imagine you're Joe Normie
There's a machette company that has a mechanism where they get $1 every time you hit something with the machette you bought from them. the government says "we have this device you can add to the blade where if it hits a tree, you still get $1, but if it hits flesh, the blade goes dull and you get $0". please install it.
machette company declines. a couple people get attacked and killed with machettes, the knife company makes some money.
in court, the gov't says, "look at this, Joe Normie, we asked them to install this device which would have kept those people safe. they didn't install it, those people are dead AND they made a profit on the act!"
Joe is siding with the prosecutors before the machette company even draws breath to explain how such a device would backfire when trying to defend oneself against wild boars in the jungle, not to mention make the cost of machette production prohibitive and deprive the world of effective brush clearing devices.
point is, this is all hard enough to win public opinion on in the best case. it's nearly impossible when enormous profits are involved.
Replies (1)
Those analogies are retarded. Hammer manufacturers and machete manufacturers have made profit off of every single tool sold, even the ones that eventually wound up in a crime scene. Additionally, the thing about the machete manufacturer adding some safety net sounds similar to how regulators want financial institutions to use the safety net of KYC/AML policies and licenses. You will recall however, that the regulator in charge of issuing money transmitting licenses for financial institutions, FinCEN, was approached by federal prosecutors and asked specifically if Samourai Wallet would need a license and the regulator explicitly said "no". The prosecutors indicted the developers for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business 6-months later anyways. You give far too much credit to this idea that the average Joe is going to somehow dismiss the prosecution's arguments if profit wasn't an element, yet you are neglecting to recognize that the fact that profit was involved was not an issue for the prosecutors as they would have prosecuted them the same anyways. Not to mention, if you listen to the full story you will hear Keonne explain how difficult it is to get defense evidence in front of the jury. You seem to have this common misconception that both side of an argument show up and lay out all their evidence for a jury to decide and that is simply not how it works in reality. Furthermore, you seem to think that Samourai Wallet was raking in exorbitant amounts of money when in actuality there was $6.3m earned over the course of 10-years; so if you take the government's own numbers as true then that means Samourai Wallet earned a whopping 3% of the 2 Billion dollars in "unlawful" funds that flowed through Whirlpool, meaning they are either awfully bad at being criminals or the fee was actually there as a Sybil resistance measure, not a mechanism for profiting off of crime.