Worked for Gandhi. The Brits didn't get him for tax evasion, sex with a minor, etc.

Let's not use the a-word though, rather: npub, identity, etc

Making it more difficult to find "something else" helps. Even in Russia, definitely in the US.

Also there are few things governments are good at, collecting taxes is one of those things. A few hundred thousand dollars worth of effort probably gets them a nice 8 figure settlement. Sure they could nail him on jaywalking, but that's not the same ROI.

Very nice and original back to basics explanation. nostr:note187cr4x4f6j0je4fn5s9zzc609flvympkjz7h4a0jgymcvm4qyx5qsempfx

I'm not sure how much that helps given the USA's history of assassinating people abroad, especially in Latin America. Not to mention coups.

Well at least it's a slightly higher bar than an extradition request.

Yeah, I do hope they stop before employe ~10 or so...

No, just intimidate the majority into compliance and then deal with - or ignore - the few remaining holdouts.

That's a pretty standard trick to claim jurisdiction afaik.

I think they understand it quite well and have gotten better at their attack.

It seems the DoJ and CoinCenter disagree on what the guidance means AND the DoJ argues that the guidance may not apply to Tornado Cash AND even if it did, it's just guidance.

This CoinCenter article offers a nice summary of what the main legal argument about.

Their confidence gives some hope, but keep in mind that the DoJ response to their earlier amicus brief is the whole reason everyone is very not-optimistic.

https://www.coincenter.org/dojs-new-stance-on-crypto-wallets-is-a-threat-to-liberty-and-the-rule-of-law/

Stress is bad for my memory:-)

> First you deny that they are moved by any solid principle

Correct, their true motive is just to stop all the privacy. But that's not their current legal argument. The latter is what courts deal with.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with their lawyers. I responded to the post above which makes a legal extrapolation which the prosecutor more or less explicitly deals with. It doesn't hurt if lawyers try it anyway, but if we just post something like that and move on to work on other things, then two years later the case is lost and we're all surprised.

(But very unlike maintainers, our job is not make their lives easy)

And one way you do that is by studying what prosecutors are saying. They have a 99% success rate, and an incentive to keep it that way. With all due to respect to criminal defense lawyers, their success rate is much lower and they'll get new clients even if they lose.

You're taking the analogy too far. My point is that we need to come up with quality legal arguments rather than cool sounding quips that get retweets but don't survive two seconds in a courtroom.

Are you reorging 3 years deep or just making the chain even longer?

There are few lawyers out there with the skill and inclination to defend self custody and financial privacy. Most of those will get hire by Joe Lubin to protect the shitcoin casino against the SEC instead.

We need to treat them as a scarce resource and give them useful information. They may be very creative but probably need our help to find entirely novel lines of attack. The collaboration between COPA and the Bitcoin devs against CSW was a good demonstration of that.

In that light, one should read the DoJ document as if they were a grumpy maintainer closing your Github issue because you didn't search for existing issues, didn't say which commit you ran on, etc.

That's also why I took dozens of pages of notes at the Dutch trial, mostly from the prosecutor argument. Thankfully in America you can just read transcripts online.

nostr:note1hcc6dddmqr7vf2d0j95k5pz2xp5pd6ety9uluknmgwscwm2gud3smat4zg

The document has a section on fair warning, mentioning Ross Ulbricht as an example. They don't believe they needed to.

I don't believe marketing matters that much. The DoJ mentions it because it works well for them with media and jury.

But Tornado Cash had very pro compliance marketing. Then they just went and looked for internal chats to find something to make them look like they don't care. If you're super careful about your chats, they'll send an undercover to a conference, get you drunk and then make you say something self-incriminating.

I think the only real metric is usage.