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I'm not watching that. I might look-up "Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of Samourai Wallet" at some point, but the only thing this post has going for it is that that text was available in the Video Description on youtube.
Story title is clickbait. Read this (short) Wikipedia article to get a quick summary
tl;dr the privacy tool in question mixes cryptocurrency funds with other users funds and hence the US government alleged this was a money laundering service
Clearly the government does not like people seeing this absolute diabolical misrepresentation of law and a absolute miscarriage of so called "justice".
This guy made a tool that makes it harder to TRACK crypto transactions. That's it. Thats all. They never had the money. They didnt do anything with the money. They just make it hard for anyone else to track your money. This whole case was fucked up beyond all recognition.
The video is really about the general right to privacy and covers that charge. The prosecution was so badly done it that even a fucking congressman piped into the case adding "its like charging Microsoft with conspiracy to commit money laundering because some criminals used Windows/Excel to keep their ledgers" Real FUBAR shit
Tldr: Two guys made a non custodial service that makes it harder to track crypto. And they tried to fuck them cause it makes their jobs hard.
Fuck cryptobros
They all should be jailed
One simple way to run a Tor bridge: The Snowflake extension. It's a browser extension that runs whenever you use your browser.
don't run tor bridges, they are publicly listed (the protocol needs this) and bad, influencial people put their IPs on IP blocklists for website operators. as I know, snowflake shouldn't be a problem.
monero nodes don't use the GPU, if you have the storage you can run a node too. maybe you don't want to host it on the clearnet, but only as a hidden service, you could do that on Tor and I2P. make sure it's listed on the monero.fail site
you can also run an I2P router. by just having it run in the background you contribute to the network with your bandwidth. if you have an always on computer, it's better to run the router on that, because in I2P routers do "routing commitments". if you just quickly shut down the router without waiting for these to expire, connections using your router will break. you don't need to take this too seriously, but just don't run it on the PC in public mode if you can't solve this there
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They chose to plead guilty instead of fighting the allegedly bogus charges
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Even under the new DOJ guidance for developers, the prosecutors would have easily proved mens rea:
In a 2018 WhatsApp chat, Rodriguez called mixing “money laundering for Bitcoin.” Hill allegedly promoted the service on dark web forums, claiming it would “clean dirty Bitcoin”
Tldw?
A 1 hour long video....
Might be interesting, but looking up his name (Keonne Rodriguez) for a Wikipedia article gave me what I wanted to know:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keonne_Rodriguez
I'll just paste the current summary here for anyone, but the full article is short and worth a read:
Keonne Rodriguez is an American software developer and co-founder of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin wallet designed to enhance transaction privacy for Bitcoin users. In 2024, Rodriguez and fellow co-founder William Lonergan Hill were arrested and later plead guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business for creating the software for the application. His prosecution drew criticism from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups, who argued that the case threatened financial privacy, open source development, and the principle of code as speech.
I wonder if I'll end up in prison for any of the projects I work on even as a non-coder. Hopefully the devs doing the actual coding work on these projects can keep themselves more anonymous and safe than me at least
Molly White’s coverage:
…maintained that they were merely developing privacy-preserving software, and that they were not responsible for criminal use of the software. Prosecutors have argued that the developers actively intended the software to be used for criminal purposes, pointing to marketing aimed at “Dark/Grey Market participants” and those engaged in “Illicit activity”.
Judge Cote cited a letter to the court in which Rodriguez continued to say that he was merely motivated by a desire to protect financial privacy and not “a desire to facilitate criminal activity” as evidence that Rodriguez “has not come to terms with what he did. ... The letter indicated to me that you were very much still operating in a world with moral blinders on.”
Not gonna watch an hour of video but from the blurb,
I had the pleasure and heartache of interviewing Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of Samourai Wallet, an open-source, non-custodial privacy wallet, who goes to prison this week because of the privacy tool he created.
Maybe some web searches could help figure out what happened. I hadn't ever heard of that guy before. There are certainly tons of bitcoin wallets out there whose implementers didn't encounter such problems.
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