I love this, but why are we paying (no offense to anyone who’s might freak out on me) to defend people who clearly knew what they were doing was wrong in many aspects. They assured their customers that they could launder bitcoin for them and even charged more for that job. no one likes the government, but there are certain things that you can’t thumb your nose at and to have everyone pay for your defense if that makes sense.
Replies (6)
Because they didn't launder money for anyone. They wrote open source code that facilitated privacy on bitcoin, and then loudly speculated that it could be used for money laundering. They might be slimy, but even if they are the precedent that writing code to facilitate private transactions constitutes money laundering is exremely dangerous. The US has a common law system, so precedent becomes law.
did you see what they did in the netherlands? they threw a guy in jail because the code he wrote and deployed to a decentralized network "could not be stoped" and made him responsible for the criminal actions commited with that code.
that is like someone is drowning a guy in my pond, but now it is my fault for deploying an unstoppable pond. it makes no sense, and has to be fought tooth and nail.
and before you say "yeah but he made a tool that is useful for criminals"...
Everything that is remotely useful is also useful for criminals
excuse me but fuck no.
acknowledging that customers participate in the black/grey markets doesn't make anyone a criminal.
even those customers.
building a product *that criminals also use* is just building a good product. acknowledging that criminals use it doesn't make building the thing a crime.
also, "premium addons" for high net worth individuals doesn't constitute charging more to launder the proceeds from criminal acts.
the DOJ has a flimsy case. that's why they are prosecuting for conspiracy instead of operating an unlicensed money transmitter.
no unfortunate precedent if they lose.
this is an intimidation tactic.
de facto legislation through lack of clarity and indictment.
EVERYONE who cares about overreach should care about this case. These people are freedom fighters and they deserve the total support of the open source community and the greater citizenry.
they did NOTHING wrong.
No.
Samourai did nothing wrong.
Building a tool that criminals also use (~5%) does not make the tool or the builder criminal
Neither does publically or privately acknowledging criminal usage.
#freesamourai
Mel
I love this, but why are we paying (no offense to anyone who’s might freak out on me) to defend people who clearly knew what they were doing was wrong in many aspects. They assured their customers that they could launder bitcoin for them and even charged more for that job. no one likes the government, but there are certain things that you can’t thumb your nose at and to have everyone pay for your defense if that makes sense.
View quoted note →
Why should we pay for defence lawyers when someone working on freedom tech is targeted by parasites that have murdered more people and laundered more money than we could ever dream of doing in a thousand years?
Because we don't yet have the firepower to exterminate the parasites, and so our only option is to use whatever semblence of a just system there is left.
Thank you!💯🔥
