Keonne Rodriguez is feverishly doing podcast interviews before his federal sentence starts in six days, and I have a post about his sentencing. Basically they ran the Samourai Wallet that allowed you to use Bitcoin and utilize a mixing service to neuter transaction tracking for financial privacy, as one of the tracking firms admitted on the stand that only a small percentage of these users are involved in criminal activity and laundering money. Consequently, the service was non-custodial, and just people anonymously joining together in joint transactions for their own privacy. The devs were profiting from these joint transactions as part of offering the server and service, but they never held or had control of anyone’s funds nor controlled who could join the transaction, which kind of negates the operating a money transmission business charge. Though due to some comments and a t-shirt, a case could be made for conspiracy to commit money laundering, which was dropped in the plea deal (very stupid on their end while actively provoking the federal government).
Since I’m conspiracy minded, I find it very interesting that he’s doing the rounds on podcasts before starting his prison sentence, and advocating for people to sign the petition along with donating money to his defense, with crypto not allowed so you’ll be fully identified through the financial transaction. And Sam Bent did a good job covering this topic below. Personally, I don’t sign any petitions or give my identity for anything in this day and age of identity theft.
Personally, they were making millions offering this service on precarious legal standing, so they should have relocated to a country with no extradition agreement with the US. But what if this is theater as the damage to cryptocurrency privacy mixing services is done, they took a plea deal, so are they going to be pardoned as part of a backroom deal? Are they actively participating in a con to dox a lot of cryptocurrency privacy minded individuals? As they’re getting people to put their own names on a list of interest for the federal government and it’s just being promoted too much. Will the IRS investigate this list for people that are concealing their cryptocurrency holdings, looking for people not paying their capital gains taxes? The whole thing is just fishy at this point.
But it does go to show that if you pop up on the radar of the federal government, they will get you, and federal judges are notorious for denying you the ability to put on a legitimate defense guaranteeing your conviction. And federal judges are usually caught up in politics of some form, and they can make irregular legal rulings as well, so you can forget about having a fair day in court.