"Resistance Money, that Andrew Bailey wrote, has a brilliant section talking about how physical cash works. When I get given physical cash, I don’t know who had it before the person that gave it to me. I don’t have any personal details on them. I don’t know how old they are, or what sex they are, or what address they have, or how much other money they've got. I just know that that’s a $10 bill, and I take it from them. So it’s got what’s called backward privacy — I have no idea where it’s been. And then when I go and spend that money, the person I give it to has the same problem. That becomes forward privacy. So as cash changes hands, the privacy of the buyer and the seller remains intact, and we don’t have tons of private individual information on each other.

That’s what, in some ways, Samourai Wallet — and any other CoinJoin service — is doing. It’s helping Bitcoin, the digitally native peer-to-peer cash, actually function as cash. It’s really frustrating to see this happen, and I’m so sorry to those two developers who’ve got wrapped up in this — who face jail time — because what they’re building is something the world needs. Something the world should be encouraging.

It’s only through the nefarious, long fingernails of the central bankers — who can print their own money, pay for the police force, pay for the judicial system — that they hunt down their competition. They do not want an algorithm that delivers value to people, to send, receive, and store over time, that is out of the control of the state — and out of their control. Specifically, the central banks.

It should be possible to transact digitally in a private manner. Like, come on — what are we playing at here? Long story short: we need more software like Samourai Wallet, not less."

Jake Woodhouse / Ep.82 / 32:12