You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Gian, this is crazy.
This is the first time that you've been on this show,
and it's for a very, I don't want to say somber,
but we're going to record to make the case for yourself and Bill
to stay out of prison.
this is a morbid way to start with the podcast how are you
yeah i'm doing good thank you for having me on here marty um i was trying to remember if i had
done this podcast or not as samurai because i know we've done some things together um but i don't
think it was uh this podcast yeah i think we've done rabbit hole recap and right other things
together the uh i don't know i've been thinking a lot over the last few days of uh how to start
this episode. I've been watching
a lot of the appearances you've done on Pod
256.
The show with Kevin Kelly and
Tableau last week.
And I think jumping
off, obviously, you are
the co-founder of Samurai Wallet. Yourself
and Bill
were subject
of prosecution from the Department
of Justice.
You guys
pled out
to take on a lesser sentence.
And I think we'll get into the sort of details of the trial and how that went.
But before the what, I think it's important really, because I've known you in the space for quite a while, going all the way back to your blockchain.info days.
I think it's important for the audience to really understand why you decided to found Samurai Wallet and why you dedicated your life to privacy for people using Bitcoin.
Why did you get into this in the first place?
Yeah, sure.
So as you mentioned, I started my career in Bitcoin at blockchain.info, now known as blockchain.com in 2012.
And that's actually where I met Bill, who would co-found Samurai Wallet with me later on.
And to really understand why I co-founded Samurai Wallet, I think you have to kind of understand why I got into Bitcoin at all.
And when I got into Bitcoin 2012, it really wasn't about making money or a number go up or an investment.
It was a real practical purpose. And I saw Bitcoin as a truly censorship resistant version of digital cash. And that's what brought me to Bitcoin. That's what I had been passionate about even prior to Bitcoin. Right.
So I spent a lot of time dealing with gold and silver because it was a bearer asset that couldn't be confiscated.
And, you know, no one could tell me what I could spend that gold and silver on.
So when I discovered Bitcoin, I was like, oh, this is a better version of gold or silver.
This is an electronic version of that.
And I knew right when I discovered it, this is what I wanted to work on.
And privacy, to me, wasn't like the thing I needed to work on because at that time, to me, privacy was obvious.
If you have a censorship resistant form of digital cash, it needs to be private or it won't be censorship resistant.
It would seem like a pretty basic thing.
Um, so really what I focused on at the, at that time in 2012 was making sure, um, any
of this stuff we built was non-custodial or self-custodial, or I guess the parlance of
the day is self-hosted.
Right.
Um, and, and really focusing in on that aspect of things, right.
Because the whole point was to, um, get rid of intermediaries and third parties.
So I wanted to make software that really put the end user in total and absolute control.
And I thought at that time that privacy was just going to come naturally as part of the
progression of the protocol.
So all that being said, by 2015, I think I started to get a little jaded with the Bitcoin
space in general.
And I think Bill was kind of right there with me in feeling that way.
We felt like because of the run-up in price and because of all the new entrants in the space, a lot of VC, a lot of traditional finance types, privacy was being pushed to the bottom of the priority list.
It was more about scaling at that point and less about privacy.
And we saw that as a problem, right? Because if we didn't take care of privacy at this point,
when there's not a huge amount of users, it's going to be very difficult to do it when there's
billions of users. And it's going to be very difficult to start changing the protocol.
So we realized then that protocol is not going to change. They're not going to implement
confidential transactions. They're not going to implement things of that nature,
which I don't necessarily think is wrong, but it was something that we recognized.
and instead of crying about it or making a fork of bitcoin or moving to an altcoin like monero or
something else we said well we're into bitcoin and the majority of people are into bitcoin
they should have a private experience and they should be able to use bitcoin in the way that
we foresaw it uh as a as a peer-to-peer cash and if it's not going to happen on the protocol
than it needs to happen on the application layer.
And the primary gateway for users to interact with the network is through a wallet.
So let's create a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet that is solely focused on the transactional
privacy aspect of Bitcoin.
And that's what we did with Samurai Wallet.
That was the whole starting off point.
and diving deeper to the philosophical side of this uh we live in a day and age where
many assume that privacy is a bad thing why why is that not the case like why do individuals need
privacy in their financial dealings yeah i mean people need privacy in every aspect of their life
and people enjoy privacy in every aspect of their life even the people who say oh only criminals need
privacy, right? Those same people put their letters in envelopes and they put blinds or
curtains on their windows. These are privacy technologies, right? So I think in order for
the human condition to flourish, privacy has to be part of that, right? Because you have to be able
to, speaking specifically about transactional privacy or financial privacy, if like me,
you believe that being able to transact is a form of speech, right? So you, for example,
are supporting a political candidate or you're supporting financially or you're supporting a
charitable organization financially. That's a form of speech. And if it becomes dangerous for you,
like if you're not in the United States, you're in some authoritarian country, it's dangerous.
It's dangerous to support a political opponent or it's dangerous to support a charitable cause that runs contrary to what powerful people want.
So being able to do that in a way that's not going to get you imprisoned or killed or something else is essential.
But even more practical than that, especially on Bitcoin, there's a safety issue.
if anyone can look at the blockchain and see you know essentially your net worth in bitcoin
you're putting a giant target on your back and saying hey i have x amount of money rob me or
or kidnap me or torture me and we've seen this happen countless times and it's only ramping up
you know so there's practical you know concerns with financial privacy there's philosophical
concerns of financial privacy being able to support the causes you want to support
But ultimately, all we really wanted to do with Samurai Wallet and Bitcoin more broadly is just replicate the existing financial privacy that you get in the existing traditional finance world.
When you go and use Visa at Starbucks, your Visa card, the barista or the cashier doesn't get to see what you've spent your money on in the past, doesn't get to see what you're spending it on in the future.
They don't know your bank balance.
That's a private transaction.
and that's what we wanted to replicate with um with bitcoin yeah i think the aspect of bitcoin
that makes us particularly unique is the fact that it's a bearer instrument right like many people
say oh you can go look at the forbes rich list you can see all these extremely wealthy people
they're not subjected to this but i think the fact that bitcoin is a bearer instrument really
increases the sort of security uh security risks that exist for for individual bitcoiners and like
you said the five dollar wrench attacks are only accelerating as more and more nefarious individuals
begin to hone in on this key aspect of bitcoin yeah absolutely and and to the the forbes rich
list like two points there right like you don't really know what other wealth those people have
You just know the public available information that Forbes prints.
But I'm pretty certain a lot of those people on that list have more than just what's on that list.
Right. That list is and they're they're not quite liquid.
I got to your point about a bare instrument. Right.
Their bank balance might be something, but that's all tied into securities and and, you know, other investments and property, this and that.
it would be like them having that Forbes Rich List walking around down the streets of Manhattan,
just pockets filled with gold coins, right? And you could see the outline of the gold coins in
their pockets. And you could hear the metal clanging together. That's an invitation to say,
hey, rob me. I'm walking around with gold coins in my pocket. And that's essentially what you're
doing when you transact on Bitcoin without any kind of privacy knowledge or strategy.
A lot of people just don't know the way the blockchain works, especially as Bitcoin's
adoption has accelerated so rapidly.
You have people who really don't understand what they're doing when they are sending to
their self-custodial wallet.
And they're not taking into account that everyone can see, anyone who's looking can see everything.
And unless you're doing something specifically to combat that, and that's what the tools of Samurai Wallet were designed for, it's pretty difficult to maintain a basic financial privacy.
It takes quite a bit of work.
uh so again that why that's why we created samurai wallet and tried to make it as user-friendly as
possible so that the majority of people who don't who aren't so technically minded and don't know
the specifics of how to read a blockchain could benefit from the basic privacy that they deserve
and they probably thought they were getting quite frankly and i mean it's obviously abundantly clear
that the government does not like what you and Bill built with Samurai Wall
and what others outside of Bitcoin, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog.
That was Bitcoin related, but you have Roman going through some troubles there as well.
They do not like individuals using Bitcoin, trying to do it privately.
And yeah, obviously you are intimately aware with the perspective of the government
after the last few years.
And I think it's important for people to be aware
of how their government views them
through the lens of transacting privately.
They do not like it.
And you've experienced this uphand and personal,
up close and personal.
Yeah, it's actually still surprising to me
because it became abundantly clear
throughout the last almost two years
that the government doesn't see any legitimate reason for financial privacy in general, not just
on Bitcoin, in general. And they have a open hostility to any kind of privacy. They feel
the Fourth Amendment that protects you from certain seizure is a detriment to their cause
of pursuing justice and pursuing order,
which is just such a shocking it so contrary to my worldview and I think a lot of americans worldview that it shocking to hear these people who are supposed to be these paragons of of law and order and justice
have such disregard for basic privacy of the citizenry uh so yeah it became abundantly clear
that the government doesn't see any legitimate use for financial privacy on bitcoin uh at all
And their whole case revolved around the idea that the only reason we created Samurai Wallet was to facilitate crime, not to do anything regarding privacy or protecting people's rights or giving people the basic privacy rights that they allegedly have.
It was solely to facilitate crime, which is, you know, laughable because that's not why we got into this at all.
It's not only laughable, it's scary.
I mean, obviously, very scary for you.
You're going through.
You've been sort of thrown to the ringer of the court system here in the United States.
But like Matt and I, we've been literally up until the DOJ, the FBI sort of raided your house and took you to a cage.
we even talk weekly about the software updates that you guys were incorporating into Samurai
Wallet and literally teaching people listening to our podcast how to leverage tools like Samurai to
achieve financial privacy when using Bitcoin. And if you extend what's happening to you and Bill
into the future and this precedent is set,
what's to stop them from coming after individuals
like Matt and I, Kano Alchemist,
others who care deeply about this
and are trying to educate other individuals
about how to use Bitcoin privately,
that they're not going to be subject
to some sort of blowback from the government
because they're educating people about how to do this.
Do they think we're educating criminals
how to evade the government.
Yeah, it's an absolutely legitimate and valid concern.
I think more builders within the space
should be looking at what the government has done here
and really shoring up their defenses,
both legally to at some point expect
the government will come knocking
and they don't just knock peacefully.
know they come in heavy-handed i think miners in particular um are going to be squeezed next
right because if we're if we're going by the government's theory that um and this is their
theory with samurai um that you don't that custody and control makes no difference um to money
transmission if that's their and that's their theory of samurai that's their theory in tornado
cash custody and control makes no difference well if you really want to put it through that lens
then the only people who are actually performing money transmission on Bitcoin network are the
miners, because they're the ones that are selecting which transactions go into a block.
All of the transactions that Samurai Wallet created, while unconfirmed, there was no
transmission, nothing moved. It wasn't until the miner included it in the block that it became
a transaction for real. So I think miners are going to be the next ones that are squeezed.
And I think they'll do it, you know, in such a way to say, look, you need to only accept transactions from, you know, certain counterparties like Coinbase and regulated exchanges.
You can't accept self-hosted transactions.
And if you and you need to do OFAC screening and you need to do KYC AML or your counterparty does, you know, I don't know when that's going to come.
But that's, to me, it seems like a pretty obvious next step for a government that wants to not destroy Bitcoin because that would be counter to their desires, right?
They want to control Bitcoin.
And that's a great way to do it.
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Let's dive into this key aspect here, which is the non-custodial nature of Samurai and what the
government claim that you're doing again throwing this sort of technical detail to the wind for
money transmission laws uh and i guess let's just go through the history of the prosecution
particularly the detail about fincen and their call to fincen what they found out what they hid
from the defense and how that came and how you became aware of that and how it became part of
the trial and then ultimately what it was looking like before the plea deal why you guys decided to
and what type of precedent this sets there yeah so i mean it's important to start the the story
with FinCEN. And FinCEN is the financial crime enforcement network. It's the regulator as part
of the treasury that's in charge of money transmission and combating illicit finance
and money laundering. In 2013, they were one of the only regulators to put out pretty clear and
common sense guidance when it comes to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And they clearly
stated in 2013 that in order to be a money transmitter, as they saw it and get a license
from them, you needed to take custody and control of the money or the crypto or whatever you want to
call it. So that was a key aspect to FinCEN, that if you took custody and control, like an exchange,
for example, then you were a money transmitter and you had to register with FinCEN and get a license.
they then followed that up in 2019 and made it even more explicit and said if you're an anonymity
provider software provider that does not take control of customer funds then you are not a
money transmitter pretty straightforward we as samurai wallet who started in 2015 so two years
after the initial guidance it's all that and said pretty straightforward we're not a money
transmitter if we don't take custody we've never taken custody not a single one of our tools we've
ever created takes custody we're not a money transmitter um so fasting uh fast forwarding now
to april 24th uh 2024 when the fbi conducts a pre-dawn raid on my house and arrests me
i come to find out uh that i'm charged with uh two crimes conspiracy to commit money laundering
and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business, an MSB. And the agency that
you would get the license from to be an MSB is FinCEN, the Financial Crime Enforcement Network.
So I'm thinking about this and saying, well, FinCEN's always been really clear on their
guidance that you can't be a money transmitter if you don't have custody. So the government must be
confused. The government must think that this is like an old school traditional mixer that would
take custody and then send the Bitcoin back out, kind of like Bitcoin Fog did and all of these old
school mixers. They must be confused about how this works. Because surely if they knew, they
wouldn't bring this charge. And same with money laundering. How can one launder money if they
never had the money? It's a common sense reading of the statute would mean if you're a money
launderer, you need to actually take the money to launder it. So that was kind of our understanding
through FinCEN and part of our defense was going to be that the guidance was so clear from FinCEN
and the government never got in contact with us. The DOJ never tried to communicate with us and say,
hey, we think you're breaking the law here. So there's like a due process violation.
You can't really be guilty of something if all of the guidance and all of the literature and the regulator saying one thing, then the government comes up and says, oh, actually, what the regulator says doesn't matter, what we say matters.
That's a due process issue.
So one of the things that happens in a criminal trial that your listeners may or may not be aware of is a sharing of discovery.
and the government needs to provide to our lawyers all of the evidence that they have against us
including uh what's called exculpatory evidence meaning evidence that's actually helpful to us
evidence that may exonerate us from the crimes and this is a legal requirement that they hand
over all of this information and so they handed over tons of information in discovery
but they didn't hand over everything we came to discover because my lawyers wrote to the government
and asked them very specifically did you ever have a conversation about samurai wallet with
fincen and the government then had to reply oh why yes we did and here's conversations that we had
now the government was supposed to hand that over to us without us asking because you may not know
what to ask. You may not know what questions to ask the government in order for them to send over
the evidence. So Supreme Court has said that the government has an obligation
to hand over everything without being asked and to do so in a timely manner.
We got that information a year after the prosecution had been going on. And when we
looked at that information, that evidence, it was a bombshell because they had asked FinCEN
six months before indicting us if they thought if fincent thought that we were operating a money
service business without a license which is again this is the agency that gives out the licenses
and fincent said no they they're not a money transmitter because they don't take custody of
anyone's funds clear as day but it didn't matter to the government because six months later
they indicted us anyway with one of the charges being you know operating a money service business
without a license, even though the people who give the licenses said we didn't need a license.
So that was a huge bombshell. And it was something that we thought was very important. And, you know,
we needed to get the judge involved at this point to say, hey, one, why didn't you hand this over
when you're supposed to? And two, what other information aren't you handing over? We need to
have a hearing about this and figure out exactly what evidence exists that you're not sharing with
us and what happened at that point well we wrote that motion um it's called a like a it's called a
brady violation when the government does that it happens all the time in a criminal trial government
almost never hands over the information they're legally required to hand over
um we wrote several motions at this point one was about this brady violation uh one was a motion to
dismiss the indictment.
Um and one was a uh motion to allow third parties to write to the judge and explain aspects of Bitcoin to the judge that the judge probably doesn know about Right So Coin Center for example which is a Bitcoin advocacy group in DC they wanted to submit a submission to the
court just to give the judge some more working knowledge about Bitcoin and non-custodial versus
custodial and what that all meant. So you have to get permission from the judge to let these people
submit this stuff, which is very common. Most of the time judges accept it because they want to
know as much information as possible uh so the so we made those motions submitted them to the court
and then about a few days before we were meant to go and argue those motions in front of the court
our judge changed um suddenly which is pretty unusual for criminal cases usually you get a
judge and that judge sticks with you throughout the whole case um so we got a new judge and this
judge has a pretty, pretty strong reputation as being a one, a pretty heavy sentencer. So if you
if you go to trial, get found guilty, she's giving you the max sentence almost every time. And two,
it was formerly a high level prosecutor in the Southern District of New York herself. She was
the head of the criminal division at SDNY. These are the same people who are prosecuting me now.
So, you know, very usual, very pro prosecution judge, a little concerning, but we didn't really
know what to expect. We hadn't seen her yet, hadn't appeared in front of her. So a couple days go by,
and now it's time to appear in front of her for the first time and argue the motions that we had
submitted to the court. And I just want to take a moment to give your listeners an understanding of,
in particular, the motion to dismiss, because that's an important point in this whole story.
at this point of proceedings you write a motion to dismiss indictment and as the defendant you
have to at this point assume that everything the government has said about you in the indictment
is true right you're not there to argue the facts of the case because juries are the ones who decide
facts the judge is the one who decides the law and in the motion to dismiss you have to keep it
solely on the law so you're saying anything the government said is true and it should still be
dismissed because of XYZ points of law. And we wrote a really phenomenal motion to dismiss a lot
of research, a lot of time went into it. And we found various precedent setting cases, Supreme
Court cases, that really tied into this situation beautifully. Two, I will mention briefly,
one was in 1940, a sugar distributor was charged with a conspiracy charge, just like we were,
because he knowingly sold sugar to a bootlegger who was creating alcohol, which was illegal at
that time. And the Supreme Court said, you can't convict him of conspiracy just because he had some
vague knowledge of a crime, right? He had to be actually part of the crime. And just by selling
the sugar, that didn't make him part of the crime. And then the second one that was really compelling
was a case from the 90s, a grow light manufacturer.
So usually you use like grow lights when you're growing tomatoes or hydroponic systems, that
type of thing.
They got this guy on a conspiracy charge because he knowingly sold his grow lights to a marijuana
dealer or grower.
And he even advertised his grow lights in High Times magazine, which is a marijuana enthusiast
magazine.
And he even had jokes, which the government doesn't have a sense of humor. They do not like jokes. And he said to the person he was selling to, I don't even want to know what you're doing with these lights. Right. And he got convicted on conspiracy in front of the jury. And then it was overturned on appeal because, again, the appeal court said just mere knowledge isn't enough. You have to be part of the actual criminal act itself.
So we were pretty confident in our arguments on this motion to dismiss.
And even if we didn't think it was going to work and she was going to dismiss the indictment, because that's pretty rare, we still thought that she would have an opinion on it and tell us why she's either approving or denying the motion, granting or denying it.
So we go into court.
We have all of our motions.
Keep in mind, getting to this point alone has cost us about a million and a half dollars.
right getting this motion getting all the stuff together very expensive process and uh we're ready
to argue and no argument she says i don't need any argument i've read all the motions they're all
denied and that was it right so she didn't she didn't have any argument on the brady violation
no argument on the motion to dismiss no argument or or anything on the the amicus briefs for the
third parties to give her information, all denied with one word, and no oral or written opinion as
to why she was denying it. So we just had nothing to even work with. So at that point, when that
happened, I kind of looked to my lawyer, and was just like, what is going on here? Like, this judge
isn't even going to listen to our arguments. You know, he even isn't gonna, you know, entertain
a free and fair trial. This is not going to go well. And at that point, I think my mindset shifted
from we're going to put our version in front of the jury. We're going to have a fair trial.
The jury's going to examine the facts and make a determination. And I think we're in the clear
to there's no way that this judge is going to let us put on the defense that we want to put on.
we're not going to get a fair trial. And the jury is going to have no choice but to convict us based
on the evidence that they get to hear. Because again, people think everything comes out of trial,
it doesn't. The judge has so much control as to what evidence the jury actually ends up hearing
that I really felt that going to trial was going to end in a conviction. And that conviction would
be a 25-year sentence, just knowing how this judge operates. So that's where my head was at
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Did they give any reason for why they switched the judge midway through the trial?
Nope.
Oh.
This is kind of mind-blowing.
I mean, it's like, do we actually live in a free country?
And I think, even outside of this case, I think it's becoming pretty clear that judges are exerting way too much power over the legal system in the United States.
And the fact that you wouldn't even hear arguments to...
It was something.
Like, what is a judge?
What are they supposed to be?
There's supposed to be some sort of impartial arbiter of the law.
And it's very clear in this case and many others that these judges have a bias and ego and hubris that's really tied into their careers.
Yeah, I think especially in the Southern District, almost all the judges there are formally prosecutors.
And I think it's true broadly in the federal system.
Uh, which there's just, uh, I understand they have to come from somewhere, you know, so you're
going to inevitably have, you know, prosecutors become judges, but there's a bias just implicitly
in that, right.
Where, oh, I was a prosecutor.
I know how it works.
There's some credibility that the prosecutor has.
If there wasn't actually a case here, the prosecutor wouldn't have brought it.
All that kind of builds in, into the system when it really shouldn't be that way.
You know, there's, it should be non-biased. It should be, let's figure out the truth. And what I discovered in this entire process is the truth does not matter. The truth is inconsequential to a criminal trial, a federal criminal trial.
the prosecutor has decided pre-indictment and they will you know force feed any evidence they
can get into their narrative and that's that even if their narrative becomes untenable
they'll never admit that and they will go as far as they can go even if they know it's not the
truth and that it you know again i knew there was something wrong with the justice system we all kind
of know there's something wrong with our justice system but you still think that well it's probably
the best in the world even with all its problems and it's probably you know one of the most fair
um it's probably better than a lot of other places and then you go face to face with the
department of justice and you go oh this is a clown show this is a circus and uh it's not just
me is i mean this is happening to a lot of people um you know so it's it is definitely a
a sobering experience yeah an indictment on the state of uh the united states particularly
the justice system yeah like what what uh what is this contract we're engaged in with the federal
government if the department of justice feels very emboldened to not show impartiality and just
put up judges who are going to dictate the way they think things should be dictated.
I mean, this gets to the broader question of the times that we live in. I mean, obviously,
everything's getting hyper-digital surveillance state is being erected quicker than ever now,
especially with AI all around us. And many people are asleep at the wheel, not really
noticing that it's happening. Even some people are, I think, intuitively and implicitly
understand that it's happening but i don't think they understand the scale
or the desires of the federal government and what they would like to cattle herd
individual citizens not only here in the united states but globally
into so they can they can tag track and bag whoever is stepping out of line
and something as what for the longest time for human history was innocuous financial privacy
I think we're trying to make an example out of you specifically just to send a message
of chilling effects.
Like, Hey, there will be no privacy.
Yeah, I agree with that completely.
You know, so for the, again, for the longest time we, we operated openly for 10 years,
right?
So it's not like we just came on the scene and they took us out.
You know, we've, we've been operating openly for 10 years and, um, we, we thought, and I
still think that what we were doing was legal right we didn't take custody and we figured out
a novel way of providing a very strong privacy protection on bitcoin without taking custody
and they did not like that right because they could go after bitcoin thought and they could
go after the old school mixing uh tools because all those tools took custody and they had existing
laws in order to get them. And they got them fairly easily. But then suddenly comes Biden's
Department of Justice, which really had a negative view of crypto. And they needed to figure out a
way to take us out when we didn't have those same issues. We didn't take custody. Guidance was on
our side. FinCEN was on our side. How do we get them? And at that point, my discovery is
that precedence, law, truth, none of it matters. If they want to take you out,
they will take you out. And it doesn't matter what the regulator says. It doesn't matter how
the actual thing works. It doesn't matter that what they're going to do is upending
years of precedence. They don't care. They're going to do it and try to get away with it.
And unfortunately, in this case, they managed to get away with it.
What I pled to,
unlicensed money transmission, is the charge that FinCEN said,
I didn't need to be licensed. And no one cares about that in the system.
They got their win I mean it again incredibly scary What do you think needs to happen to force these institutions to care about this stuff
Broadly, I don't know.
I think on a micro level, the Trump administration needs to clean house at the Southern District of New York.
I think that's really one of the most corrupt U.S. attorney's offices in the country.
And it's something that President Trump should know himself. He's dealt with them. They've come after him. Right. And, you know, they they've ignored so much about what his administration said they wanted to do. Right.
So we had Todd Blanche, the assistant attorney general, write a memo, the Blanche memo, that was, I mean, it couldn't have been about any other case other than Samurai Wallet and Tornado Cash.
It was like written about us, this memo.
And it said mixers, tumblers, software developers are not going to be held responsible for the crimes of their end users.
We're going to go after the actual criminals.
Clear as day.
Southern District ignored it.
They ignored their boss, the deputy attorney general, and they continued ahead.
Just the fact that we were brought under indictment in the Southern District of New York is crazy because we hadn't been to New York.
And their claim is, well, someone in New York could use the app, so we have jurisdiction.
It's insane.
uh so i mean i think that trump and the administration should take a cold hard look
at the southern district uh which is just they have their their nickname is the sovereign district
of new york because they do what they want and that's they've done that for a long time uh getting
them under control i think would be a good start um besides that i don't know i mean i think it's
just a inherent problem with our system yeah no the fact that they got the case in the first place
make a very good point is astonishing yeah you know how they did it they got they sent some fbi
agent into the streets of manhattan who opened up his phone downloaded samurai wallet made a
transaction into whirlpool and that gave them the jurisdictional ability to bring charges against us
that sounds like a conspiracy right it's crazy it's crazy we had never done business in new york
are they allowed are they allowed to just contract fbi agents to go do this stuff
yeah apparently i think they they they can do whatever they want you know and even if what they
do ends up being uh illegal which has happened they have prosecutorial immunity you can't do
anything about it you know so they are a protected class yeah and i don't know i forget if i cover
in the newsletter when I did a video last week on this case
and just juxtaposing the treatment that you've received
and the numbers that they cited in the prosecution.
I think it was like $236 million in volume
and gone through Whirlpool.
And then you look at just J.P. Morgan alone since 2000.
They've paid $40 billion in fines
for way more quote-unquote money laundering.
Yes.
and yeah no ceos no executive level raids employees no raids nothing it's just the cost
of doing business i mean yeah yeah i mean i think jp morgan chase all those guys would have killed
for a ratio that we had right so here here's the government's numbers i i haven't checked them i
don't know if these numbers are accurate or not but this is what the government is saying so in
In the indictment, they said $2 billion worth of unlawful transactions, not illicit, unlawful, went through Samurai Wallet.
What does that mean?
The government's contention is that Samurai Wallet was a financial institution.
And as a financial institution has the obligation to perform KYC and AML on all of its users.
And because we didn't perform any KYC or AML on our users, every dollar that went through Samurai Wallet was unlawful.
That's why the total amount of $2 billion is all unlawful.
Then of that $2 billion, they say $237 million were the proceeds of illicit activity, of crime.
And that was the amount that we allegedly laundered by creating Samurai Wallet.
So $237 million out of $2 billion.
okay that's like 10 right jp morgan chase hsbc would kill for 10 their numbers are way higher
in terms of illicit stuff and they know about it too right and they court it and that's why they
keep getting these fines and you know uh so the government was saying that 237 million
bill and i would be responsible for paying in restitution to the government they knew full well
we never had a cent of that 237 million because they acknowledged that samurai wallet was
non-custodial we never had it but they were going to make us pay that 237 million to them in the
event of a conviction which essentially is a life sentence right so a conviction is 25 years
and when you finally get out after 25 years you have a 237 million dollar debt on your head
that you need to pay the government. You can't travel. You can't leave. You're under
basically supervised release for the rest of your life.
They knew full well that we couldn't pay it. So what they did was as part of the deal,
they said, well, Samurai Wallet earned $6 million in fees over the course of 10 years that you
operated. So you pay us that $6 million that you earned total, and we'll consider the $237 million
fully satisfied. So that's part of the deal we ended up taking.
And I saw you, I watched you talk about this on Pod 256, but I think it's important to reiterate
here. I mean, the means by which the Department of Justice is attributing that illicit activity
that went through samurai is murky in and of itself with the chain surveillance tools
chain analysis historically is not as accurate as they claim to be definitely and you know they
can't show their work uh they they basically get a report from you know chain analysis or elliptic
or one of these other pools and they run with it and no one can actually say well how did you get
to that conclusion. They say the Silk Road coins are going through Whirlpool. But we already know
that the Silk Road cluster that Chainalysis and Elliptic and all these companies use is pretty
polluted. Stuff that has no relation to Silk Road gets clustered in and tied into being part of Silk
Road. But we don't know. And that would have been something that we would have had to deal with
at trial, trying to figure out and cross-examine their experts. But we already know from the Roman
sterling off case and bitcoin fog that you can't cross-examine those people because they'll they'll
make a case in national security and that's it they use those magic words and suddenly our our
you know our system our constitutional right to confront our accusers goes out the window
uh so that would have been an uphill uh challenge at trial uh but one that we were willing to to
fight um knowing that it's a it's a tough thing to do right because they get to say these came
from north korea these came from the silk road these came from so and so and then we have to go
up there and say no they didn't and the only way you can do that is by cross-examining that witness
saying well how did you come to that conclusion what's the scientific method you use what's the
error rate uh of this this heuristic that you're using and you're not allowed to do it uh so that
would have been that would have been tough but i mean even if that's true and it could be true
right i would not surprise me if north korean hackers used whirlpool wouldn't surprise me
because of course bad actors are going to seek out privacy tools they always have they use tor
they use vpns they use signal people use technology and bad actors use technology
so that wouldn't have surprised me uh and that's i think really the key to the government just my
mere knowledge that bad actors could use my tool meant that i was guilty that's where they got me
they said you knew and you continue to do it therefore you conspired with them by you building
this software knowing that bad actors could use it you conspired with those bad actors to create
a money laundering empire right yeah i mean and this is the craziest part right because 90 i mean
Even going off the government's numbers, which may be exaggerated to the higher end because of the murky chain heuristics, chain surveillance heuristics that we just discussed.
The fact or the potential for them to shut down these technologies, just come in with a rubber stamp, an iron boot, and stamp them out because there are nefarious individuals also using them is completely insane.
I mean, going back to what we were talking about earlier about the sort of security risk that's introduced if people know exactly how much Bitcoin you have and in which wallets it sits in.
The fact that it would prevent law-abiding, privacy-conscious individual citizens from accessing this technology because a few bad actors may be using it as well is completely insane.
Yeah.
And, I don't know, it's...
I try to be optimistic, but it's like cases like this, your case particularly, it's just like,
holy crap, what world are we living in? Is the government even, are they even going to try to
pay lip service to the fact that we live in a free country and as individual citizens, we have
inalienable rights that we are God-given rights that we can defend and leverage? It doesn't seem
like that's the case anymore?
No, no, not in that court at least
and not with those prosecutors.
Like I said, they have an open disdain
for the rights of privacy
and being secure from search and seizure,
an open disdain for financial privacy
and not just them, the judge as well.
It's a losing battle in the Southern District of New York.
That's for sure.
I want to make it very clear
that the government didn't charge any of these criminals, didn't go after any of these actual
criminals, right? They went after Bill and me who made a tool, but the alleged hackers and
money launderers and this and that have not been charged. And they didn't have someone to bring up.
And this is why they charged us with conspiracy instead of actual money laundering. Because if
they would have charged us with actual money laundering, they would have had to bring up
somebody to say, yeah, I sent my money to Keone and he laundered it and we agreed to do this.
They didn't have that person because that person never existed because I obviously did not get
into this to create a quote unquote criminal money laundering enterprise. And if I had,
I certainly wouldn't have only earned $6 million over 10 years. That's not a money laundering
enterprise that's a pretty modest amount to have earned over 10 years and at one and something that
i'm very proud of and you know building an open source company an open source tool and monetizing
in a way that we could at least keep it going for a decade is a point of pride that i have
and that's something they absolutely will not take away uh from me i'm proud of what we what
we built at samurai and you should be you should be extremely proud because these are
extremely important tools that people need and again it's just crazy that
you bill others building non-custodial software that helps people taint privacy on bitcoin and
other chains for that matter have to feel like actual criminals and the fact that they didn't
bring anybody forward it's just incredibly poetic in a way yeah in this no victims no victims and no
criminals yeah so obviously now you guys pled down you're facing five years in a cage sorry
for putting it that way but i think it's important to be to be blunt here um it looks like the
only potential to avoid this is a pardon from president trump um what is the case what what
would what would you put forth as the case for a pardon from president if you could speak to the
president directly i know he listens to the show quite frequently what would you say to him i think
I don't know what I would say to him exactly, but I think the president has an innate barometer for fairness.
He knows what's fair and what isn't fair.
He knows what's unjust and what's just.
He himself has been the target of unjust lawfare used against him and his family.
So I think he knows what it looks like when he sees it.
And if he understood this case, he would see it is profoundly unjust.
And I think the strategy at this point is to raise enough noise and awareness around this case to get it in front of someone in the administration who could bring it to his attention.
He said he wanted the U.S. to be the crypto capital of the world.
So do I.
but you can't do that if you're putting your builders in prison right and he wants um the
his department of justice todd blanche wants the department of justice line prosecutors to focus on
crime which would be great not focus on builders uh and and hold them accountable to for their
users actions with him a hundred percent but his u.s attorney's offices aren't following that
directive. He wants a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And if you do have to forfeit Bitcoin to the
government in a criminal action like we had to, he wants that Bitcoin to become part of the
strategic Bitcoin reserve. Well, I hope that he is aware that the Southern District of New York
disregarded that executive order and immediately sold the Bitcoin that we forfeited to them.
So bypassing his executive order for a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
yeah yeah it's lawless over there they do what they want and the president needs to know that
they do not respect him they do not respect his administration they do not respect main justice
they do what they want there and they get away with it constantly so i think the president can
restore balance to this can restore uh the injustice that has occurred in this case
by granting Bill and I full pardons
and then turning his attention
to the Southern District of New York.
Yeah.
If, even if you and Bill,
when you get pardoned,
we're going to manifest it,
when you and Bill get pardoned,
does the plea deal,
is that still set a precedent
that could be used in future cases though?
No, no, that was a consideration.
So the way court precedent actually works
is true precedent doesn't get sent doesn't get set at the district level right and that's where
we were at it gets set at appellate and above so if we were found guilty for example at a trial
criminal trial that wouldn't be precedent it would be like i forgot the exact term they use
like persuasive authority i think is the exact word they can use so the concept is that a district
judge is not bound by the decision of any other district judge.
Right?
So they can, they can look at that case and say, nah, I disagree.
Or they can go, yeah, I agree.
Um, so we would have had to appeal it up to the appeals court, uh, to get
actual precedent.
And this is what Roman storm is doing right So Roman storm with tornado cash he went to trial I don know if they offered him a deal or not but he went to trial and he was found guilty on the charge that bill and i pled to
um same charge unlicensed money transmission and it was a hung jury on money laundering um
so he gets to appeal that conviction of unlicensed money transmission and he's going to appeal it
And he's going to raise at appeal the fact that as a matter of law, you cannot transmit money if you've never had the money to begin with.
And I think he has a pretty good shot on appeal there because the appeal court, they look at this sort of thing.
So that's where precedent will get set when he does that.
for us because we didn't go to trial and we took a deal there is no precedent nor is there any
persuasive authority it's just done it's a deal but all that said the government doesn't care
about precedent if they want to go after you they will go after you they there was no precedence
in going after samurai wallet there was no precedence that an unlicensed money transmitter
could be non-custodial everything was said otherwise and that doesn't matter they will
make precedence when they want to make it they will spin things when they want to spin it so
we give a lot of weight to this legal concept of precedence it doesn't matter they do what they
want when they want and unfortunately that's just true oh it's fucked up how um how has this affected
you. I mean, obviously it's been a long couple of years. How are you holding up? What's gotten you
through this? How's your mental state approaching the time at which you have to report to prison?
What does this do for the individual? Yeah, I mean, it's tough. I tried to look on the bright
side of things, right? It could have been worse. I could have been held in pretrial detention,
which would have been difficult to aid in my defense.
I was lucky that I was able to get bail and go home
and spend time with my family and my wife.
So I try to look on the bright side of things,
but even that is tough.
You're sentenced to home incarceration,
meaning you can't leave the four walls of the house.
And it's for someone who is not used to that,
is used to being able to go on a whim,
go shopping or go to the park or go for a hike or a walk that getting used to not being able to do
that does take some time um and i guess it would be quite easy to kind of go stir crazy right and
i joke about it because um like they didn't get me on on covid lockdowns like i completely
disregarded that and i would go out for walks and i would do whatever i wanted i wasn't going to be
stuck in my house then. So I laugh with my wife. I say, well, they finally got me. They finally got
me in the lockdown. So I guess some people did experience that. So they know what it's like
being cooped up inside. So it's just been trying to fill the time. Primarily, I think the biggest
thing to get used to was for 10 years, I would get up every day, five or six in the morning,
and essentially start work Work on Samurai talk to Bill because he was in Europe so it was a perfect kind of of time zone thing start talking to bill start talking to the other people on the team and just get moving how
are we going to change bitcoin today how are we going to you know uh deploy software uh in a way
that no one has seen and just go 100 110 and we did that for 10 years just suddenly nothing right
Nothing to work on, nothing to build.
Can't talk to my friend who I've talked to hours a day for 10 years.
Can't talk to all the other people involved in Samurai.
Completely isolated.
That was tough getting used to.
And I think I just filled my day with reading, with learning new stuff,
playing around with little projects I could do on my computer,
coding, ideas that I may have had throughout the years.
and just try to fill the time.
And now it's just a waiting game.
I report on December 19th, so I have 10 days.
So it's just spending time with my wife and my family
and making sure everything logistically is ready for me
to be away from the house, the household.
I'm sorry I have to go through this.
It's really demoralizing.
I can't imagine for you, but even for someone who cares, I mean, deeply about Bitcoin, but just human liberty generally at the end of the day.
It's insane to me that you and Bill are going through this and we even have to have this type of conversation in 2025.
five um yeah i mean if anybody who's listening to this is close to the administration i think
kian has made a pretty uh cogent and clear case here that there this was not justice at the end
of the day if anything it was unjust what's what's happening it is unjust what's happening to you
bill and others in the non-custodial privacy space across crypto right now um and i think this is
a critical part of inflection point because it seems pretty clear that governments around the
world want to lean into this technology bitcoin crypto a lot of them are focused on stable coins
and other things, but we need to make sure that we preserve privacy and liberty in this
digital age with these digital currencies.
And if we stomp that out at the beginning, we're 17 years in, but it's still the very
beginning of humanity leveraging these technologies.
It's not a very hopeful future.
In fact, it's bleak, very, very despotic.
so if anybody's listening has the ear of the administration i think this is a critically
important topic to to really lean into and focus on and make sure we get this right for
not only ourselves but our children grandchildren people that will be born decades from now
yeah i i agree completely you know it's um i've always said that bitcoin
um broadly i guess crypto in general but bitcoin broadly really has the potential um to advance human freedom like no other technology before it But on the same side of the coin it has the ability to become a surveillance panopticon
and completely enslave us.
And we really have to be vigilant and do the right things to keep that from happening.
We do not want a totally surveilled open network.
right we want private digital cash and we can have it we're so close to having it
and we need to make sure that that's what our focus is uh because the alternative is
is is very dreary julius kian thank you for um
your hard work on bitcoin samurai wallet for more than a decade now uh
and wishing you bill everybody really uh the best of luck and hopefully sensible individuals
uh rise up and and right this wrong uh issue you a full pardon you and bill full pardons roman
storm as well um even though he's appealing his case right now i think again to what you said
earlier if we want to be the bitcoin slash crypto capital of the world stuff like this
cannot happen you're not going to be the bitcoin capital of the world if
the builders are being thrown in cages for writing software open source software
non-custodial software that just simply enables people to use bitcoin smarter in a more private way
yeah absolutely we will link to the change.org petition um bill and kian.org as well logan
and yeah i admire the um the strength that you're showing through all this i've been watching a lot
of the interviews that you've uh been a part of the last couple weeks and it is incredibly
impressive that you're um as put together and sort of steadfast as you have been the last few
weeks so you're uh you're much stronger than i may be uh if i were in a similar situation so
i appreciate it marty thank you for having me on all right make some noise freaks peace and love
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