Visit a website called Bill and Keone dot org.
K E O M N E dot org.
There's two calls to action on that page.
One is to sign the petition asking the president to pardon Bill and myself.
That's free to do.
Please, if you read the petition and agree with it or have heard what I've said
and agreed with it, please do sign it.
Please share it with your friends and family.
And then the second thing is there is a donate button on the website
to donate to my family and Bill's family.
If you feel moved to donate what you can, please do.
But otherwise, what's really most important at this point
is signing that petition and sharing that petition.
And those two things, I think, would be the most helpful right now.
What is real?
How do you define real?
You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do to get out?
Keone Rodriguez is a co-founder of Samurai Wallet.
He is now going to prison for writing privacy software that worked too well.
Keone Rodriguez, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix.
How are you?
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is, I think, a really important conversation.
uh sorry that for what you're going through and um that you're sort of the the bearer this
this information I feel like but um I really like to kind of get into the backstory um what drew you
to Bitcoin how did you hear about it and what what made it you feel like it was something you should
be interested in yeah sure uh it's an important question uh because it gets to the heart of
everything that I did while building Samurai Wallet. So I got into Bitcoin in 2012.
That's when I really got into it. But I had heard about Bitcoin probably in 2010. And it's a really
nerdy and weird way that I heard about Bitcoin. I played Minecraft at that time, and I was on a
Minecraft server with a bunch of libertarians and anarcho-capitalist kind of people. And one of the
guys on that server was selling a stack of 64 Minecraft diamonds for one Bitcoin. And it was
the first time that I had ever heard of Bitcoin and what it was, and I didn't really understand it.
But that's when it first entered my conscious, right? How is this person able to sell in-game
items for currency, whatever it may be. But I kind of put it on the back burner from there.
And around that same time, I was about 20 years old in 2008 when the Great Recession was happening.
And I was working and I was earning money and I knew something wasn't right with the financial
system. And I started to exit that system by buying gold and silver because it was a bearer
instrument. There was no third party in between me and my gold and silver. And it was a censorship
resistant type of money, right? The government wasn't involved in it. I could spend it if I
needed to, however I wanted to. So these were already properties that were really important to
me. But by 2012, I don't remember exactly how it happened, but something clicked in my brain
with Bitcoin. And I started to understand that actually this digital currency that I've been
hearing about for the last several years is really or can really be a better version of gold and
silver, an electronic version of gold and silver. I really then understood that it couldn't be
inflated, that the supply was fixed, that most importantly to me, that there is censorship
resistance, right? Because just like gold and silver, it's a bearer instrument. It's mine.
And if it's not mine, it means it's not in my control anymore. And no one can stop a payment
or transaction from happening. So at that point, it just clicked in my brain. And I was like, okay,
I need to get involved in this thing. I am into this. So I went on a mission of finding a job
in the Bitcoin space, which was very young at that time. 2012 is still pretty small space.
But I knew that if I wanted to get Bitcoin and I wanted to get it, I would need to work for it.
Buying it wasn't as straightforward and easy as it is today. And I really didn't trust third
party exchanges so i said if i want to get bitcoin i need to earn bitcoin so i went out and tried to
find a job and i was successful i did i used my skills in product design and product development
to land a job at blockchain.info that's what it was called back then now it's called blockchain.com
they had the first web wallet for bitcoin that was entirely non-custodial meaning they didn't
take your private keys. And to me, that was an essential aspect of the whole system. If you had
to trust a third party, then you really weren't using Bitcoin properly. So I worked at blockchain.info.
I met Bill, who I would later co-found Samurai Wallet with. He was employee number, I think,
six or seven at blockchain. I was employee number eight. And Bill and I got on like a house on fire.
We both had the same kind of vision about Bitcoin.
We had the same goals.
And what was important to us was, again, censorship resistance and no third parties, no counterparty risk.
So I was at blockchain from 2012 to 2015.
and between 2012 and 2015 we had a huge surge of new entrance into the bitcoin space right the
price had gone up it hit a thousand bucks it was like a big deal price dropped back down you know
it was it was a wild time but a lot of people were entering the space and a lot of people who had a
different value proposition to Bitcoin. To them, it was more of an investment. It was
more of a financial asset that they could make a lot of money on. And to their credit,
they were right. Not saying they were wrong, but their priorities were very different than
mine and Bill's. We love the price going up, right? We take our salary in Bitcoin. So price
goes up. That's really good for us. But that wasn't the central thing. The central thing
to us was privacy, censorship resistance, and the culture was starting to shift where
that was becoming less important.
And we started to see a lot of regulated exchanges pushing third party custodians.
So self custody was less important and privacy was less important.
So Bill and I were talking one day while we were at blockchain.
And this is, again, in the context of what was called the scaling wars of 2015, right, where Roger Veer made a new altcoin called Bitcoin Cash and people were leaving Bitcoin and it was a whole mess.
We didn't want to do that. We didn't want to leave Bitcoin. We love Bitcoin. Right. We wanted to support Bitcoin.
So we didn't want to leave Bitcoin. We didn't want to join like altcoin like Monero or something, which is a private cryptocurrency.
we wanted to work on Bitcoin. So I said, let's, and we both, we both said,
let's build the software that we want to see and that we want to use. And it doesn't matter if only
10 other people want to use this software, we'll create it because we want to use it. And that
software ended up being Samurai Wallet. So Samurai Wallet was first and foremost, a Bitcoin wallet
with two major red lines.
We never wanted to take custody of user funds
and we never wanted to implement any sort of KYC or AML
or data collection
because that was antithetical to our beliefs.
And we didn't think we had to
because it was non-custodial.
It's pretty straightforward.
So the point of Samurai Wallet
was first and foremost, transactional privacy.
How can we get more private transactions on Bitcoin without changing the underlying protocol of Bitcoin?
And you do that through a Bitcoin wallet.
The gateway to the entire ecosystem is a wallet.
So that's what we decided to build.
What kind of service is Samurai Wallet and how does it work?
Yeah, so Samurai Wallet was a Bitcoin wallet.
I mean, it's pretty simple.
most of your listeners probably have interacted with a Bitcoin wallet in some degree, hopefully
one that is self-custodial or non-custodial, right? So that's what Samurai Wallet was.
You downloaded a mobile application either from the Google Play Store or using a direct
download link or from a third-party application store like F-Droid or something like that
onto your Android phone. When you first booted it up, you had two options. One was, do you want to
enable Tor, which is a network privacy tool. We were the first Bitcoin wallet to actually
natively integrate Tor into the application. So before that, it was kind of difficult to set up
properly. In Samurai Wallet, you just press the button and Tor was enabled. And then the second
thing you were asked when you first installed it is, do you have your own Bitcoin node?
And if so, do you want to connect to that? Some users have their own Bitcoin nodes,
but many users don't. So we gave them the option to connect to their own Bitcoin node or to connect
to our Bitcoin node. And if your listeners don't know, a Bitcoin node is just essentially how your
wallet determines what its balances are and what the transaction history is. A Bitcoin node is
essentially talking to the blockchain and seeing what the state of transactions are, coins are.
And then from that point, the wallet would provide you with your seed words. I'm sure your listeners
are aware you get 12 or 24 words that you write down. And those words, when you can take them to
any other wallet, right, you don't have to use Samurai wallet, you can go to Sparrow wallet or
Edge or Blue, whatever, one of the many wallets out there and use those same words to reconstitute
your wallet, right? And get access to the same coins that you expect to have there. So
it was just a simple self-custodial Bitcoin wallet where the complexity came in is what we were
focusing on within the feature set of the wallet. And like I said earlier, that was primarily
privacy enhancing technologies. So, I mean, we had so many. I don't know if you want me to get
into the details of them, but generally they were, yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. So the word mixer and
Tumblr is really not accurate, right? We use those words because everyone knows what that means.
But in the context of what Samurai Wallet did and what other non-custodial coin join implementations such as Wasabi and JoinMarket do, it's not really coin mixing.
So to start, I'll explain what coin mixing is. And that is the old school. You have one Bitcoin and you send it out of your control to a mixer.
and then the mixer sends back a different Bitcoin to you, right?
And the goal of that is to separate the history of the old coin from the new coin.
That's how mixers worked.
And there's a big issue with mixers.
And it's pretty simple.
You have to trust the mixer.
You have to send your Bitcoin to the mixer and hope that you're getting your Bitcoin back.
And there's nothing that can stop the mixer from saying, actually, I'm not going to send this back. I'm going to run off now.
So we never wanted to do that. Right. Again, these red lines that we put in place, no custody, no KYC, etc.
So by doing something like that, we would be crossing that red line into custody, not not desired.
So in, I believe it was 2013, a Bitcoin core developer named Gregory Maxwell wrote onto the Bitcoin talk forums and suggested a technology called CoinJoin.
And it was, he didn't write the code.
He just wrote the theory of it and how it would work and what it would do.
And the idea of CoinJoin was to mimic the results of coin mixing, right, separating the past history from the future activity of your Bitcoin without having to give up custody.
So the user wouldn be introducing counterparty risk into their profile their risk profile And that was in 2013 And it
kind of just sat there and various people tried to work on it over the years. But it wasn't until
2019 that we finished our working implementation of CoinJoin. So we took Gregory Maxwell's theory
and wrote code around it and implemented it in Samurai Wallet in a mobile application.
That was a pretty big deal. And the idea of it very simply is you are one of up to eight people
who want to obscure the transaction history of your coins. So it's you and eight other people
at the same time who have the same interests and goals as you you get together and form a transaction
together and that transaction is eight people on this side sending to themselves on this side
but because they're all they all look alike you can't tell which coin belongs to which person
and again it's a the goal is the same as coin mixing but the uh how it's set up is different
right no custody leaves you have one bitcoin and then you send it to yourself and you still have
that one bitcoin but eight other people have done that with you now there's doubt and confusion on
the blockchain and that's essentially what every single one of our features was designed to do
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Wow.
And I'm sure going into this, you, and during this, you thought about the legality and compliance and things of this nature.
Where were you kind of getting your guidance from?
Where does FinCEN fit in through this throughout the years?
Yeah, that's a great question.
And it's exactly why we felt so confident in building this technology openly.
FinCEN is the regulator in charge of money transmission and illicit crime, financial
crime in general. FinCEN stands for the Financial Crime Enforcement Network. And in 2013, so
pretty early on, Bitcoin was on their radar. And they had to figure out what is Bitcoin
and how does it tie into the crime enforcement that we perform?
And they wrote guidelines that early on in 2013.
And they said in 2013, in order to be a money transmitter,
which is an entity that is regulated by us, by FinCEN,
you have to take custody of the assets, right?
So for example, Coinbase.
When you buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, custody of that Bitcoin remains with Coinbase until you transfer it off their platform into a wallet you control.
Coinbase is without question a money transmitter, according to FinCEN, because Coinbase has that custody.
But a wallet, software wallet like Samurai Wallet or any other non-custodial wallets, those are just software providers, according to FinCEN guidance in 2013.
Because none of those softwares take and control anyone's money.
So it was pretty straightforward, common sense regulation from FinCEN that essentially said, in order to transmit money, you actually have to hold the money to transmit.
right you can't transmit something you don't have and that was pretty straightforward so
that was 2013 in 2019 they issued new guidance to build off of that and they were even more
explicit about the custody requirement and they even talked about anonymity providers service
providers stuff like tumbling and mixing and again they reiterate in order to be a money service
business or money transmitting business, the service would have to take custody of the coins.
So to us that was crystal clear. The regulator in charge says if you don't have any custody,
you're not a money transmitter. Pretty clear stuff. But even with that clear guideline,
we engaged with a law firm before we launched Whirlpool. We hired a lawyer, retained a lawyer
and put them on the books as our counsel and asked him, we read the FinCEN guidance. We think
it makes sense. We understand it. But do you get the same conclusion that we do? And the answer
was a resounding yes. It's very clear. It couldn't be more clear. Custody is a requirement of
transmission. That unfortunately was not the end of the story as one would expect it to be.
On April 24th of 2024, the FBI raided my home with over like 40 to 50 armed agents and arrested me
for unlicensed money transmission and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business and
conspiracy to commit money laundering. Two things that we didn't think were possible
for a software developer who never actually had anyone's money.
Wow. Where maybe along this journey then did you feel your own risk level increasing?
I agree with you. I started my journey a lot later in Bitcoin in 2017, the end and
a lot about number go up, but there were the block size wars in the background. It was very
confusing. So you're looking at this and you're, you're,
I think it's very prophetic in a lot of ways that you're looking at privacy and
scaling, just not getting the attention it needs.
I don't think there's anything that more important in Bitcoin today than
privacy. I'm sorry, privacy versus scaling, privacy, self-custody.
These are the most important running a node.
And a lot of that ethos has gone away. You're,
you're getting clear guidance from FinCEN and you're getting guidance from your
lawyers, but was it a complete sneak attack in April or did you sort of feel the risk
level rising with the Biden administration, maybe an operation chokehold?
Yeah.
So that's a good question.
I knew from the start, from 2015, when we started it, that governments were not going
to like the software we built.
That wasn't a surprise, right?
We're building software that really puts the user in control and gives the user a certain level of financial privacy that the government doesn't like.
The government has spent the last several decades slowly eroding basic financial privacy to the point where now most people are, if not okay with, at least accepting of the fact that the government is going to be peaking in your bank accounts.
and taking note of every transaction you're making above $600.
That concept 30 years ago, 20 years ago, would have been outrageous.
Now it might be outrageous, but it's like, oh, well, what are you going to do?
So we were trying to give people back basic financial privacy.
So of course the government wasn't going to like that.
I never thought they were.
But I thought that the law was clear and the regulatory guidelines were clear so that even if we did create software that the government didn't like, they really couldn't do much about it as long as we stayed on the right side of the law in terms of that custody component.
So I knew they wouldn't like it, but I also had no warning they were going to respond this way.
It's not like they called my lawyer up one day and said, hey, we think Keone's breaking the law.
No, it was a complete sneak attack surprise and really, frankly, over the top to raid my house with a SWAT team and drones and armored vehicles and pointing guns at my wife and me.
Completely unnecessary. I'm not a violent person. I don't have any criminal convictions, no history of violence.
quite frankly, all they had to do was call me or my lawyer and say, surrender yourself because we
have charges against you. And I would have, you know, I'm not going to fight. I'm going to fight
in the court system. I've always said that I'm not going to fight any other way. So, yeah, it was a
sneak attack and it was completely unnecessary and it was all theatrics. And on the Biden
administration specifically, yes, I knew that the Biden administration was pretty hostile to crypto.
They were open about that. But again, it just went back to the fact that I thought we understood the regulatory environment.
I thought we understood what FinCEN was saying. And I understood from my lawyers that we were in the clear.
So, again, just stay on that right side of the law. Don't go into, you know, territory of custody and you're pretty good to go.
Unfortunately, that just didn't end up being the case.
So much lack of clarity there.
And it sounds like you're on solid ground.
So how does the sort of things unfold from there, maybe with the trial and evidence and discovery?
Yeah.
So after arrest and when I figure out what the charges are, we get to work pretty much immediately.
We hire a defense team, a legal defense team, both for me and for Bill.
And the discovery process begins.
and in discovery the government is required to hand over all evidence they have against you
good and bad so good evidence for you is called exculpatory evidence and by by law they need to
give that to you they can't hide it that's a supreme court ruling so in this case there was
an extreme amount of discovery terabytes on terabytes on terabytes of discovery
and a person might be thinking, oh, they had so much on you, right? Like they had terabytes of
evidence against you. No, that's not what it was. For example, they subpoenaed Google for my Gmail
account, right? My Gmail account has been in use since 2006 when Gmail first, or sorry, 2004,
when Gmail first came out, I've had an account there. So I have a lot of emails. I don't know.
I did not maintain in box zero.
I had emails going back to 2004.
Every single one of those emails was included in discovery, right?
Because that was part of the evidence.
Even if it's not anything to do with the case, they collected it.
So they have to give it to us.
And that's a tactic that they often use to bury a defendant, right?
If you have terabytes of stuff you have to go through, your lawyers have to go through it.
They have to go through it in case there's something there.
and a Manhattan attorney is two to three thousand dollars an hour so you have a person going through
this stuff for two to three thousand dollars an hour you're going to run out of money right because
you're not the government you don't have endless resources so this is a common tactic to really
squeeze a defendant but that's what they did and we dealt with it we went through it we used tools
to try to sift through everything and then if we go through this process is going forward now for a
We're now a year into this process of discovery review and going over the evidence and seeing what they have versus what they really don't have.
And for some reason thank God my attorney writes to the prosecutor and asks them very specific question They say hey have you ever had a conversation with FinCEN the regulator about Samurai Wallet And the government had to respond and they did They said well yes
we have had a conversation with FinCEN about Samurai Wallet. Here's the conversation,
and they provided the email. So they didn't hand this over to us before. This wasn't part of the
terabytes and terabytes of discovery. They forgot to give this to us. And when we read it,
It was a bombshell. It was a shock. Because the government, six months before they brought the indictment against us, went to FinCEN and asked them, is what Samurai Wallet doing illegal? And FinCEN answered them explicitly and clearly, no, they don't take custody. Therefore, we do not consider them a money service business regulated by us.
Wow. Six months later, the government brings an indictment with one of the charges being
unlicensed money transmission, even though the regulator in charge of giving the license
said they don't need a license. It was a shocking turn of events. And we really thought that was
going to be a big bombshell to the court, right? Not only is there this exculpatory evidence,
they didn't share it with us for over a year and they're supposed to give us everything
not only that but they went to the regulator the regulator later said they don't need a license and
then they bring charges for not having a license this is clear malicious prosecution let's talk
about the prosecution why why were you being prosecuted in new york is that where samurai has
are you domiciled in New York? Is that where you have the most business or something? Why was it in
New York? Why do you have to hire a Manhattan lawyer? Yeah, excellent question. No, Samurai
was not domiciled in New York. Neither Bill or myself had been to New York to do any business.
I hadn't even been to New York for pleasure purposes for well over a decade.
There was no ties to New York. The way that the Southern District of New York gained what they
called jurisdiction over the case is they sent an FBI agent outside to stand in central Manhattan,
pull out his phone, install Samurai Wallet, make a transaction using Samurai Wallet,
and that was it. Now they said, they claim, we have jurisdiction.
And this is something that the Southern District of New York is famous for. The Southern District
of New York thinks that they have jurisdiction over any case they want, right? Because all the
wires come through Manhattan. Everything goes through Manhattan. So we're the Southern District.
We can bring charges against you. So in this particular case, this is a Biden DOJ at this
point. The U.S. attorney is a man called Damian Williams. And Damian Williams wants to be the
sheriff of crypto. He took down Tornado Cash. He took down FTX. I mean, rightfully so on that one,
but that's what his goal, right? He's looked at Giuliani taking down the mafia and he says,
I want to be that guy, but for crypto. So he went after all of the crypto things that he could go
after because he wants to make a name for himself. He's not going to be a US attorney after Biden,
right he needs to advance his career so it's either getting um a job at like a high-paid
white shoe law firm afterwards where he can say i had a 98 conviction rate or it's elected office
right he wants to be governor or he wants to be a congressman or something like that so he wants
to advance his career and this is a good way to boost up his resume um that's why they went after
tornado cash. That's why they went after us. And at least one of the reasons why they went after us,
not the only one. I'm sure that was a broad administration level strategy.
We need to crack down on crypto. We're going to get the best U.S. attorney's office in the
country, Southern District. They're going to go after them. Yeah, this isn't going after predatory
finance or pre-mines or, you know, fraud or real.
We'll get into what real money laundering is.
But but there was a change of administration.
We're in the year 2025.
Didn't the Trump administration and his team give direction or guidance to the DOJ?
What guidance was given there?
And when was that?
When did that come out?
Yeah. So the Trump appointed a deputy attorney general named Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche is the deputy attorney general of the DOJ over at Maine Justice in D.C.
And Todd Blanche wrote a memo. I forgot exactly when it was, but it was shortly after the inauguration.
Wrote a memo to all of his U.S. attorney's offices in the country and said, we're ending regulation by prosecution.
He said, software developers should not be held liable for the actions of their end users.
I mean, this is clear. What he was talking about were two cases, Tornado Cash and Samurai Wallet, because those are the only two cases going on where software developers who've never had custody are being targeted by a DOJ for the actions of their end users.
Unfortunately, the Southern District of New York has a nickname.
And that nickname is the Sovereign District of New York.
They do what they want.
They really could not care less what an administration says if they don't agree with it.
They so happen to agree with the Biden administration in cracking down on crypto.
But when Trump says he wants Bitcoin or crypto to be or America to be the capital of crypto
and the DAG, Deputy Attorney General, says we're ending regulation by prosecution, they
don't care.
They will willfully ignore it, just like they did in this case.
It's really something that President Trump needs to address in this, you know, before
he leaves office, because he better believe they're going to come after him and his family.
next when he doesn't have the protection of the presidency.
So here you are, you're, you're fighting for our financial freedom,
but you're also fighting for your own life.
And you're going through what sounds like a year or more of a discovery and
figuring out how to raise your defense.
And what, what happens with the judge?
Like, didn't you want to raise a bunch of motions?
because, I mean, it sounds like some serious stuff was discovered during pretrial.
Yeah. So when we discovered that the government had secretly communicated with Vincen
before bringing the indictment and then hid that information from us, we wrote a motion to the
court. And in that motion, we asked the judge to do two things. One, to compel the government to
hand over everything they had, right, that we didn't know what to ask for.
If it's exculpatory Brady information, they have to hand it over. And two, we wanted to figure out
exactly why they didn't hand it over. Who made that decision to not hand it over? So we put this
into a motion. We had another motion, a motion to dismiss the indictment. And a motion to dismiss
the indictment you at that point of pretrial you have to assume everything the government has said
about you is true in the indictment which p.s they lie a lot but you assume everything they said is
true and you still say the indictment should be dismissed because the law does not support it
right even if all those facts are the case the law isn't on their side and here's how
And we put together a phenomenal motion to dismiss. Really good. We had another motion, which was a simple thing, asking the court to allow what are called amicus briefs. These are pieces of literature written by Coin Center, by the DeFi Education Fund, by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to inform the judge, who is not an expert in Bitcoin, not an expert in cryptocurrency, but to give her or him some understanding.
understanding of the different aspects at play. It's a very common thing that almost all judges
like to have, right? Because it's just additional information they can read to understand something.
So one might be about what's a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet versus a custodial Bitcoin wallet.
You know, what is the blockchain? How does that actually work? What is a Bitcoin node? How does
that actually work? Things that just, you know, may be helpful. So we had other ones, but those
were the big three that we wanted the judge to consider. The judge gave a date, said, okay,
on this date you come up and we're going to argue the motions and I'll make my rulings.
Two days before that date, the judge changes. New judge, which is very unusual. Normally in a
criminal trial, you have a judge assigned to you at the start and that judge sees you through all
the way to the end. It happens when there's, you know, a judge gets sick maybe or something like
that, but it's incredibly rare. And in our case, our original judge wasn't sick. He was still hearing
cases. So we don't know why he changed. And we went from having this judge, Judge Berman,
to being assigned a new judge, Judge Coate, who has a reputation as a very pro-prosecutor judge.
she herself was formally the head of the DOJ's criminal division at the Southern District of New
York these are the people who are prosecuting me she was before a judge she was their boss
yeah not great she also has a reputation for being a very harsh sentencer so if you go
appear before her and go to trial and lose at trial, she's giving you the max sentence.
Also not great. But we hadn't been in front of her yet. We didn't really know what to expect.
And we did have three motions, at least three motions in front of her that we were going to
argue. We get up there ready to say our piece, ready to do what we're going to do.
and before we even can begin, she sits at the bench, the stenographer starts typing,
and she says, I've read the motions and I'm denying all of them. No argument. No one got
to get up and say our piece. Just one word from the judge, denied. And normally when a judge denies
or accepts a motion, they write an opinion. And that opinion explains their thought process as to
why they either accepted or denied the motion. And if they don't write it, then they give it orally.
So it's either called an oral opinion or a written opinion. This judge did neither. We have,
I still to this day, no idea why she denied our motions other than one word denied. And even if
the motion to dismiss being successful was unlikely, which it was, most judges don't do that.
they just let it go to the jury either way, they still give a reason why they're denying it. They'll
say, because of this precedent or this law or whatever they're going to say. That was very odd.
But what was really odd was the denial of amicus briefs, of additional information that the court
could use to broaden their understanding of something a 79-year-old woman has no idea about,
who has never really heard of Bitcoin? Why would you deny having additional information?
So at that point, I think we realized that this was going to be far from a fair trial.
We had a judge who was hostile, who didn't want to learn and didn't want to give us any indication
of anything, right?
So it really did feel like this was going to be a fight
that we could not win with a judge like this.
Yeah, I mean, it just feels so stubbornly unjust.
I mean, new judge to the case two days prior
and doesn't even really want to dig into the back and forth
and arguments being made, evidence being supplied,
opinions, guidance, all things of this nature that you would think you'd want, you know,
if you're going to find truth, you'd want to shed light and shine light on all of this.
Yeah, just one thing to respond to that, because I was with you there. I thought maybe perhaps
naively that the justice system, even imperfect, and we know that it's imperfect, but that the
justice system ultimately
wanted to get to truth right Wanted to to get to justice But that But that couldn be further from the truth The government lies so much in a criminal indictment and so much in a criminal like
straight up lies and they get away with it to the point where most people just won't believe me when
I tell them this because they haven't gone through it. But if you've asked anyone who has gone
through a federal criminal trial versus the DOJ, it's the same story every time, especially these
white collar cases, right? It's the same story every time. Out of context statements, complete
omissions of truth and fact. All of these Brady violations constantly happening, hiding of evidence,
misstating the facts to the judge. This happens constantly. So the point is, it really isn't about
truth. It's about winning. And the prosecutor is supposed to be the one who's on the quest for
truth. And they don't care. They really don't. And it's a very unfortunate thing, one for me,
who's actually dealing with it. But two, just as an American, you want your justice system
to be blind. You want your justice system to work properly, not to be hyper-focused on winning,
but focused on finding out what the truth is and pursuing that no matter where it takes you.
And I'm very disappointed to find out that that really is not the case.
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The justice system for the civilians and normal persons is so fragile and so broken.
You think about sort of democracy and we could argue whether that's the end state for humanity.
but here we're in a situation where appointed individuals are taking sort of the whole country's
view and making decisions, right? So either not sharing evidence, good or bad, a single person,
right? And we don't get to find out who that is. The system's supposed to give you an impartial
judge and they get to change the judge midway through right in a very in a very not really
impartial district um that seems to have gone rogue i mean this is where ross olbrich i think
was unfairly tried uh he had no real business in new york no ties to new york yeah i think schumer
appointed the judge there and there was a lot of shenanigans in that trial for sure and things hit
and things held back and other trials going on at the same time.
And this is also where Trump faced issues.
President Trump personally with, I think, mortgage fraud
that didn't seem like sort of real fraud.
So how fast did it unfold from you think and hope you have a fighting chance,
you're making a case, to the door is going to slam really shut.
she's the kind of judge that crushes people with punishment um i'm not getting a fair case how fast
did that go from there from yeah pretty fast yeah pretty fast from there i mean at this point when
by the time that happened we're over a year in right and we're we're fighting we we think these
charges are bogus and we're gonna fight this case and we think we have a pretty good shot especially
with the judge the original judge who seemed to be he he was old too he had really no idea about
bitcoin but he at least seemed to be willing to let us argue the case we wanted to argue
uh once we got the new judge who just really showed that in that hearing that she wasn't there
to be fair um it became pretty clear we needed to make a deal um and we i as far as i know
So we didn't go to them for a deal, but they did come to us with a deal. And it would have been quite frankly crazy not to take it because it was almost a certainty that we were going to get convicted at trial.
And if we did get convicted at trial with this judge, who's known, again, known as a hanging judge, right?
This is if we still had hangings in this country, this is the judge who would be ordering them.
We knew that if we lost at trial with this judge, she would convict us for 25 years.
And, you know, you start doing the mental calculations, right?
You start doing the arithmetic in your head.
And it's like, okay, 25 years away from my family, away from my wife, because I'm what, going to fight in an unfair fight? I'm going to fight with my hands tied behind my back and my legs shackled together? That doesn't make any sense.
So they offered the deal to drop the money laundering charge if we would plead guilty to the money transmission charge, which in itself is so laughable because that's the exact charge that FinCEN didn't apply to us.
And it just shows the government doesn't care.
They really don't care what the Treasury Department had to say about it, which is what FinCEN is part of.
They said we're the Department of Justice.
We say it's against the law.
It doesn't matter what FinCEN says.
Okay.
So they got their way.
We made that plea.
We had to forfeit the entire earnings that we ever made with Samurai Wallet over 10 years.
And we had to plead guilty to unlicensed money transmission.
Let's break that down.
What were they throwing at you on top of the 25 years?
Let's maybe look at some of the numbers here.
What were they saying about the business?
What did the business do?
And how did they come to some of their conclusions, albeit wrong or erroneous or unjust?
I can't verify these numbers, so we're just going to assume the numbers that the government has said are true,
though I wouldn't take it as gospel, but let's just work with what they give us.
So they said that Samurai Wallet had transmitted $2.3 billion total.
They called this unlawfully transmitted because in their theory, we were required to get a money transmitter's license.
And if we got a money transmitter's license, we were required to perform KYC and AML on every user that used Samurai Wallet.
Right. Again, this is a non-custodial piece of software.
So because we didn't get a money transmitter license and because we didn't perform KYC and AML on any of our customers,
all 203 billion dollars that customers, you know, sent through Samurai Wallet were considered unlawful by the United States government.
of that two uh two billion dollars the government claimed that 287 million
was the proceeds of crime of illicit activity of some manner right so of the two billion 287 million
were uh the the amount that was laundered quote unquote um and
And then they say out of that $2 billion total, Samurai Wallet made, earned $6 million in fees.
And that was over a period of 10 years, that $6 million in fees that we earned.
So what the government said is if you go to trial and you lose, which was very likely
at this point, not only will you get 25 years, but we're going to hold you responsible for
paying us back the $287 million that was illicitly used through your software.
They knew we didn't have $287 million, right?
They knew we never took custody of that $287 million.
They didn't care.
to put that 287 million over our heads for the rest of our life because until you pay that back
once you're out after 25 years you're still under their thumb right you can't travel you can't leave
they'll put a lien on your property they'll put a lien they'll take your income every month
until they hit 287 million which they'll never hit i can't make that you know um so that was that
That was pretty rough.
So part of the deal was, and again,
it's just them turning the screw, right?
Part of the deal was, well, take the plea.
You won't get any more than five years, right?
They can't give you any more than five years for this plea.
And instead of having to pay us $287 million
that you've never had,
you can just pay us the 6 million that you earned in fees
over the course of 10 years, right?
Even though, even by their own numbers,
That $6 million was total off of the $2 billion, not the $287 million.
Doesn't matter.
Pay us anything that you earned over that period of time,
and we'll consider your $287 million debt satisfied.
Right.
And they also know the $6 million they're alleging is not even –
that would be off the top.
That doesn't include the fees to lawyers being compliant.
Oh, yeah.
That wasn't profit.
That was just revenue.
All absurd.
Do they get precedent out of this?
No, no, they don't.
So the way precedence works, legal precedence only actually gets set at the appellate level, right?
So if we got to trial, we got convicted, they still wouldn't have legal precedence.
Legal precedence would have occurred if we appealed and then won that appeal or lost that appeal.
what gets what gets set at um the district court level is uh gosh what's the term they use
oh persuasive authority right so a district court judge is not bound by the ruling of another
district court judge but they can look at other rulings and be persuaded by them uh so persuasive
authority is what gets set at district court level. But because we took a plea, there was no
persuasive authority set and there was no precedent, informal or formally set. So the answer to the
question is no. But as I've said many times now, after going through this process, the Department
of Justice doesn't care about precedents. There was no precedents coming after a non-custodial
software developer. That was a brand new innovation that they thought up in 2024 and didn't need
precedents to do it. So, you know, we like to think that our common law system has, you know,
this legal precedence. We submitted legal precedents in our motion to dismiss that couldn't
get any higher, that came from the Supreme Court of the United States, saying that you can't be
part of a conspiracy unless you're actually a part of a crime. Just knowing about a crime isn't enough.
Right. I mean, we couldn't have had better precedents. Didn't matter. Judge ignored it.
Government ignored it. Didn't matter. So unfortunately, another reality of our justice
system is that. So I understood Bitcoiners worried about the precedence that was being set by this
case. So, you know, the two responses I have to that is there was no precedent set by this case.
But two, precedence doesn't matter.
They do what they want when they want to do it.
It's obvious they do what they want.
They don't need precedence.
They'll go after and take down whoever they want for whatever they can want to fabricate for.
But I feel like this does set precedence.
This is threatening.
You're going to prison in 10 days.
I mean, I think we're going to hopefully make enough noise and get you to not go.
And I'm very optimistic. But that is this is all precedence to me and scary to, I think, already coders and developers around the world.
And this is sort of the antithesis of, you know, America being the capital of Bitcoin.
This is sort of me for this would be the end of America being a great place for Bitcoiners.
The beginning of the end. Yeah, and absolutely agree.
You know, Bitcoin's code, it goes on, but I got to live somewhere.
You got to live somewhere, right?
And does this mean the government, the U.S. government wants to destroy Bitcoin?
No, I don't think they want to destroy Bitcoin.
I think they want to capture Bitcoin.
And tools like what I built with Samurai Wallet throws a wrench in their ability to successfully capture Bitcoin in the way that they want.
They want to be able to see every transaction you make.
And with Bitcoin, they can.
It's actually pretty great for them.
Right. Unless you're doing something specific to to,
you know, control for that.
The blockchain is public and not only is it public, it's immutable.
So if they can't read it today, they might be able to read it in 10 years from now
and say, oh, 10 years ago, you did something we don't like.
So no, they don't want to destroy Bitcoin.
They want to capture it and control it.
And any software, any tool that throws a wrench into their ability to do that effectively,
they're going to come down on.
So that's why they came down on Samurai.
And they'll come down on the next tool that gets into their scope.
If people use it, if there's a mass around it, they'll come after it.
You know, a lot of people think of Bitcoin as a tool for freedom, freedom money.
Can Bitcoin become a surveillance panopticon?
Absolutely.
And it's quite likely.
So Bitcoin can be freedom money.
That's why I was attracted to it.
That's why I got involved in Bitcoin in 2012, because I saw its potential as freedom money.
But that's not a given.
It's not some miraculous divine intervention that Bitcoin is given to us in its perfect state.
We need to work for that.
for that. People need to develop the tools to make it free to money. And you can't have freedom money
without privacy. Privacy is essential to that concept of freedom money. So if you don't have
the tools and the builders building the tools to enhance user privacy on Bitcoin, it will become a
surveillance panopticon. And in some ways it already is. Who do you think is maybe next in
line in the government's war on financial privacy? I think it really depends. It depends on
what tools emerge and the operational security of the builders, right? Hopefully the builders
learn from us that even though the loss has one thing that can still come after you and destroy
your life, so we better stay completely anonymous and, you know, do all of that.
if a tool becomes very successful and popular, they'll go after that tool.
But I think it would be easier to target the miners in the United States, right? And they
can say to these miners in the United States, hey, you're money transmitters now. You're actually
the ones that are including transactions into a block that get broadcast to the network.
Transactions, in fact, don't actually exist until you put them in a block. Therefore,
we have a pretty good case against you as a money transmitter. You better get licensed and you better
only accept transactions from white listed exchanges and you better do OFAC screening.
So I think they're going to squeeze the miners eventually. And that's just another step in the
wrong direction and another step in making America the backwater of crypto, right? Because miners will
leave. They won't do that. They'll go offshore and they'll go to a jurisdiction where they
don't have to deal with that. Can you maybe restate the case for financial
privacy Why it so important It the financial privacy is the basic building block of civilization right You need not just financial but all privacy You need privacy to feel safe enough to say certain things that might not be accepted by the majority
Right. So, for example, one of our founding documents, not necessarily founding documents, but an important document in our founding was Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense and incited the colonial nation to take up arms against the crown.
Thomas Paine wrote that under a pseudonym.
It was too dangerous to write that publicly.
And that was one of the most consequential publications in the world.
So privacy is absolutely essential.
We take it for granted, right?
We all put our letters in envelopes.
We all close the blinds on our windows at night.
We all have doors. We don't live in glass houses. We have secrets. We're humans. Privacy is absolutely essential to that. And it's been the de facto condition since the dawn of time. It's only within the last several decades that financial privacy and privacy in general have been under severe attack from governments as technology grows and they grow with technology.
technology, they're able to undermine privacy. As world events like 9-11 and other major things
happen, they're able to erode financial privacy under the guise of protecting against terrorism and
stopping drug cartels and this and that. So it's a pretty modern innovation that your privacy
is at the whim of the government. The government is what grants you your privacy. No, no, no,
that's never how it's been that's absolutely never how it's been and we need to build tools
to combat the surveillance uh capabilities that the government uh and and corporations for that
matter um employ and that's again what we were trying to do with samurai wallet well when when
was the last time you got to talk to bill the last time i got to speak with bill uh was at our change
a plea hearing in July. I'm not allowed to speak with Bill by myself. I have to only speak with
Bill when lawyers are present. So, and again, we're talking Manhattan attorneys, $2,000 to $3,000 an
hour. That's $4,000 to $6,000 for a conversation with Bill. So we're not doing many of those,
right um so uh it's it sucks bill is one of my best friends known him over a decade and i've
spoken to him every single day hours a day prior to this all happening i wish i could speak to bill
um and i'm hopeful that at least i'll be able to write him uh when i'm in prison um i don't know
if that allowed or not i think i have to get permission from the case manager uh to do that but I hoping that they give us that permission because I like to talk to him you know just as a friend Wow I can imagine how hard this is What are these
days like as you prepare? I'm holding up fine. You know, I've come to terms with everything,
you know, that has happened. You know, it's not fair or just, but I'm not the type of person to,
to, you know, go on about that. You know, a lot of life isn't fair. And especially when you're
dealing with the state or governments, a lot of things aren't fair or just, you just have to kind
of deal with it. So that's where I'm at with it in my head. And these last, last, what is it now,
nine days that I have is primarily getting everything ready logistically to ease the
burden and transition on my wife. Right. I don't want her to, to suffer unduly. There's a lot of
things that I take care of that she's going to have to take care of now because I won't be here
to do it. So I'm trying to, uh, prepare her for those logistical tasks. Um, you know, and, uh,
obviously spending as much time as I can with her and my family. Uh, that's pretty much all I can do
at this. Can you leave the house? I can leave the house now. Yes. We didn't really get into the
whole bail conditions things, but just suffice it to say that at first I wasn't allowed to leave the
house. And after, I think it was about the year mark, we got it so that I could get onto a curfew
where I could leave the house between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. So I can do that now, which has made
the bail, the house arrest a lot more bearable. You know, I'm able to go out with my wife
to the park or go for a walk or, you know, normal, go shopping, just normal things,
which I wasn't able to do for a long time. Well, the case for a partner is obvious. What
can people do to help spread the word and what can they do to contribute?
Yeah. So if they could visit a website called billandkeone.org, K-E-O-N-N-E,
dot org. There's two things that, two calls to action on that page. One is to sign the petition
asking the president to pardon Bill and myself. That's free to do. Please, if you read the petition
and agree with it, or have heard what I've said and agreed with it, please do sign it. Please share
it with your friends and family. And then the second thing is there is a donate button on the
website to donate to my family and Bill's family. So half of what you donate will go to my wife,
Lauren, and half will go to Bill's wife, Sabrina. If you feel moved to donate what you can,
please do. But otherwise, what's really most important at this point is signing that petition
and sharing that petition And those two things I think would be the most helpful right now Going to prison awful writing writing Bitcoin code This is so wrong Please help The hashtag is Pardon Samurai It movement
Even Ross Ulbricht popped up to show support.
What was it like speaking with Ross?
That was, yeah, that was very surprising.
I was not expecting that at all.
As far as I know, Ross hasn't spoken a space before.
He did one appearance at a Bitcoin conference shortly after he was released.
And that was kind of last we heard from Ross, understandably so.
I talked, I had been in conversations with his mother, Lynn, who had just been very supportive of me and Bill and just trying to give us encouragement.
Right. She's kind of gone through this. She knows the system and how it works.
But I never expected Ross to jump on that space and talk with him.
And it was just a beautiful moment.
we had like five, five or 10 minutes where it was sent. It felt like it was a one-on-one
conversation between Ross and me. Um, and it was just, it was very nice. I really appreciated that.
I'm grateful that you spending this time with us. Um, I can't imagine what this is like going
through your true freedom fighter. Um, I hope this gets to Trump and his team, president Trump.
and I hope they hear the message loud and clear.
This needs to happen ASAP.
We're in touch privately.
We're in some group chats together.
Anything I could do to help, you know,
and I really encourage listeners to do everything they can
to get the word out and contribute.
So I'll leave it to you for any parting words.
I think I said it all.
I appreciate you giving me the opportunity
to come onto your platform, tell my story to your listeners.
and I just I hope that while I'm gone if I do have to go and we were not successful
successful in getting the part in I truly hope that the ethos of Bitcoin as freedom money
doesn't go away I hope that the ethos as Bitcoin as a censorship resistant
form of cash doesn't go away and people still fight for that vision because that's what brought
me to Bitcoin originally, the promise of that is still there, even if it's been drowned out,
you know, by a different group or a louder group or the, you know, more financial or more
sophisticated group, it doesn't matter, that potential is still there. So I hope the builders
don't shy away and they do build the tools that we desperately need and learn from, you know,
what we went through to protect themselves better. So I think that's really all I have to say. So
thanks again, Cedric, for having me on.
Thank you, Keone, for all your work.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do?
You get out.