In light of the charges brought against Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill for their alleged operation of Samourai Wallet, I believe it is important for Bitcoiners to assess the current state of things. Too much of the discourse in Bitcoin today is simply lip flapping from state-sponsored hypnotists pushing intelligence-captured infrastructure rails as scaling solutions while manufacturing consent for transaction censorship and treasury centralization within the very private sector institutions that profiteered from the manufactured economic crises of the 21st century. Toxic maximalism in 2024 means cheering for U.S. dollar stablecoin issuers despite their recent onboarding of the Secret Service and the FBI, much like it meant celebrating the arrests of TornadoCash operators simply for being “shitcoiners.” It couldn’t happen here, no, not on Satoshi’s protocol. “Bitcoin is decentralized,” the hypnotists preached, and the issues concerning state regulation brought up by a small minority of maximalists were ignored en masse for further false prophet sermons simultaneously pushing the hypocritical imminent hyperinflation of the dollar and their dollarcoin as a human rights tool.
But this isn’t just another op-ed about my disdain for stablecoins. This is a wake up call. A wake up call for every one of you in Bitcoin to rub the All Time High-grains of six figure-sand out of your eyes and take a look around. How did we get here? How have we spent the last year arguing about what constitutes spam, and ethical use of Bitcoin, while completely ignoring the encroaching regulatory moat? There were more than enough signs. There were more than enough warnings. Congress is putting together drafted legislation for further internet regulation, stablecoin bills, social media application bans, while the state continues to redefine in real time what a cryptocurrency even is.
Bitcoin is a database. Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin is code. Bitcoin isn’t money, and it certainly isn’t money under the jurisdiction of the United States. The compliance-driving hypnotists will tell you we must ask permission from our local governing offices for an embracement of bitcoin. So that we can pay our taxes in bitcoin and service our legal debts. Samourai Wallet didn’t operate a money laundering service, and certainly not a money transmitting business. They wrote code. Code that users across the globe, within a myriad of legal jurisdictions, utilized to exchange certain alphanumeric strings of data over the internet. The Bitcoin protocol is incapable of transferring criminal proceeds between parties due to UTXO destruction being a function of every spend. Satoshis do not exist, despite clever claims from both degenerate Ordinalstans and the DOJ’s regulatory arms. They are completely and utterly consumed during each transaction, and reborn bearing zero resemblance to where the entities actualizing blockchain heuristics claim they have came.
The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims Samourai has executed over “$2 billion in unlawful transactions” while facilitating “more than $100 million in money laundering transactions.” This accusation contains a complete misunderstanding – not to mention a simply unconstitutional reframing – of what a Bitcoin transaction is and how it should be treated by our elected officials. Writing code is not a crime. Even when said code was written with the express purpose to enable the committing of a crime, the criminal action takes place when actualizing said intention, not at the onset of the authoring or even distribution of the code. Code is speech. Distributing code is an expression between parties of bytes reduces to bits, to ones and zeroes. Any precedent that establishes anything other than this is in direct violation of the first amendment, and further more, against the should-be-obvious natural code of freedom of expression.
There are PLENTY of ways that Bitcoin the network can spread itself across the globe, and how bitcoin the asset can monetize to astronomical heights without bringing an ounce more freedom to the populous of the world. Bitcoin’s definition has been gaslight by the hypnotists to be within the purview of the regulatory moat, and thus Bitcoin is in dire need of a redefinition. Bitcoin was never about dollar denominated value, it was never about perpetuating the UST market via Treasury-backed tokens utilized by captured on and off ramps. Bitcoin was never about embracing the state and the furthering of the reach and influence of the psychopathic criminals obsessed with changing the definition of speech and expression, of code and of numbers. We sat and watched the bookkeepers take their red felt pen and change the meaning of words, slowly bringing the frogs and their dictionaries to a boil, while taking shelter under the false pretense of an immutable ledger – misunderstanding the legal and rhetorical structure of that ledger itself was being reconstituted at its foundation.
Bitcoin is a tool of empowerment and Bitcoin is for enemies. Well, now our enemy, the state, is empowered, and their regulatory goons are barking like wolves at the gate. We must stay clever, and arm ourselves with the rhetoric needed for the oncoming onslaught against those that dare to build tools that threaten the spellings of the state.
Writing code is not a crime.
Whispering numbers to a loved one cannot be redefined as a criminal act.
Bitcoin is not money, but just a ledger.
A database.
Free Samourai.