Hearing from my source in the court that the samourai guys pled guilty to money transmission in exchange for the money laundering charge getting dropped.
Theyāve stated they wonāt seek appeal if the sentence is five years or less.
The judge is a bit of a hardass apparently so expect the full 5 years. With good behavior etcā¦ roughly 4 years likely.
Thatās at least somewhat reassuring, but they should just get out.
fuck.
See also nevent1qqs8u94wrny8eh59fxl44fmmfjfcx4nz3w82q44axf682pmrkjp3psgdxe4dd
So if you run a Bitcoin node you are a money transmitter? This sounds like a very bad precedent. I get they are trying to avoid a harsher sentence, but this sounds very bad. And 5 years?!
Thereās no precedent with a guilty plea thankfully
How do you mean? Because they pled guilty this case canāt be used as justification for other cases?
Right. Itās because this is a plea and a plea is not a judicial decision. Had they lost in court and been found guilty than that would have set precedent. This is a negotiated settlement to avoid trial.
They actively collected fees for their Coinjoin, Paynym and some other services.
Some of these did not even require a central server (like Paynym, Stonewall and collaborative transactions) but a fee was still taken by Samourai Wallet developers.
They also have the capability to comply with the OFAC address list on their coordinator, but have decided not to.
Other things include that they possibly could have traced all of their usersā¦
I sometimes canāt feel bad for them when they literally poked the bear multiple times, while also giving the government every excuse to shut it down, and also being extremely shady.
tl;dr none of that is even close to running a Bitcoin node.
also fyi many influencers like Odell have a financial incentive in Samourai wallet, and I remember the Samourai wallet team displaying many characteristics similar to NVK.
New to the Nostr ecosystem. What is going on with this whole Samurai Wallet thing? Iāve seen a bunch of posts but have no clue whatās going on.
TL;DR: Developers made a Bitcoin wallet that made transactions very private. Bad people used these privacy features for crimes. The developers are going to jail for writing code.
Samourai Wallet was a Bitcoin wallet built to give people real privacy using CoinJoin to break chain surveillance. The devs were arrested by US authorities for basically writing open-source code, and now the government is trying to criminalize privacy itself. This is bigger than one wallet, itās about whether weāre allowed to use Bitcoin privately at all.
No one wants to hear this, but the path forward is to lobby DC. More FOSS while part of the solution is not going to get us the win we need.
If AIPAC can ensure Jews get all the benefits and protections they want, then why canāt Bitcoiners create PAC to advance our agenda? Neglecting politics has been to our detriment. That has changed recently, but we gotta keep pushing.
This is why I support BPI and have since the beginning
+1
We need to get broader support from the community. No more āpolitics donāt matterā
Jews control the US government. Iām sure paying and bribing jews to give you power will work out great. Just look at all those Trump donations are working out. LOL
Jews influence on our politics is a separate issue, but the point remains that they are proof of concept. They didnāt always control things. No reason why Bitcoiners canāt achieve a similar level of influence and control.
All the Trump donations got Ross out of prison, an SBR created, and removed hostility from banks towards bitcoin businesses.
You donāt have to be part of the solution, but at least get out of the way.
Iām not sure why you fagtrons want to save the Masonic slave empire. I guess you still believe in muh freedoms and sing yankee doodle dandy. Muh founding fathers, muh Declaration of Independence.
Collapse all these centralized power structures. Bitcoiners want the power. I hope all the bitcoiners that gravitate to the ZOG get burned as they deserve.
Lol like I said, youāre welcome to continue being a loser incel in your shit hole country
Iām talking to the people that care about bitcoin and want to wield political power so developers donāt go to jail.
If you and hodl want to give jews your bitcoin, fuck kids and kiss the wall to help bitcoin then thatās totally your call. Godspeed.
You can campaign on more than one issue. The libertarians were strategically important in the last election, and there were promises made to that effect. If we continue to campaign we'll have more promises kept and new ones made.
We can also campaign on Epstien, and on Gaza, and on privacy, and tax exemptions, etc.
Bitcoiners have a higher propensity to save, so our time and money spent should be relatively more targeted and efficient. Paying up to the Jews is not the only way to get things done.
Also, you can put a price on your freedoms and pay it up. It's something that people do.
I fukin hate the government. How did we let it come to this.
Some devs made a bitcoin wallet with lots of privacy increasing features. The main one being a CoinJoin coordinator.
You could join at least 5 other ppl to make 5 new utxos by paying a fee to the Samourai devs that made the coordination. Once you pay once you could re-do the CoinJoin as many times as you wanted with different ppl, thus breaking any possibility of chain analysis from that point on.
The US government hated this and claimed that it was 'money laundering' and other made up charges and cracked down the dev team. They have been trying to defend their case since then.
It's an attack on privacy most likely to make an example out of them to suppress other ppl from trying to do the same, since it was all open source and all the dev team did was write the code.
It seems the US gvmt hate if ppl make tools that anyone can use to gain more privacy.
Looks like time to dump bitcoin for Monero. Mcafee was right.
monero is way easier to track than lightning, why would you want to reduce your privacy with some outdated shitcoin?
Then why do people give a shit about mixers and conjoins?
You didn't read what he said.
There's no mixers on lightning.
They need to update their tech. CJs were an okay measure before lightning got to where it is.
If you're serious about privacy it's still good practice to CJ before and after opening and closing channels.
Lightning is much more difficult to use in a private way than Monero.
Most people using it are on custodians or with large LSPs that basically see everything because of that. Pair that with optional privacy upgrades almost no one uses like blinded paths. It's all over the place.
I wish they'd acknowledge this instead of promising them that it's better than xmr privacy by default without verifying.
You have privacy on lightning as long as:
-you run your own node
-You trust and verify your peers
-You trust they won't close your channel this revealing your channel information on chain
-you have faith that you aren't being targeted for probing or timing attacks
I bet you secretly worship lightning in private devotion to come out with that much faith in it's privacy.
You must be getting your information from SuperTestNet.
nostr:nprofile1qythwumn8ghj7ct5d3shxtnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcqyqsc8628tpyp6rcjf77e83tve2j9ulj5tnht34fgfrucy5l5j7uh2r2aejt is of course an extremely knowledgable source but many other bitcoin developers and users are impressed by the privacy on non-custodial lightning.
Samurai died so we may live.
Bitter day.
Privacy still being attacked.
Reading the Roman Storm case.
Gov doesn't give a shit about individual privacies.
We're on our own.
ā¹ļø
Sad and awful š¢
