The great thing about Strike is that it will make you think of the racial slur that it rhymes with when you interact with it

Every time I see my name in an appellate brief for a case that has a good shot at justice I gleefully think FUCK YOU PIGS, TIMOTHY MCVEIGH DID NOTHING WRONG

Normiecons getting banned from Twitter under the Elon regime lol

I invite all Bitcoiners to read the incredible appellant briefs filed on behalf of Roman Sterlingov by his counsel team, Tor Ekeland, Marc Fernich, Maksim Nemtsev, Aaron Daniel, and Amy Collins. They are not only firm denunciations of the ridiculous perjury committed by Chainanalysis and federal prosecutors, and vicious assaults on the current unconstitutional federal theories of infinite and unfettered criminal jurisdiction against everyone using Bitcoin, but there is also a more intimate reason to read these briefs. Sterlingov’s defense received orders of magnitude less support than others who did not go to trial. In contrast, Sterlingov actually showed up to fight the government for us. His own flesh is on the line. He went to trial and appealed, refusing to kowtow to government bullying, despite the fact that he was potentially facing the rest of his natural life in prison if he fought. I need you to read these because this is an actual, tangible work product produced in an appeals court for the benefit of each and every one of us that’s ever used Bitcoin as money. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492.01208839518.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492.01208828899.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492/gov.uscourts.cadc.41492.01208776525.0.pdf In May the United States District Court for the District of Columbia finally heard oral arguments for US v. Sterlingov. The process is potentially done, barring a SCOTUS appeal. It is too late to raise any more money for Roman Sterlingov’s appeal. We’ll have the decision of the court shortly, and we’ll all likely have to live with the consequences of that decision forever if it is negative, barring a future circuit split. We were told by Odell and company that it would cost millions of dollars to defend Samourai. I know for a fact that is not true. I know it very personally, because I myself did a controversial federal criminal appeal, which I won by the way. I won it so well that it set precedent for everyone that uses the Internet, and has gotten several people out of prison, and is also a primary case cited in the appellant briefs to defend Bitcoin mixers in US v. Sterlingov. If you read the appellate briefs in Sterlingov you can find my name in there. If Samourai had gone to appeals, they would have likely had my name in those as well, because I sacrificed years of my life to create foundational precedent for all of you. So I can say with relative certainty that I am somewhat of an accidental subject matter expert on this. If you worry about your human rights while using Bitcoin or the Internet, you can thank me at any time. I am not trying to toot my own horn here but I think it is a fair claim. But I also know from parties with direct knowledge on the subject that the Sterlingov appeal did not cost millions of dollars. This claim that you require millions of dollars to do a federal criminal defense is just pulled out of thin air. It is not true. Odell was, however, still repeating this incredible claim of his that the million raised for Samourai was not enough to fight the case just two days ago:

X (formerly Twitter)

ODELL (@ODELLXYZ) on X

when the samourai devs had their homes raided by heavily armed cops 2 years ago it sent a chill throughout the bitcoin industry i felt it first ha...

You can, with many reputable attorneys who have actual records of successful appeal work in this area, do a case for much less than a million dollars. I’d say if you have a case like Samourai’s and want to go full appeal, you can probably do the stuff you actually need (mainly getting passable appellate briefs that will preserve all your needed arguments for appeal) on about 100k at most these days or even far less if you find lawyers who are excited about the subject matter (which is easy to do in Bitcoin). I know a lot of people who are computer criminals and/or actively targeted political dissidents who get indicted, we’re actually a pretty small community, and I do not know anybody, anywhere, that has spent more than 650k on their federal criminal defense all the way through appeals, and those were not computer cases, which are cheaper to litigate because software is not as much of a problem to examine as aviation wreckage. Multiple millions is an insane quote and nobody who is not a disinterested biglaw or someone looking to scam you would give it. Note that the standard yearly compensation for a 8-year associate at a BigLaw is 330k, so with that you can absolutely get a smart young attorney looking to make a reputation for a new firm he’s founded working 9-5 every weekday grinding on your case for a whole year:

Law firm - Wikipedia

— no boutique lawyer with a reputation for successful computer crimes appellate work will that I know would ask for multiple millions to fight the Samourai thing. But maybe someone would if they’re your personal contact and you are telling them you can get suckers on Twitter to give them extra money for free. As it doesn’t cost a 2 or more million dollars to do this case, it also definitely does not cost a million dollars to do a plea deal. So there’s a large amount of unaccounted for money being thrown around here. So I have been putting as much pressure on Odell and company as possible, to try to extract statements from people close to them. Because this looks like a scam. And today I finally got a great one. Kortik, who is followed by most of the Primal crowd, including Odell and Miljan (Miljan only follows 800 accounts, it is definitely a person close to them), now publicly testifies: “it was raised by p2prights.org fund which supported multiple efforts not just Keonne and Bill's case” in the embedded post below. View quoted note → I have been told repeatedly up until this point, including directly by Odell that 100% of the funds raised went to Samourai’s attorney. But now I am hearing that it has gone to many unrelated and as yet unannounced projects. For years the only project ever listed on the p2prights projects page is the Samourai Wallet case: https://web.archive.org/web/20240612114733/https://p2prights.org/projects.html and yet according to Kortik everyone that donated on calls to help Samourai were actually donating to a private slush fund to be used at the whim of Matt Odell which has been spent on many other projects. Of course, there’s zero transparency in all of this. I don’t know if the lawyer scammed them and took a million dollars for a plea deal, or of Matt Odell is using the majority of it as his personal discretion. All I know is that a million dollars has been raised, according to Odell, and he claims that went to an attorney but his friend says otherwise. Someone got an extra 970 thousand fucking dollars, and I would like to know who that is. I think the entire community, at this point, is entitled to know. Note that the p2prights site also says this: > Potential for Success and Impact: We will assess the likelihood and scale of success in each case …. the probability of legal victory, and the value of the legal precedent that success might establish. This absolutely was not done in any way we can describe in any way other than “negligence” “thoughtlessness” and “complete disregard for duty and honor”. You don’t hand somebody that hasn’t gone to trial a check for a million dollars. Nobody responsible will do this. Other legal rights orgs won’t pull this kind of shit. Talk to the EFF — they only break out real resources for you on appeal. Because the EFF doesn’t know if you’re going to plea out or not. And the actual job of a rights organization is to make good precedent, not generate profits for itself or fabricate billing hours for attorneys. If it is a private slush fund for Odell, this is potentially a historical pattern of behavior for him. He got the enormous privilege to hand out Jack Dorsey’s money at OpenSats, and Will from Damus, the producer of the excellent Notedeck, a non-custodial Nostr client written in memory safe Rust, has talked about how this money was given out circularly to his friends without any sense of fiduciary duty as how to best manage this capital for Nostr or Bitcoin's benefit. All the guy really does is run a Bitcoin podcast and post on Twitter, and he uses this position to exploit his social connections to soak up all the capital in the space and then spend it on his friends. Everywhere Odell goes, we get a million dollars raised for federal criminal defenses that never happen, broken custodial LN implementations, stupid Nostr toys that nobody would want to ever use, and the broken censorious Nostr implementation that is Primal. Amethyst is now the most popular client on Nostr. Orders of magnitude more people were told about Primal, Primal got orders of magnitude more money. That means Amethyst has orders of magnitude higher user retention rates. What we got out of all this social and economic capital spent on Odell’s Primal was a heavily centralized quasi-custodial service that happens to scrape data from Nostr (and use that position to censor people on its Orwellian name of “caching service” — caches just make things faster, the primary purpose of the caching service is censorship and circular promotion of Odell’s friends. Meanwhile, Damus is about to shut down its relay because it isn’t getting cash to pay the monthly hosting bill. Which is extremely sad, because this is one of the few people operating a one of the largest relays that vocally and aggressively cares about censorship resistance. Primal certainly doesn’t, they actually block people using anonymity software from even *viewing* things on a lot of their infrastructure. Using Tor (I use a dedicated Tor router, Amethyst uses Tor as well) I am blocked from even viewing things on Primal’s blossom server. Just as raising a million dollars for Samourai while Sterlingov’s appeal fundraising was a near-complete blackout starved the actually important case that would decide the law on Bitcoin mixers in the appellate courts, Primal soaking up the vast majority of Nostr-related capital to give us broken trash has actively starved the important service operators in this space. How many times does Odell need to give someone else’s money to his friends to produce trash we don’t need before we can say that it is scammer behavior and is violating fiduciary duty in a way that harms Bitcoin, harms Nostr, and harms Internet freedom, the things Odell claims he is representing? “By their fruits we shall know them” is timeless wisdom. And we should all begin to question whether the fruits of Matt Odell are that of the poisonous tree. And we should all ask him: where did the Samourai money go?

People who have used Monero have found that privacy is not friction at all. It is seamless, and just works. And just another “the business owner is just using it wrong!” from the Lightning Network shills. He’s using fucking Square! Everyone who ever abandons LN is just a FUCKING RETARD that is MANAGING LIQUIDITY WRONG. Well, I guess I’m a fucking retard that is using it wrong because I am not tolerating using a fucking payment network with a 5%+ failure rate in the real world, when using the *most used LN vendor software* made by the *billionaire developer that is the public face of owning the most Bitcoin himself*. “The bartender needs to have the right settings in his lnd config” do you know how you people sound? Like I hear this shit and think you should be instantly shoved into a locker. View quoted note →