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.
Discussion
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.