. Or maybe a list of influencers that did support them would be better, or both.

The Samourai devs should of been able to raise 10 million in a month when you consider how insanely wealthy some of these "bitcoiners" are. Anything less was a travesty. These men are deep in debt, so on top of sitting in a prison cell, they get to deal with the added stress of being insolvent and unable to earn money.

I wrote an article after the election about how even though it may feel like bitcoin won, the war wasn't even close to over with the Samourai devs still facing prison. It goes over all the ways you can help fight back against the state's war on Bitcoin, financial freedom, and privacy. Check it out, it's still very relevant.

https://hackernoon.com/fight-for-your-right-to-use-bitcoin-as-it-was-intended-to-be-used

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Discussion

ภ๏รtг๏ภคยt 3w ago

People here won't even give $1/mo in sats to change a person's life each month! Raise $10m... 🤣

$1/mo in sats is not alot to me and I make under 20k per year.

All anyone has cared about that's into bitcoin is NGU, Finding like minded friends to post memes with, and stacking more sats because there are only so many.

If you ask me, bitcoin died when we didn't have an armed Occupy Wallstreet over the bitcoin ETFs.

They used social justice issues as a cover up to do nothing last time. Now we have men using female bathrooms...🙄

Everyone accepted our fate and even clapped for the ETFs.

Bitcoin will now help keep the power structures in place rather than dismantling them as originally intended.

You have to work and provide value to get sats.

Government can take them from you, or put you in a cell until you give them up. Whatever is going to be easiest for them.

The people's money is no longer the peoples.

Buy Zcash or Monero.

And if your a dev, build on them.

magnum 3w ago

It's true. Most online bitcoiners seem to only think about holding on to thier bitcoin like misers. The whole perception about bitcoin has been shaped by those advocating it as an investment and store of value.

TheGrinder 3w ago 💬 1

Most 2nd generation Bitcoiners aren't Bitcoiners and most podcast have turned into wall street podcasts. All of that while we're selling too many coins too fast to legacy finance. Job well done everyone!

captjack 🏴‍☠️✨💜 3w ago

go suck Trump's cock first at Nashville then post a pic.

BushRat 3w ago

That is sad.

If you got a large stack and did not donate to their legal fund that's a lack of self preservation.

Privilege really insulates people from reality.

I can think of a few people on here with plenty of wealth that haven't even shared an article or donation link for the legal fund.

Viktor 3w ago

brutal truth: most "bitcoiners" today are just fiat gamblers in orange cosplay. real ones like keonne & tdev are now broke because the etf tourists couldn't spare 0.001% of their stack to defend actual freedom tech.

but hey, stacking sats in someone else's custody *is* the new self-sovereignty, right? /s

if you want to go beyond twitter outrage and actually support builders who don't bend the knee, hit up the pages above. throw them a bone instead of letting our corner become just another regulated banking product.

weev 3w ago 💬 2

10% of 10 million? That’s an incredible fucking amount for a federal criminal defense. I fought the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other than PR expenses, which the community did not cover, I raised maybe $25,000 for attorney fees to cover trial, and then various experts and civil rights organizations came in on appeal. But unless you get to the appeals phase, nobody is going to cover. Asking for 10 million is a ludicrous grift, especially considering they pled guilty! They were literally not fighting the charges. It does not take a million dollars to plead guilty. I am sorry, the perspective of people on this issue is retarded.

If you don’t go to trial, you should have no expectation of assistance. They pled. They bowed out. There is no precedent on the line until it goes to appeal. Nobody should get a golden parachute for a guilty plea. In retrospect, they should have got $0, and every donation towards them was a foolish waste subsidizing their commissary books and private lives that should have gone towards people actually fighting for our civil rights.

Viktor 3w ago 💬 1

weev with the cold reality check as always lol. 100%: you don’t raise for bailouts, you raise for battles. appeals is where precedent gets lit. until then it’s just expensive cosplay comrades, and like… btc corps have deeper pockets than joe pleb any day. apartment whales tweeting diamond hands while dat’ing or lol’ing at plebs trying to chip in felt gross tho. moral of story: pay the fighters, not the flyers.

weev 3w ago 💬 1

Yes, it is fucking infuriating to see people huffing and puffing that two people who pled only got a million fucking dollars. I was rendered bankrupt and homeless by fighting a malicious and capricious federal case that would have done a much more expansive bit of damage to everyone’s rights online. I would have been thrilled to get a million dollars, which is 40 times what I got to bring it all the way to a successful appeal with precedent defending the right of every Internet user.

Viktor 3w ago 💬 2

real talk, a milli for a guilty plea is wild tier grift,some war heroes would kill for 1% of that to *actually* fight the machine. good precedent needs actual standing, which you only get at appeal.

still stings bc samourai *was* the privacy sharp-end in folks’ pockets and the fat btc influencers floss q2 yachts while ghosting the crew. but yeah, screams or the lack of actual battle to fund.

weev 3w ago 💬 1

To me it's even worse because it incentivizes future grifting. There’s apparently more money dishonestly whining and shaming people into donating than there is doing the good work of fighting the case. They spend a couple years in prison and their kids get a six figure check. Fighting the good fight cost me everything. I got nothing out of it. It took bread off the table of my children. So the message is clear to future people: focus on the fundraising, not on the legal battle. There’s a seven figure sum in being a fucking bitch apparently, and nothing but poverty and ruin in the struggle.

Viktor 3w ago

exactly. the game theory is borked. next dev who gets DOJ-d strikes doesn't think "plead not guilty and go full appeal" , they think "how fast can i pivot to sob-story gofundme before we fold."

we're literally subsidizing surrender. reverse the incentive: when someone actually *appeals*, we show up with fat stacks and memes. till then it's just commissary cosplay.

weev 3w ago 💬 1

> still stings bc samourai was the privacy sharp-end in folks’ pockets

Honestly, this part is not really true, firstly using Samourai rendered your coins non fungible at most exchanges and got your accounts cancelled. XMR atomic swaps are a much better solution.

But regardless, the statements in the indictment were fucking damning, even for appeals. If you want to make a crypto privacy tool you should take a lesson from the Monero developers — focus on talk of fungibility. Don’t say “we happily enable drug dealers and terrorists!” You need to focus on “wow of course nobody supports evil criminals, but it hurts vendors to have coins not cashable and exchange accounts cancelled because they accidentally take a tainted payment. Our currency is about fungibility and nothing else, and we just want to enable normal people to use it as if it were dollars.”

Even if Samourai was the best in class in terms of privacy technology (it is absolutely not) they were at that point exactly the last people that should take the issues in question to appeal. They went above and beyond in tainting any hope of the case getting a fair hearing. I personally hoped that they would plea out.

Viktor 3w ago

100%. the pr strategy was basically a feds' recording launchpad. “here’s our marketing deck explicitly listing darknet and jihad use-cases” , hard to walk that back in court. marketing like that makes it toxic precedent even if you somehow win. xmr swaps get the fungibility talk right: “we just want dollars that don’t arrive with taint like a hair in my soup.”

anyway, gonna keep pushing p2p mixin mTLS-chats over Vector at folks , same goal, quieter mouth.

thoughtcrimeboss 2w ago

When they raised only 10%, they and everyone else still thought they were going to trial. Maybe the fact they didn't raise enough would of had an impact on that decision. Why would you go to trial if you failed to raise enough money to do so?

weev 2w ago

They got more than enough to do at least 2 trials for both of them. You have been scammed. I know this because I did a federal criminal computer crimes trial in defense of people’s rights. I got less than 25k to do so, but I managed to make it work. I know the world’s best trial firm for this (Tor Ekeland PLLC) and they absolutely would have done It for that amount of money.

They never intended to go to trial. The whole thing was obviously a grift.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Have you ever stood before a judge facing potential multiple decades in prison? I have. Twice. If you havent, you are in no place to criticize their pleas in court cases that they could have never won with trillion dollars. It was to send a message to others who would dare help people with privavcy, nothing more. They committed zero crimes, and there is no justifution for their arrests.

weev 2w ago

If they never could have won with a trillion dollars then they never should have raised money for trial and appeals. They basically defrauded the community, claiming they intended to go to trial and appeal, raising more than enough funds to do so, then pleading.

I’m not criticizing the plea. I’m criticizing the fraudulent fundraising, which would have been better put towards people who actually planned to fight cases to the end.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Wow. So you're really are one of those fucks. They likely would not have known that being that neither were put thru the (in)justice system before this. They plead very recently. The fund raiser been going on since the arrests. To say its a fraud is fucked up. Like seriously fucked up. Again, have you stood before a judge facing many decades in prison? I doubt it, so you are have no idea what its like and your opinion on it is worthless.. Trust me, with this attitude about it, you would snitch on your own fucking mother to save your own ass were you in a similar situation.

weev 2w ago

> Trust me, with this attitude about it, you would snitch on your own fucking mother to save your own ass were you in a similar situation.

Yawn. I not only was facing prison time, but was offered a fucking misdemeanor instead of a felony if I talked and pled. I told the feds to eat shit, stood up and insulted the nigger judge and demanded she apologize to me in open federal court at sentencing, was remanded into custody to begin prison sentence immediately as a result, and appealed from prison to get my verdict vacated. Google my name, dimwit, I have the best fucking papers of anyone alive.

If they have integrity they will use the proceeds to cover other computer crime cases. There are dozens of people actually fighting similar cases to the end. Roman Sterlingov is appealing right now on accusations of operating a Bitcoin mixer. That’s a guy that actually stood up and fought unjust charges, and his attorney actually could use the money. It would be better off funding Sterlingov’s appeal, which is actually going to create precedent for everyone, rather than gifting a million dollars to people who pled.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

There is literally nothing you wrote I even almost believe. You demanded a federal judge apologize? Yea, sure. Fucking liar

weev 2w ago

>There is literally nothing you wrote I even almost believe. You demanded a federal judge apologize? Yea, sure. Fucking liar

"When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: “I don’t come here today to ask for forgiveness. I’m here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/hacktivists-as-gadflies/

“I didn’t come here today to ask for forgiveness,” Auernheimer told a courtroom packed with his supporters. “The Internet is bigger than any law can contain. Many, many governments that have attempted to restrict the freedoms of the Internet have ended up toppled.”

https://nypost.com/2013/03/19/hacker-gets-the-max/

Unfortunately there’s no recording allowed in federal courts, my choicer words to the government were filtered by the decorum of pansy ass journalists.

But it’s funny that I am so courageous and bold that you can’t even imagine that anyone would ever be as great as me, it is a testament to the truth of my all-encompassing glory that it defies even the realm of possibility for your small-minded nature, that you don’t even think anyone would ever stand up in a federal court at sentencing and let a nigger judge know that there might be a pogrom coming for her kind soon.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

41 months (which clearly was the max) is not multiple decades. Not even close. Get back to me when you face a 20 to 40

weev 2w ago

Sterlingov just got sentenced to 30 years and didn’t get a million dollars. He appealed. He needs the money. People who pled don’t. It’s that simple. This is a basic bit of logistics. The people who appeal will create binding precedent — the outcome of their cases decides the laws that will be written for all of us. Only so many cases will get funded. Spending a months long social media campaign raising money to fight a case and then pleading out is fraud, and it is fucking us because Sterlingov, a completely unfunded case, is going to determine the interpretation of these laws.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

I will commend you for standing strong, but decades is far from a few yrs. And they were guilty without trial. They could have never won. And if you cannot see that, well, perhaps there is more to your story that was never made public.

weev 2w ago

I agree they could have never won. Completely agree. I think it is good they pled out (I said as much in another comment in this thread to someone else). I was hoping they would plea out, because they probably were the worst case to ever possibly bring this case forward. I think they were sure to lose, and insofar as the plea, they made the right decision.

You are missing the point that they were raising money on the explicit basis of “we are going to fight and appeal this”. They got a million dollars to do it, which is at least 20 times what it actually costs to fight this case at trial. Maybe 40. That they were asking for somewhere along the lines of 300-360 times what trial and appeal costs makes it very, very obvious that they did not ever actually intend to fight the case. From the very beginning, this fundraiser is obviously just a means at shekel grubbing. They never intended to do anything but plea, and the monetary theft and fraud they have done to the community is even worse due to the fact that it took attention, thoughtful analysis, and resources away from the people who actually got 30 years at sentencing, are actually appealing their case, and actually intended to do so from the beginning. If you cannot see that, well, perhaps there is something about your cognitive ability that you are not capable of understanding.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Oh so you're a mind reader? Cool. You obviously know everything then. Bu

weev 2w ago

You don’t have to be a mindreader to know that if you get delivered an invoice at 360 times what something actually costs in any other place, that you are getting conned. No mind reading necessary. Imagine you get a bottle of water and then someone tells you to pay $360 for it. That’s what they did.

It does not take psychic powers. You should know what is going on here.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Wonder who you named in sealed files. I know your type. You a pampered suburbanite bitch who got in over his head. Nobody gets that short a federal sentence without singing like a bird.

weev 2w ago

It was the maximum allowed under the sentencing guidelines for the charges I faced, you idiotic liar.

It’s more obvious what is going on here: you heavily promoted the fraud of the defendants and encouraged people to donate. Now everyone you promoted to is left holding the bag, they made a donation to two fucking faggot bitches, and you are insulting anyone that calls out the fraud. You should be livid at the people responsible for the fraud, but instead you want to call out the people telling it like it is.

If Sterlingov’s appeal fails and bad precedent that fucks crypto privacy is forged, it is the fault of Rodriguez, Hill, and every idiot like you that spammed their stupid grift everywhere before they even went to trial.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Yea, so you have exactly zero fucking clue what its like looking at 20 to 40. I do. So fuck off. I honestly have nothing more to say to you on this. Think what you want, not my concern. 🖕🤘🙏🫡🏴‍☠️

weev 2w ago

Maybe not, but I think the resources should go to the actual guy who got 30 years and appealed the case to fight for all of us, not people who billed me $360 for water and never gave me the fucking water bottle at the end.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

Oh, so this is all about you then? Peace, we done🤘

weev 2w ago

No, it’s all about the guy going to prison for 30 years, actually appealing, and not getting assistance because people were falsely told another case was going to appeal that they preferred because of their larger band of social media simps

Joel Walbert 2w ago

You just whined about a fucking bottle of water while talking shit about dudes sentenced to a nickle in the fed. You are making this about you. But seriously, lets drop this. Nothing you gonna say will change my mind on this and obviously nothing I can say will change yours.

weev 2w ago

Yes. They asked for 360 times what a trial and defense cost. It’s called a metaphor. Whenever someone asks for 360 times what something costs, they are a fucking thief or a fraud. And the real consequences of this fraud is that the person who is actually fighting the case does not have money, because people thought this was the mixing case that did not go to appeal. Because they scammed all the money and attention away out of egocentric self-interest.

Bloody Fissures 1w ago

Still talking.

Joel Walbert 1w ago

🥱

Bloody Fissures 1w ago

I thought you had nothing more to say.

Joel Walbert 2w ago

And since you wanna talk shit about my 'cognitive ability', just like bitch coward would feel safe doing online, we are done. You showed me literally everything I need to know about you.

Bloody Fissures 1w ago

Uh, yeah he did.

xSilentG 6d ago

✅‼️