A whole lot of crazy shit has gone down since my last round up:
Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill, the Samourai Wallet (a Bitcoin privacy wallet) developers changed their plea to guilty after fighting the case for more than a year. This was a sad day for bitcoin, for crypto as a whole, and for freedom itself. I don't blame them for a second for folding, it is entirely likely the Feds threatened their families to get them to take a plea deal, they do fucked up shit like that all the time. The only good thing is that they won't get more than five years in prison, but any amount of prison time is unacceptable. They did absolutely nothing wrong.
JUST IN
Here is a good essay about Samourai Wallet and lessons we need to take from it;
There are moments that define an era. Not because they shock us - though the arrest of the Samourai Wallet developers certainly did - but because they clarify the terrain of struggle. In the clash...
As if that wasn't enough, after a dramatic trial that lasted weeks, a verdict has finally arrived in the Federal criminal case against Roman Storm, the Tornado Cash developer.
He was found guilty for one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business under 18 US Criminal Code Section 1960.
On the other counts, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate international sanctions, the jury was deadlocked and couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. Thank god for the holdouts on the jury who refused to switch their vote to guilty even though I am sure everyone just wanted to get it over with and go home.
So what does this mean? It means it's a mistrial on 2 of 3 charges, and the government has a choice whether they want to retry those charges or not. It also means Storm is facing a max of 5 years on the charge he was found guilty on. 5 years is a lot better than the serious time he was facing, but it's still FIVE YEARS OF A MAN'S LIFE JUST FOR WRITING SOME CODE TO PROTECT OUR PRIVACY.
Sadly normies don't even know shit like this is happening. I wonder if normies did know what this means for our freedom would they be rioting in the streets over it? Or would they just accept it and continue being good little slaves? This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about writing about things like this, in the hope that I can wake even one person up to the evil that is being committed every day by the state.
The defense did a great job in my opinion defending Roman Storm. They poked so many holes in the Fed's case that it was looking like Swiss cheese by the end of the trial.
For example. the Fed presented a supposed "victim" of Tornado Cash and claimed that funds stolen from her were sent through Tornado Cash to be cleaned. The defense managed to prove that this was not actually true which made the Feds look like either liars or idiots. This cast doubt on the Government's entire case. The defense also showed that one of the Government's expert's, an IRS agent in charge of tracing crypto, didn't even know the difference between a blockchain and their own asshole.
Juries, especially in Federal cases, are statistically more likely to convict than acquit. So the fact that there were holdouts who refused to convict on 2 out of 3 charges is demonstrative of both the weakness of the Fed's case against Roman Storm and the strength of his defense.
Shout out to everyone who has donated to Roman Storm's legal defense fund, good lawyers are not cheap and these donations were absolutely essential. Roman Storm got to walk away today instead of going to prison, and that at least is a victory. He may still be going to prison for up to five years on the lesser charge, and he could be retried on the more serious charges, but the judge refused the prosecution's motion to remand him to custody while he awaits sentencing. However, the fight continues and appeals are expensive. We are talking a million dollars minimum for his appeal! So we still need to donate more to his legal defense.
Notably, the judge made some comments about how there were several interesting legal questions related to the one charge he was found guilty on. This leaves it wide open for an appeal. This means the judge that tried the case thinks there is at least a chance of winning on appeal which gives me a bit of hope. So overall this was not a great outcome, but not a horrible outcome either.
Pray for Roman Storm.
Here's a recording of a twitter spaces The Rage hosted right after the verdict that dives deep into it.
Here's Coin Center's take on the verdict.
1. The sole conviction—unlicensed money transmission (18 U.S.C. § 1960)—turns mainly on legal/regulatory interpretation (“does this count as money transmission?”), not jury fact-finding. 2. The court, at the
Hester Pierce delivered a speech on the importance of financial privacy, quoting the cypherpunk manifesto like she doesn't work for the federal government.
Unfortunately despite Hester's speech, the Trump administration has thoroughly demonstrated that they actually don't care about privacy and freedom to transact at all and their dedication to crypto doesn't extend much further than making sure Trump can't ever be prosecuted for Trumpcoin. How do we know they don't care about privacy and freedom? Read the new long awaited much hyped Digital Assets report that came out of the White House last week. In it is some very disturbing stuff, which would make using crypto privately illegal and make people flash digital IDs to use DeFi. Read all about it in the Rage's article here.
In better news, the SEC has confirmed that liquid staking tokens are NOT securities! Kraken was fined 30 million dollars over this, I wonder if they can get that back now?
SEC declares crypto liquid staking activities are not considered securities.
This Russian man getting sentenced to 3 years in prison for a 20 dollar donation to an "unapproved" non profit is yet another example of the dangers of allowing governments to have financial surveillance tools. You may think this can't happen in my country, that's what everyone always thinks until it does happen. The freedom to donate to any organization privately is absolutely essential for a free society.
The Moscow court sentenced on Tuesday a father of five to three years of imprisonment on the charges of financing a terrorist organization. Dmitry Marsov was arrested in April this year for donating t...
El Salvador is quickly becoming a dictatorship.
RED ALERT!
The UK is also getting really bad, very quickly. The UK's misleadingly named Child Safety Act is leading various big tech companies to implement age verification measures on their platforms. Spotify, Youtube, Reddit, etc all immediately rolled over like lil' bitches because why do they care, they have never cared about user privacy and aren't going to start now. Even if you don't have to verify your age in your jurisdiction yet, this is laying the foundation for a dystopian nightmare and other countries likely will attempt passing similar measures to "protect the children". If you think a bunch of corrupt politicians give two fucks about protecting children I got a bridge in Alaska to sell you. This is purely about control. If everything we do on the internet is linked to our identity, they can just turn off your access if you do anything they don't like.
Decentralized permissionless alternatives to these services are more essential than ever. If there is no company to go after, they can't be fined and punished for not implementing this ridiculous age verification.
To underscore the gravity of this situation, Wikipedia is currently fighting the UK government to stay accessible without age verifying. I think people under the age of 18 should be allowed to access any information they want. It's actually more important for a minor to have free access to Wikipedia than an adult, because without it the minors will be forced to get all their information from authority figures pushing propaganda during a crucial time in which they are most susceptible to brainwashing.
Free and open access to the internet is what enabled me as a young lad or lady to first realize that the government and my teachers were lying about certain things, such as the dangers of cannabis. This opened the door for me to start questioning the world and educating myself. If this is taken away from the kids of today, the next generation is going to be a bunch of obedient drones who will willingly let the state take all their remaining freedoms away.
Parents are the ones who should be guiding a minors access to the internet, not the state. A 13 year old can go to the library and check out any book they want, but you are going to block them from the internet and by doing so open the door for surveillance of all online activities for all users young and old. We need to push back on this before it spreads far and wide. The UK is the canary in the coal mine, a dystopia awaits us if we don't stop this.
btc sessions did a tutorial for sparrow wallet, which is the best desktop bitcoin wallet and the one you should be using for any significant amount of bitcoin.
The Monero/Qubic drama continues, with the Qubic project claiming they would 51% attack Monero starting on August 2. They failed to do so.
The Qubic founder is the cofounder of Iota, remember them? Yeah noone else does either. I think he is attacking Monero to try to bring attention to his shitcoin that noone cares about other than his twitter bot army. Whatever doesn't break Monero only makes it stronger, so if you care about privacy and freedom please contribute to Monero's decentralization by solo mining or mining through p2p pool. We do need more miners for sure. We can not let Monero fail, it is essential in this age of CBDCs and mass surveillance to have an alternative private digital cash.
Here is a good breakdown on the drama in the latest Monero Monthly podcast from Ungovernable Misfits featuring Seth for Privacy
A monthly show where Max and Seth take a trip down memory lane to see what happened in the last 4 weeks of Monero.What to knowSupposedly launching a 51% attack on August 2ndTheoretically have shown the ability to deploy ~30% of the network hashrate for a 6h period, and only
Another privacy tool under attack right now is kycnot.me which is being DDOSed, what kind of jackass would do that to such a valuable resource that helps so many people? Probably the state or whoever else hates freedom.
TradeOgre has been down for more than a week now. Nobody knows if it is an exit scam or what happened. TradeOgre was a decently reliable place to buy and sell crypto with no KYC for a long time. I saw some people on X claiming that wallets connected to them were depositing ETH into Binance not long before the site went down but I haven't confirmed this. If you were a TradeOgre user and you are looking for a new exchange, I have been using nonkyc.io for awhile now and have had zero problems other than the spread being wide at times. On average you are going to be paying 1 to 2 percent more for XMR on there than the spot price listed on coingecko. I think this is the part where I am supposed to shill you my ref link, but then that would link my nonkyc account to my social identity and that sounds dumb to me. I guess the solution would then be to make an entirely fresh nonkyc account just for shilling on social media and earning referral fees. But I'm too lazy to do that right now. If you do end up getting benefit out of it, send me a nickel or something.
Personally I refuse to deposit more than $500 at a time into any exchange, that number can change obviously based on your risk tolerance. Just don't deposit more than whatever amount of money you can lose and it not be devastating to you. Saving a couple bucks on fees is not worth the risk! Also remember, when depositing into a new exchange, always do a test first! Deposit $20, withdraw that $20.
TradeOgre went down not long after Majestic Bank announced it was shutting down....
This pissed me off, Louisiana has outlawed another plant. Kratom is now illegal in the not so great state of Louisiana and you can get up to 6 months in jail for a fucking plant. Kratom is a plant from Southeast Asia that has been used by many people for pain relief or to treat opiate addiction. It is relatively harmless, although it can be habit forming the withdrawals from it are mild. At low doses it is stimulating and at high doses it is more like an opiate. Because it affects your opiate receptors, Heroin addicts have literally gotten off of heroin by using this harmless plant. Workers in southeast Asia use it to help them tolerate long days of work in the jungle's heat and humidity. The state doesn't want addicts getting off of heroin by using plant medicine though, they would much prefer those addicts to use dangerous pharmaceuticals such as methadone that are even more addictive than heroin. The state also wants you to treat your pain with highly addictive pharmaceutical opiates such as hydrocodone or oxycodone rather than Kratom.
The very concept of making a plant illegal is so evil and disgusting it makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs. Interestingly, I think Kratom is the only plant ever to manage to avoid being scheduled by the DEA years ago due to the amount of public backlash that occurred during the "comment period". Usually when the DEA wants to schedule something (make it illegal), it flies through with almost no opposition from anyone, but not Kratom. It was a rare victory against drug prohibition which is now being undone in the jurisdiction of Louisiana.
Notable cryptoanarchist Frank Braun has a new blog post about the need for base layer privacy in crypto.
Privacy is the absence of information leakage and that implies it comes from value at rest, not value in motion. And privacy at rest can only be ga...
Anything you say to ChatGPT can and will be used against you;
Interesting interview about stablecoins being used as backdoor CBDCs
Whether you know it or not, this new stablecoin regulatory regime is going to transform your life and the entire global monetary order
Another ridiculous anti privacy measure is being floated in the EU. Now they want to force messaging apps to scan every message, photo, and video you send. INSANE.
I see so much crazy bullshit in the EU like this and I gotta wonder, does the average EU citizen care? Do they even realize their freedom is slowly being destroyed and they are about to be living in a total dystopian nightmare? They should be rioting in the streets at this point. How do these politicians trying to do things like this sleep at night? EU citizen messages are nobody's business, especially not the government. And no, it's not about protecting anyone, it is about control.
Privacy Tip
To avoid timing analysis, don't convert transparent cryptocurrencies such as BTC or ETH to XMR on an as needed basis for spending. Instead keep some amount of XMR ready to go for spending and replenish it occasionally. You don't want to be swapping $100 of BTC to XMR and buying a $100 Amazon card twenty minutes later. If you then order some shit straight to your house, that would make it pretty easy to connect the dots and dox your wallets. Instead occasionally buy some XMR on a day you are not going to be buying any giftcards or anything IRL, buy more than you'll need for a couple of weeks or so. Then spend out of that like a checking account.
Although, that amazon gift card example reminded me of another tip....use amazon lockers instead of using your home address to receive packages. It is not very difficult to have an amazon account under an alias that only uses amazon lockers so that your name and home address are never revealed to Amazon.
Thanks for reading! I'll try to get another Round Up out for you next week! Or maybe the following week...we'll see what happens.
If you like this kind of content and want to see more of it, please consider a donation! I'd rather you just do that than buy a "content coin" for this post but you can do that too whatever's clever.
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