Pardon Samourai ft. Keonne

Welcome to a special edition of Freedom Tech Friday. We're going live this week on a Tuesday due to time constraints. This week will be a little different because we have a special guest on the show.

Today's guest is Keone Rodriguez, cofounder of Samurai Wallet. For those of you new to ungovernable misfits or those that have not been following the case, Keone ran Samurai Wallet for a decade.

The software stack has been a crucial tool to protect users' privacy for as long as anyone in the ungovernable crew have used Bitcoin. Almost two years ago, Kionne and his cofounder Bill were arrested by the FBI while at their home with their families.

They have now been sentenced to five years in prison alongside some large financial penalties. It is clear to us that they have been wrongfully accused, and the crime that they have committed is creating software that actually works and protects the individual.

In recent weeks, much of the conversation around Kearney and Bill has focused on the legal case. But today, we're stepping back to tell the fuller story, why samurai was created, the problems its tools were designed to solve, and what its prosecution means for the future of privacy in Freedom Tech.

As always, on freedom tech Friday, I'm joined by my friends q and a and Seth who are going to help me unpack the samurai story along with our ungovernable listeners who have submitted questions that we will cover if time permits.

We have a hard stop at fifty five minutes, so let's get into it. Keone, it's a pleasure to have you back on Uncoverable Misfits show. We all wish it was under different circumstances, but we wanted to do our part in helping raise awareness on the insanity of the case against you and Bill.

Welcome to the show, Keone. Yep. Thank you very much for having me. It's, weird to be on the show as me, as Keone, and not a samurai wallet. Very good. Yeah. But, definitely feel that I'm among, friends, family even. You know, we go we go way back and, all of us do. And it's, you know, nice to be here for one of the last,

podcast or stream appearances that I'm gonna be doing. Yeah. As I said, we're gonna try and get to some of the, questions at the end of this stream. Before we do that, each, me, Q, and Seth had a had a few questions that we wanted to go through. I think a good place to start is really why samurai was created,

where this came from, and and what led you down this path. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. It's it's kind of really practical. Right? So since 2012 between 2012 and 2015 actually, 2016, Bill and me both worked at a Bitcoin company called Blockchain.

It was called blockchain.info back then, and now it's still around. It's called blockchain.com. And we were working and earning, Bitcoin solely. There was no fiat. We didn't have bank accounts or anything like that. So we had to spend our Bitcoin, to live, to pay rent, to buy groceries,

to pay bills. All the things that you normally do with dollars or or pounds, we had to do with Bitcoin. And by 2015, we noticed a couple things going wrong in the space as we would see it. Right? Like, the emphasis, within Bitcoin was no longer about censorship resistance and and, no trusted third parties. It was more about scaling

and getting Bitcoin ready for the next 10,000,000 users. That was, like, the big slogan at the time, which is all well and good. But for us, censorship resistance and spending, was more important.

And in order to have censorship resistance or just good spending, there has to be a layer of privacy, and no one was talking about that layer anymore. So instead of just forking off, going, making a new coin, going to a new coin, Bill and I talked, and we said, why don't we build a piece of software, a wallet, which is the most important

piece of software that an individual can interact with when dealing with cryptocurrency? Why don't we build something that we wanna use that's gonna be useful for us? So that's why we built samurai wallet. We wanted a piece of software, a wallet that had basic financial privacy protections in place, and that was useful and helpful

for people who actually transacted at a high amount. Right? So it wasn't, like, one time every every few months. Maybe it was just one transferring to self custody for holding. No. This was like we were spending Bitcoin

multiple transactions a day every single day. We needed a wallet that was really truly built for that, and that's what we designed San Brian wallet to to be. And I think we were ultimately, quite successful in creating, that type of wallet.

Hey, Keone. Q and a. The the the Sunrise all set has always been kind of, like, quite literally light years ahead of anything else in a privacy game.

You know, you've got, Whirlpool, Ricochet, Panem, Stonewall, Soroban, to name, you know, just a just a a small view of of everything that you and Bill created over the years. And the pair of you, must be incredibly proud of what you and the team achieved, in, you know, a little over a decade.

Could you talk through the the highlights that you've had, of building Samuai Wallet and maybe, you know, along the way highlight a couple of the the your favorite tools among the the huge software

stack that, you and the team ended up creating because, it it seems as though it's never ended. I'm on for another ten minutes. I'll listen off everything that you and the guys had, had so, yeah, maybe share you just share some of your highlights and your and your favorite tools within the the stack.

Sure. I mean, it's hard to put a specific highlight or a moment. Like, every every day that we got to work on Samurais Wallet was pure joy. Right? Like, Bill and I started building Samurais Wallet as a nights and weekend project, just the two of us. And we never thought that it would turn into something

that we could work on full time and sustain itself. And and the fact that it did, that's the highlight. Right? The fact that for, almost ten years, we got to build this thing every single day, come up with new ideas, come up with new features in our heads, and then make them real. That was,

you know, something really special and makes it really difficult to even think about doing anything else even even today. Right? Like, that was that was our passion, and we were actually able to to do our passion, which is not something that, you know, many people get to say, unfortunately.

As for our favorite kind of tools and moments, again, right from the beginning, 2015, when so when you're dealing with a public and transparent blockchain like Bitcoin, as opposed to something like Monero, which is a whole different ballgame.

Bitcoin's blockchain is transparent and public, and unless you're building in, privacy at the protocol layer, you're really limited as to what you can do in the application layer. And we pushed that application layer to the absolute extreme.

So one of the things that you can do is just create confusion in transactions, make a transaction really difficult to understand, and have so many different, permutations and combinations of what could be going on to a public server.

So one of the first things we designed when building samurai wallet all the way back in 2015 was a I a concept of Stonewall. It wasn't called Stonewall at the time, but it was that very concept of adding, unnecessary inputs and outputs to a transaction to increase the combinations and the probabilities

that input is connected to output, make it appear like a coin join. So right from the get go, that's what we were doing, and I was proud to, you know, come up with that idea. No one else had done that in a Bitcoin wallet, and we just started building on that, and that's where everything, you know, came from. So, obviously, the most

proud, I guess, I could say is of finally building and releasing Whirlpool, which are was is our Chaumian coin join. That was a significant achievement achievement, not only because it's kind of a difficult thing to to build and and get done right, but we did it on mobile.

And, you know, that was something that everyone said, oh, you can't do coins one on mobile. It's too interactive. There's too many different bits. It's too confusing. We managed to build a pretty I mean, it got better over time. We iterated over it, but even our first release was pretty simple and was pretty easy to do.

So, building out CoinJoin on mobile, major highlight, and the fact that the CoinJoin was really phenomenal. I mean, this wasn't just because of me and Bill. This we had heavy hitters on the team. We had guys like Laurent who are just all about the mathematics.

You know, we had guys like Ergo who's just going into transactions and figuring out ways of breaking heuristics. We I mean, we just had such a good team behind it that the type of CoinJoin that we built, Whirlpool, was and is still the best, CoinJoin on the market.

Yeah. It's been it's been really interesting following, like, over the years. You you mentioned on 2015, there was this this issue with privacy that no one else is really solving for. Seemed like everyone was either scared or didn't acknowledge the problem.

I think a lot of the the problem over the years has been people just don't come to terms with how dangerous Bitcoin's lack of privacy is. And y'all really kind of set the scene and,

explored a frontier no one else had at that point. And I, like, I wish I could say that over the last decade, dozens of others have stepped in to do the same thing, but it's it's kind of crazy that it just hasn't really happened like that. Like, y'all y'all stayed kind of on your own out in front for so long. I I think

since the indictment, I think it's woken up to a lot of Bitcoiners to this need for privacy and, like, hey, there are downsides to doing privacy at the application layer and relying on anything centralized. Like, maybe we need to start thinking about how we do privacy.

And it's been cool to have new things like silent payments, new things like pay join v two that that help. They don't solve everything and they don't replace Whirlpool especially. But for those of us who are trying to stand on your shoulders and we're trying to build out freedom and privacy tech on Bitcoin,

like, what advice do you have? It's it's hard.

I know a bit about what it is, like building things that no one else is building in the privacy space, not to the same extent y'all do. But I'd I'd just love to hear from you. Like, what advice do you have for those of us who are trying to carry on that mission and build privacy tech around Bitcoin?

Yeah. I mean, just don't stop. Keep going. Right? The whole the whole point of this prosecution and the prosecution of Roman storm and Ethereum was to introduce a chilling effect into The United States. Right? The previous administration was openly hostile towards crypto. They didn't make any, you know,

try to hide that fact. They were very open and blatant with it. So and the prosecutions of of Tornado Cash and Samurai

were the tip of the spear saying, hey. You're not welcome to build these types of tools here. So I commend anyone who is saying, actually, yes. We are. We can build these types of tools. We're going to build these types of tools. So just keep the course.

They're not always popular, and it's not it's not truly, it's not a big market. People who actually care about privacy versus people who care about number go up. Right? It's a very small market,

but they don't that's just because they don't realize how important it is. They don't they take for granted the basic everyday privacy protections that they enjoy, and and don't realize that, on Bitcoin or either they realize it and don't care or they don't realize it, that on Bitcoin, we have a serious privacy problem.

And, you know, Bitcoin wasn't some, grand design conceived by God and handed down to us in a perfect form. That's just that's ridiculous. Right? We have a lot of work to do to make Bitcoin what it was supposed to be, which is a peer to peer

digital cash system. Right? That's what Satoshi designed it as. And and to make it analog to cash requires a lot of work. It requires the work of people like you and others and samurai wallet, obviously, to to bring the same, concepts and protections that you have with physical cash to the electronic realm.

So, I mean, if you're building tech in in The United States that focuses on privacy, I would say get extremely good lawyers and and have a nice fat retainer, with a criminal defense lawyer, because it doesn't matter

how, verbose you are on Twitter or not. It doesn't matter if you insult the government or not. Like, I insulted the government, and I was verbose on Twitter. Roman Storm didn't do any of that. We both got indicted.

We both they both came after us. So it all that matters is if you become successful and people are using your tool to a large degree, they will come after you. They will come down on you. So being prepared for that, I think, is the best defense, but that doesn't mean that you should not do it. I think it's more important to do it.

Yeah. I definitely I definitely understand that. And that's the the hard part is that chilling effect is very real. Like, I felt that being completely honest. I think lots of other people building in the space is it it gives you a a check when you think about, should I ship this thing? Should I build this thing?

What kind of hot water could this get me in? And it's a it's a hard one to to balance and to continue building Freedom Tech, around that. But, yeah, thank you for for that advice. I think my other question this one's maybe a little bit it's a hard one to answer, but looking back on this,

almost decade that you had building samurai wallet, hopefully, more to come. If you could go back to the beginning of samurai wallet, is there anything you do differently

throughout that course of those those nine years that Samurai Wallet was growing, building FreedomTech, doing awesome things on the cutting edge? Is there anything you do differently? No. No. I don't think so. I would I I would wish for more hours in the day. I think if we had more than twenty four hours, we could have moved faster.

Right? Like, we were four months away from a decentralized Whirlpool, three or four months. We were so close. You know, so if we had more than twenty four hours in the day, we might have been right on time with that. But, no, not really. I I don't regret, any of it. You know, I don't even even the the tweets that the government,

used in the indictment, don't regret those either. I thought they were funny then. I thought I think they're funny now. You know? So no no regrets. I I'm very proud of what we built with Samurais,

the code that we we put out there in open source and the fact that it still exists to this day. And there's there's brave souls out there who forked us and are running, Ashigaru is the fork of samurai wallet, and they're running Whirlpool.

So I'm very proud of our legacy that we've left behind. Yeah. I mean, it's it's awesome, like, side of of the, the open source and the free and tech space. You know, you see you see products like Ashigaro popping up and standing on the shoulders of of, of, you know, you and Bill, the giant, the proverbial giant, so to speak.

I just wanna go back a quick second because you mentioned, decentralized Whirlpool. You said you were months away from that. For for the listeners, Ben, if I kind of, go a bit deeper there. Like, what what what was that? What would it would it have meant for the for the software stack, and what would it have enabled for for the users?

Yeah. Sure. So, just quickly, Whirlpool or Chaumian CoinJoin relied on a centralized message passing coordinator or server. Right? So the mess the message passing server couldn't read the messages it was passing, but its job was to send out these messages to the different participants in a Whirlpool transaction

to coordinate things and make sure everyone's on the same page. And from the beginning, we knew that this was a weak point of the system. If Samura wallet went down, so did the, centralized coordinator. No one would lose money, of course,

but it would be the end of the service. So we pretty much immediately after we deployed Whirlpool, work we began work on what we call decentralizing, Whirlpool. And what that would have meant is instead of one coordinator server run by us, there would have been hundreds or even thousands of coordinator servers on every person's

who has a what we call the Dojo, which was our our Bitcoin node, software package. There was a lot of people who were running Dojo. And, with one software update, they would not only be running Dojo and their indexer and and all the other stuff that comes with it, but they would also be an active,

message passing server. So instead of taking down one, entity, samurai, the they would have to take down thousands of different message passers, who are mostly running over Tor, mostly, pretty private. So it was a a pretty important, upgrade, and it took a lot of work to get there. So if it was hard to

if it was hard to build a Chaumium CoinJoin system, which it was, it was 10 times as difficult to build a decentralized version of it. And it took a lot of engineering time, a lot of investment, several years of development, to get to to where we were, which was three or four months away from deploying that update.

Yeah. I remember, we were talking about it quite heavily and, like, on all the shows constantly, me and Q, just before the arrest, it felt like it was imminent. I wonder you said, obviously,

you don't think that tweets make any difference. If they're coming after you, they're coming after you, which, by the way, I really miss. I miss your presence on Twitter and just the odd little bit of a kick and a slap because the whole space is so fucking soft and embarrassing now. It's, it is truly missed, but,

I wonder if it's not the tweets. Do you think it's they knew this was coming and this gets very close to nothing's perfect, but a pretty fucking incredibly difficult system to stop. Do you think that maybe was why the arrest happened when it did?

I think it played into it. I mean, I think they were going to arrest us either way. And I think when they figured out how close we were to decentralized Whirlpool,

what maybe they would have waited until June. Maybe they they were still doing investigations and gathering evidence and doing stuff like that. But when when they realized that we were so close to deploying decentralized Whirlpool and how much more difficult that would be to shut down, the tool, I think they probably did, you know,

bring forward the the raid date. And I I can't go into too many details, but there are certain clues that, they may have rushed this operation. Right? Like, April may not have been the original date.

So, yeah, I think that I I do think that played into it for sure. But they were gonna come either way. Right? They again, tweets, all that doesn't matter. What matters is,

are people using it? Are a lot of people using it? And is it getting easier to use? That's really what they care about. Right? Because if it's getting easier to use and you have this momentum,

you you become a prime target. Why didn't they go after joint market? Well, no one uses joint market. Right? Why didn't they go after Wasabi? A lot of crime goes through Wasabi. Well, they weren't as easy to get because they're in Eastern Europe.

So we were the right people for the for the job. Right? I was based in The US, so I'm easy enough to go after, and it sends the right message. Right? They didn't have to go after Wasabi. Wasabi saw what happened here and shut down in The US, and then later shut down totally.

You know? So

if you get any amount of success and any amount of, user base and you seem to be pushing the envelope further and further, decentralizing, liquidity keeps improving, they're gonna and you're in their their sites, they're gonna they're gonna take action, and and they did.

Yeah. Yeah. I, kinda cosign all that really. It kinda makes sense that you'd go for the one that that, you know, clearly worked and is, causing the most, difficulties for James and Bayless firms, etcetera.

I I I know we said we weren't gonna touch much on the legal side because that's been really well documented from the the 3,000 streams that you've done over the past two weeks or so. But just for as at a high level, I mean, there's a countless list of,

I don't know how else to put it other than insanities in this case and the way that you, Bill, have been, quite frankly, just made an example of.

In terms of all of the ins and everything that's been thrown at you and Bill, what what do you think is the the kind of headline most egregious thing that would make the the the normally that kind of just is walking past this case wake up and think, hang on a minute. Like, that doesn't seem right to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I I think there's two main things. I mean, I think the initial premise that the government's whole case relies on is that we, as a noncustodial software provider, was a financial service provider, was a financial institution.

So the entire indictment relies on whether it's the money laundering charge or the money transmission charge. Its central, component is that we were a financial institution. Right? If we were in a financial institution,

then the charges can't hold their own. Right? They've they kind of fall apart. So the fact that for the first time ever, they've classified noncustodial software as a financial institution, I think, is jarring and should be jarring to to a lot of people.

The second, I think, major, headline, is the fact that we find we found out after a year of pretrial and discovery and going through stuff that the government, six months before, unsealing the indictment against us, had actually gone to the regulator in charge of this stuff called FinCEN, Financial Crime Enforcement Network.

They had gone to FinCEN and asked them pretty explicitly, what do you think about samurai samurai wallet? Do you think they're operating as a money service business,

unlicensed money transmission business? And FinCEN responded, and this is black and white in print. They responded, no. They don't take any custody of user funds. That's the dividing line. Right? That's what makes you a transmitter or not because it makes sense. Right? Like, how can you transmit something you don't have?

How can money you know, I never had anyone's Bitcoin, so how can I transmit it? So FinCEN said no. The government went went, ahead and indicted us anyway. One of the charges being unlicensed money transmission, even though the regulator just said they wouldn't have needed to have a license.

So I I think that was a major bombshell. And then the fact that they hid that from us for over a year was also a pretty big bombshell. And I think most normal people who don't know anything about crypto or anything can understand that. That is pretty egregious.

So I think that was the major bombshell of this case. And it makes sense because, again, they the money laundering charge falls apart

if you get rid of the fact that we didn't need to be licensed. We didn't have the same obligations that a bank has. Right? We didn't need to do KYC. We didn't need to do AML because we're not a financial institution. So we don't have the same, you know, priority of stopping illicit finance in the same way that signal has no obligation

to monitor the messages that people make on their platform if they might be related to terrorism, for example. Right? We didn't have those obligations. The only way we have those obligations is if we're a financial institution.

So the government couldn't get rid of that charge because then everything falls apart. So they figured out a way and they, you know, they finagle. They take out of context. They do whatever, you know, their Fed brains allow them to do to make these charges happen and make them stick.

Yeah. You mentioned, you mentioned Reuben Storm's case a little bit earlier. I'm really curious to kinda hear your thoughts on that because these your case and his have been really intertwined throughout. Like, your indictment came out the same week that there was a very insane statement,

from the prosecutors in Roman Storm's case. There's been very seemingly connected timelines throughout. Like, what are your thoughts on on the case that he's dealing with right now on if this is part of a larger, like, holistic, we don't want privacy in crypto in general thing,

or just coincidence? Kinda how are you viewing that in in parallel with with what you're dealing with right now? Yeah. I I think it's it's certainly a holdover by the narrow DOJ, again, who were very anti crypto from the administration down.

And so it was a holistic, thing. Let's let's take out the two main Bitcoin privacy, Ethereum privacy, softwares. They started with Roman.

And the way I looked at it when they indicted Roman, obviously, completely ridiculous, completely unjust. And if you have an understanding of how Tornado Cash works, it's very obvious and very clear Roman never took custody or control. He couldn't transmit on behalf of users.

But in also, at the same time, and my brain is the way it worked on Tornado Cash was is fundamentally different than the way Samura1 Wallet worked. Right? On Tornado Cash, the user is giving up custody and control. They send their Ethereum out of their control.

They just don't send it to Roman. They send it to a smart contract. Right? So the legal questions about the smart contract are questions. Right? And prosecutors need to figure that out, and judges need to get their head around it. And I don't agree with it at all in the slightest. I think Roman is being

persecuted and is this is completely unjust, but there is that question. Right? The user gets loses custody and control, and this weird autonomous smart contract entity takes it and then sends it back to them, just like a custodial mixer would have, except there isn't Roman in the middle of it. He just wrote the software.

So, you know, when when all of this happens, okay. Yeah. This is gonna take some explaining to to get the concept across even though Roman is definitely innocent. In our case, there is no question. The user never loses custody or control.

It's black black and white blatant. Right? And when they're in Whirlpool, they're sending from one address they control in their wallet to another address they control in their wallet with no intermediary state in between.

So I thought it was more clear. More clearly in bounds of the FinCEN guidance and the law. It turns out it just doesn't it didn't matter. Right? And and that's what people really don't understand, that the the the prosecutors,

if they have you in their sights, they're going to take you down. It doesn't matter the intricacies of how it works. It doesn't matter if you're in bounds of the law at the time. They'll figure out a way to do it either way. If they want you, they'll get you. The the the power of a federal prosecutor is so immense.

It it it is so immense. And they have a, you know, preferential, reputation in the in the courts. Judges listen to what prosecutors say. They believe them. They start from a point of we believe everything you're saying, because why would you lie? You're a prosecutor.

And anyone who's been through this system knows that the prosecution lies, takes out of context, hides evidence, all sorts of dirty tricks. And it's it's, you know, it's very unfortunate.

Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm well versed in in all of the intricacies of of the case. We've been following it intently at, everybody at the the ungovernable team have, but hearing it kind of verbalized like that doesn't make it any less sound any less insane. Like, it's the level of injustice is just completely the charts.

We, we have quite a few, listener submitted questions ahead of the show from, fellow samurai users that I wanted to to bring up, and, hopefully get your your thoughts on q and a. First one's not even a question, but just from Schrodinger that says, endless thanks to samurai and what they've built.

Best privacy tech stack for Bitcoin, wallet will poxy, amazing job. It feels like everything changed in the space after their arrest and not for the better. Yeah. Completely cosign that one. Absolutely.

The next one comes from Vibrant. They said, is Keone comfortable talking about his fines after he's released? It seems it will accrue interest after a month.

Seems very harsh given that he's already given his profits running samurai and will spend time in jail. So maybe as you answer that, just kind of set the scene as to what what the the financial penalties that you and Bill are facing are as well.

Sure. Yeah. So as part of the deal right. So if we didn't take the deal, the plea deal, the government made it clear that they were going to obtain a fine, for me and Bill of, $287,000,000.

That was what they said was the total amount of illicit proceeds that went through Samoy wallet. And as because we were a financial institution, quote, unquote, we would be responsible for paying that. They knew full well we never had $287,000,000, nowhere close to it. So that was an essentially

twenty five years, in prison. And then when you get out of prison, you owe us 287,000,000. And if you don't pay that, you're essentially imprisoned. Right? You're on, like, house arrest until you pay that off. So part of the deal was you do your five years in prison and you pay us 6,000,000,

which is what they say we earned in that ten year period that we ran samurai. I I haven't verified these numbers. I don't know if they're true or not, but that's what they said. And that will be the deal. So that's what we agreed to. We paid them the 6,300,000.0 and, accepted the plea.

And at sentencing, after we had we had made the payment, payment had gone to them. At sentencing, they sentenced us to five years and then added an additional fine of $250,000, that I need to pay once I am released from prison.

And, I didn't know this at the time, but I later found out that, yes, this accrues interest monthly while you're in prison. So I don't know what the total fine is gonna be once I get out, but I will be responsible for paying that off.

Yeah. Again, just just completely insane. Sorry. Go on, Max. I was just gonna say, talking about criminality, the way that you've been treated and and these type of things are criminal. It is disgusting. Like,

putting a gun against your head and saying twenty five years and the rest of your life when you come out is just fucked because you've got this noose around your neck that, like, it's unreasonable to think you could ever take off.

Or Yeah. There's there's no way I can pay that $287,000,000. Right? It's gonna be tough paying $250,000. Like Yeah. People don't understand the expense of fighting a case like this. We didn't even get to trial.

Right? We're, like, a month and six months in when we take the deal, and I've already spent 2 and a half million in legal bills, and I borrowed 1,300,000.0 from friends. So, like, I'm in serious financial trouble here. So paying 250,000 alone is, you know, hard, but 280,000,000 is it's out of the realm of possibility.

Yeah. It's like giving you a choice that's not really a choice, so you have to take the play. Yeah. It's it. Yeah. It's absolutely horrific.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll hop in with the next listener question. It comes from, Reeve and Stokes. Said, will you and Bill be be able to have a reduction in sentence with good behavior or anything like that? He said he's not sure if that's a a thing in the land of the free.

Samurai was my first wallet, and I wish we could steal you. Sure. So, yes, there is, good time behavior. So if you don't get any, infractions while in prison, you earn some amount of good time.

It's very easy to earn infractions in prison. You know, you walk to the wrong place, ask the guard the wrong thing. They can write you up. Anyone can write you up for anything. So it's pretty easy to lose your good time, but, hopefully, that's not the case and we earn. And, you know, so for a five year sentence, which is I've been given,

with if everything goes well and you do all the classes and do all the things that they want you to do, maybe you're looking at three and a half to four years.

Bill who got four years, maybe two and a half to three. So, that is possible. And then, you know, you can still use Samurais. You know, all you need to do is run your own Dojo and then connect your Samurais wallet to it.

Anyone who is running their own node and using samurai wallet woke up on April 24, and nothing was different other than Whirlpool wouldn't connect. But everything else was the same. And you can still use samurai wallet. You can still use ashigaru you can use ashigaru wallet.

Haveo is still putting updates out for Dojo. It still exists. So if you wanna use samurai wallet, you can. Yep. Again, beautiful nature of open source, that the legacy lives on. Absolutely.

Another question comes from Professor Diggy. He says, do you see a picture for crypto mixes and anonymous transactions? He's obviously an educator of some sort. He said he talked to a native Capuchin samurai to students this semester.

But do you think that someday they might be outlawed? Thank you for your privacy in the fight against surveillance. Yeah. Good question. I mean, do I see a future for privacy? Absolutely. Anonymous transactions? Absolutely.

The demand is is enormous for these types of things. Do I see it on Bitcoin? That's a good question. I don't know. Right? The Monero for sure. I don't know anything really about CCash, but I think they talk about private transactions.

So, yeah, I think there's gonna be a a desire for anonymous transactions or private transactions. Absolutely. Will that be outlawed? I doubt it will be outlawed outlawed on the individual level. Right? I doubt there'll be a law written that says you as an individual can't use a privacy tool.

I think they'll do what they've done to Roman and me and Bill in this in this case and go after the builders. So they get to, again, regulate by, prosecution. They get to have their cake and eat it too.

Go after these builders, the privacy solutions go away, and they are effectively outlawed because you can't there's nothing that you can use.

So I think that's how they'll do it versus actually writing a law specifically saying, oh, you can't use this type of this type of tool. I think that'll be challenged too too much by too many people.

Yeah. I think we we did see the one tool that they have to try and stop people from using even decentralized tools, which is sanctions. Like, they sanctioned tornado cash as a protocol, which was mind boggling.

Thankfully, that got overthrown on appeals. Like, that was that was tossed out pretty quickly because it is so egregious. But that is one of the tools that they have to say, at least, like, within The US, US citizens, you're not allowed to use this decentralized protocol,

which is insane. And thankfully, a good precedent was set there and and how it was overturned. But they they would love to stop that. But like you said, usually, the easiest way is just stop people from wanting to build this technology,

stop them from having any any way to build companies around it, and just kinda let it let it die out or or fall to the niche. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We've, we've got a question from the live stream from Otosh, and I know you've already given an answer to this on Twitter, but I think it would,

make sense to to answer to it live on the the stream as well. Says, when gonna get the pardon, does Bill automatically get it? I ask this because Bill seems to be forgotten sometimes. Bill's definitely not forgotten.

I'm not allowed to speak to Bill based on court orders, but I've spoken with his wife, where where she's spoken with my wife. We're in communication. Bill's wife, I mean, not me and Bill for any prosecutors listening.

So Bill is not forgotten at all. I'm doing every piece of press that I do. It's for me and for Bill. Bill and I have been friends and partners for well over a decade since, 2012, and,

we do everything together. We we got indicted together. We fought the case together. We took the deal together. And when we get pardoned, it will be together.

Yeah. Thanks for that. The Bitcoin bugles also just popped into the chat and said,

what is the status of all of the user information that the feds may or may not have access to? I have no idea whether you have any knowledge of this, but, if you'd like to comment, yeah, now's your chance. Yeah. I don't really have too much information on it.

They took the server. So if the server wasn't encrypted at rest, then they have access to the Whirlpool server. Whirlpool server doesn't have XPubs or user information, so there's not a lot they can take from that. The if you didn't run your own node, if you didn't run your own Dojo, and they took our,

wallet server, which included XPUBs, they may have an XPUB, but we don't know exactly what they have or don't have. All I will say is that the vast majority of users who were using Whirlpool, I think it was over 60%, maybe closer to 70. I don't really remember what the number is now. We're not using our infrastructure.

So the majority of Whirlpool users were either coming from Sparrow, which had implemented Whirlpool, or they were running their own Dojo node. So the, fallout for the majority of Whirlpool users, there is none.

If you weren't using Dojo, you were relying on our node, then it's quite possible that the feds have your XPUB or a XPUB. Now you have to understand that the XPUB is still pseudonymous. Right? We didn't take KYC and AML. It's not like we have an XPUB, and next to it, a name or an ID or who it is,

but it's certainly something that's undesirable, and you should, you know, if you didn't run your own node, you should make a new wallet, maybe use a privacy enhancing tool, and, start fresh.

Yeah. Good advice. That, that, Whirlpool users/dojo chart up into the right was my favorite one to share with, with the usual haters back in the day. I did enjoy that one. Next question we've got, is from, I never know how to say this, but Wyatt Yusup.

What do you think needs to happen broadly to avoid such a weaponized legal system in the future? And then sorry. It's a double question. Are you and, Bill aware why or who decided to pursue, you both?

So the first part of the question, I don't I really don't think there's much you can do. This is just the way the system is set up. It's not nothing to do with Bitcoin, nothing to do with crypto.

The, the justice system is anything but just, and this has been this way for a long time. I've I've spoken with so many people since this has happened to me who have been pursued by the, DOJ,

by the justice system, and the stories are so strikingly similar. Right? And, specifically, when you're talking about white collar crime or victimless crimes, they're so strikingly similar, the same tactics, the same things

that their prosecutors have done that are that my prosecutors have done. So I think it's a it's a problem with the with the system. I don't think there's any way to fix it. It still is probably one of the better systems in the world, even though it is so messed up.

So I don't think there's really a way, like, Congress can pass a law. Congress could like the BRCA. They can say explicitly in law that noncustodial wallet developers are not money transmitters. That probably would help and would have helped in this in our particular case.

But broadly, a weaponized legal system is just par for the course. I don't really think there's any getting getting around it. If you if you just so happen to find yourself in the cross scopes of it, you're kind of done. Right? There's that book, Three Felonies a Day. It says that most Americans

unknowingly commit up to three felonies a day. There's so many laws on the books. There's so many regulations on the books, and they have no idea. So that when a prosecutor targets you and finds you, all they gotta do is watch you for a little while, and they got you on something, and they can go after you.

So are you am I aware when or why? No. I mean, all I know is that the investigation started and, was indicted and was, and we were arrested under, a Biden department of justice, a Biden administration department justice. That's when it started. We operated under Obama. We operated under Trump one, and we operated under Biden.

And it was during the Biden administration that they came down on us and took us out. And, again, I said it a couple times already, but the Biden administration was openly anti crypto. They were openly anti, any crypto. And so crypto privacy

is way beyond the pale to these people, and so they're the ones that came after us and decided to pursue us.

Okay. Thanks. We've got a a question from Colonial. It says, how can we carry the torch while mitigating the risk? And what advancements in Bitcoin or other cyberpunk tools need to be made next?

But above all, please just queue. Thank you, Colonial. Appreciate that.

How can we tear you the torch while mitigating the risk? I I wish there was a better answer for you, but it just comes down to what I've already said. If they want you, they're gonna get you, and it doesn't matter how you operate yourself, what protections you take.

It's very, very difficult to, be anonymous on the Internet. Like, the Ashikaru guys, they don't have a, you know, a social media. They don't have Telegram. They they you everything's behind a tour hidden service.

All of that's really good things to do and smarter than to do, but it comes at the expense of limiting yourself in the market. A majority of people aren't gonna find you. They're not gonna know about you. And if in a way, it's kind of what the feds want. They want this stuff to go underground and not meet reach the mainstream.

So advancements in Bitcoin again, Seth will probably agree with me on this. If you want privacy, it has to be at the protocol level, and that's just not gonna happen on Bitcoin. It's just not. So all that Bitcoin could do is what we were doing, and that's a dangerous game because they could take you out, pretty easily.

You know? So not to say that it's not worth it. Again, keep doing it. Work on it. Do the stuff. But, the real bulletproof privacy comes at the protocol layer, confidential transactions example.

So and that's just not gonna happen on Bitcoin. It's way too far gone for that to happen on Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

This one, I'm not sure you're gonna be able to answer this one, but I'm gonna ask it anyway because it's coming to the live stream. And if you can't answer it, just please just say so. But, BTS wrestle asks, have you had received any con anyone important

after Donald Trump acknowledged your case yesterday in video? And for for anybody who isn't aware, there was a reporter, I believe at the White House that basically said, is he aware of, or is he gonna, you know, give Keone a bill, or consider giving them a a pardon, to which Donald Trump replied something to the tune of,

him and Pam Bond, they're gonna take a look at it, but he was aware of the case. Yeah. It was great that that happened. The hardest part is getting the attention of the president where nobody's with not a lot of money and not a lot of influence or power.

So it's always gonna be tough to get the attention of the president of The United States. Now we have the attention. It's been brought to him. I think that if he reviews it, he'll see the injustice that has occurred, and I think we have a pretty good shot of a pardon.

It's just about when and, if anyone important. I'm not sure. I don't think so. I've had a lot of people on on the back end helping out with this once we were sentenced, people with contacts in the administration, people who are, professionals in their field, marketers and and podcasters

and a whole host of people who have donated a lot of time, to to this movement. So no one in particular reached out yesterday, but we do have a lot of people behind the scenes working hard for me and Bill.

Yeah. We've got a bit of one maybe more following up to to the last question before this. You you mentioned Monero as one of those options that is protocol level privacy. Like, do you see this pressure against y'all, this pressure against Tornado Cash, like, pressure against more of the commonly used, like, big name cryptocurrencies.

Do you think those are are kind of more reason to start shifting on the user side towards using something like Monero, where you're not you're not reliant on any company or central entity or anything like that to be able to use it and gain privacy.

Obviously, you're gonna have some lower liquidity. You may have less places to spend it even though for Monero, oftentimes, if you can spend Bitcoin, you can spend Monero, these days. Like, how do you see Monero playing a role in this this future where clearly there's demand for privacy?

Bitcoin at the protocol layer is not solving for that and seems to not have any route towards that right now. Yeah. Where do you see Monero fitting into that? Yeah. And we we identified how useful Monero, was to a broad holistic privacy strategy, whether you're Bitcoin or a Bitcoiner or not.

And that's why we started building, the atomic swaps, from Bitcoin into Monero, into samurai wallet. We were we were hard at work on that. You know, we're not, a maximalist, in any sense of the word. If the tool works for, you know, the the goal, which is, privacy,

then use the tool. And we were, you know, focused on that. That's why we were like I said, we were building swaps. So, yeah, I think users should use Monero if they are looking for a truly private, solution, and I think that there's needs to be ways to move in and out of Monero into Bitcoin and vice versa, which is,

as I understand it, becoming, more common and better, through the atomic swap, solutions. So, yeah, it's it's very important, but I will also say that if Monero works, and I think it does, but if it actually works as designed or described,

they're gonna come down on it too, and they're gonna come down on exchanges, and they're not gonna allow you to deposit exchanges into Monero into exchanges. And they're gonna target builders on Monero too. They may even go after core developers if they can find them. So, you know, it's not like some magic bullet.

People are people and, you know, people are a, a risk. Right? So the more use, more liquidity, the more, use of the network, the bigger the target. And I think the government would rather not make Monero, or talk about Monero or or tar target Monero

until it becomes too much for them to ignore. Right? Because they don't wanna make a big song and dance and say, get people going, oh, what is this thing? I better look into this. Never heard of this. So I think it's a fine line that they're gonna play. But once it becomes too big to ignore, they absolutely will,

go after whatever weak point they can find.

Yeah. No. I definitely agree on that. I mean, we've seen in the Monero space, it it was kind of, I think, the test bed for operation choke point two point o. There's been the the the kind of behind the scenes shadowy battle against banking connections and centralized exchanges and all of that for for years now in Monero.

I think, like you said, because it works, there's no single person that you really can take down for it. But like you said, you as a government, you just wanna make sure people don't know about it, don't have easy ways to get it if they do know about it, and just limit who really has access to it,

which which I definitely definitely understand. And, like, I I think something that I always respected about y'all was that you just weren't hardcore maximalist. Like, you you understood what worked, what didn't, and you were willing to put in those atomic swaps with Monero. And,

that's definitely something that always had had jumped out at at me about y'all. I'm just so thankful for your hard work. I I know we've had a lot of questions here, and I think you you maybe has a couple more to wrap things up, but I just wanted to throw out. Y'all did incredible work over the years. I'm hopeful for the pardon.

Hopefully, y'all can get back to doing incredible work in the field, if possible down the line. Y'all definitely missed, but hopefully hopefully, others will step in to to continue, dragging the the privacy flag forward.

Thank you. Thank thank you very much, sir. Yeah. Cognizant of time. I know you've gotta hop off, for another stream very soon. So I wanna kinda start to wrap up with some some practical steps.

I believe they'll surrender on Friday and then bill shortly after maybe in January. So so what what can we, and everybody listening, do to support, financially registering interest? Like, maybe spell out for us as as to what we can do to continue,

you know, raising awareness to this, because ultimately, you know, that presidential pardon seems to be the the kind of the the the final hope for for you and Bill. So what can we do to to help out? Yeah. So definitely, visit billandkionne.org, billandkeonne,.org.

There's, two links there. One is to sign the petition. So please do that. That's free to do. Change.org will ask you to donate. Don't donate there. That doesn't go to Bill or me. It goes to change.org.

So just sign the petition, share that petition with your friends and your family, tell them it's important to sign, and it really is, you know, incredibly helpful. I had Ross Olberk talk to me on a space couple, like, a week ago.

One on one was the first time he he used the Twitter space, and he reiterated himself to the audience how important the petition is in in getting you the pardon. So please sign it. The other option is, that's on that website is to donate to my family and Bill's family,

using give, send, go. We can't accept crypto at the moment, so it's only accepting through, fiat. If you decide you wanna donate, please do. Half will go to my wife, Lauren. The other half will go to, Bill's wife, Sabrina.

And it's just to to help, transition them from losing their husbands to the federal prison system and, make things a little bit easier on them. So really appreciate it if anyone wants to do that.

And just one quick follow-up. You mentioned that you you're unable to accept Bitcoin and crypto. Will that change when when you guys have both surrendered? Yes. Yeah. Once we both surrender, I believe crypto options will be made available.

We're just unable to accept or receive or send crypto due to our bail conditions, and I don't wanna give them any reason to add new charges to either Bill or me. So we're gonna wait until we surrender.

We're out, off of bail and in custody, then people can, donate crypto, whether it's Bitcoin or or anything else. I think we'll just allow anyone to send whatever they want. But that will be shortly after Bill surrenders himself. I believe he surrenders on January 3.

Okay. Good to know. I know there's a lot of people that will, be throwing some, or plenty of sats towards, towards the course. Yeah. I'm gonna hand over to Max in a minute, because we're gonna close the call, let you get, off to your next stream. But, again, I just wanna extend a huge thank you to to you, Bill, and the team.

As you already know, like, the San Francisco system was a huge part of my my Bitcoin journey and and still is. So thank you for everything that you do. We are not gonna stop beating the drum, for you and Bill. It worked for us, and it's gonna work for you guys as well. I'm I'm confident of that. So thank you.

And, Max, I'll I'll let you sign us off. Yeah. Echo that. It's, it's really the samurai community that that made me as excited as I was about Bitcoin and freedom technology.

It was the thing that stood out to me and the way that the community operated and the things that they cared about. So I wanna thank you for making a big change to all of our lives here and, doing what you did, and we're gonna keep doing what we can.

We don't have the biggest listener base in the world, but they're a proper group, and we'll do what we can for you and just sending love from my family to yours. And, yeah, thank you for everything.

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you guys very much. I was very happy to be on this on this stream. Like I said, it's it's like being with, family. You know? We go we all go back, and it's a friendly place.

Way back. Alright. Thanks, guys.