St_Diogenes on Nostr: 🚨 ...

quoting
nevent1q…7r5u

The founders of Samourai Wallet have been indicted for "conspiracy to commit money laundering." We know why it's "conspiracy to commit" as opposed to just "money laundering."

It's because what they did was provide a privacy tool that some people could use for money laundering.

It is part of the government's ongoing war on privacy, specifically financial privacy. Those in power yearn for every transaction to be tracked, taxed and, if need be, frozen. The action against the Canadian truckers was the template, and CBDCs (programmable, instantly manipulated money) are the tool of control that they ultimately want.

First, they must dismantle the privacy-centric alternatives so there's no viable exit ramp once CBDCs and the like are implemented. That's what we've been witnessing with the attacks on coin tumblers like Tornado Cash and today's attack on Samourai.

They will point to bad people using these tools, just as they pointed out that Hamas raised some funds in various cryptocurrencies, without noting that a vast amount of money laundering happens with government-issued currency.

It's the same kind of bad-faith argument the FBI made in the '90s when they tried to kill end-to-end encryption altogether. "Sometimes terrorists might use it." Ok, and? They also use pressure cookers. The internet as we know it today would not exist if they had succeeded.

They are unlikely to succeed this time either, but unfortunately there will be casualties in the war on privacy, and those casualties will be those who openly thwart their ambitions of total surveillance.


My 2022 video including an interview with a Samourai Wallet founder here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIYiXbLRy1c