Federal prosecutors charges Samurai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill with conspiracy to commit money laundering on Wednesday, as the U.S. government continues its approach to prosecuting crypto mixing tools that may be used by illicit actors and foreign governments to hide fund transfers.
“Prosecutors are alleging Samourai Wallet laundered over $100 million in criminal proceeds.”
Doesn’t really have anything to do with the public ledger aspect. They got busted because they were maintaining a backend service that their wallet was dependent on, and they were making money from it. Simply releasing a wallet with privacy features is still presumably legal (IANAL) due to free speech protections applying to code. The government can still prosecute end-users directly, but the same is true for users of dedicated privacy coins.
In these adversarial environments, you definitely do not want control over any server where people would come to do something with your service. If they want to prosecute people, they have to go after the end users in a peer-to-peer system of privacy, such as Monero. And that’s extremely expensive for them.
Doesn’t really have anything to do with the public ledger aspect. They got busted because they were maintaining a backend service that their wallet was dependent on, and they were making money from it. Simply releasing a wallet with privacy features is still presumably legal (IANAL) due to free speech protections applying to code. The government can still prosecute end-users directly, but the same is true for users of dedicated privacy coins.
In these adversarial environments, you definitely do not want control over any server where people would come to do something with your service. If they want to prosecute people, they have to go after the end users in a peer-to-peer system of privacy, such as Monero. And that’s extremely expensive for them.
Yes, I agree.