Two Years In | Letter #6: Notes From The Inside

Welcome back to another notes from the inside. Just a quick note to say thank you to Silas Thornbrook for reading this. He listened back to the Bitcoin brief last episode where we'd asked for someone to step up and read through letter six.

As is the case with all of these letters, they are difficult to get through. It's painful to hear, but I think it's important we put them up and we keep spreading the message. If while you're listening, you feel generous, you feel like sending some SATs, please do. Even if it's a small amount, everything helps.

These guys have given Freedom software to us. That's the least we can do is send some SATs their way. You can either go to the links that will be in the show notes or you can boost or send some stats through to this episode and all of it will be passed on to them minus the, I think, 1% that is taken by Fountain.

So if you want a quick and easy way, send us some stats. The boost also helps people see this more clearly as it pushes it up the rankings. So consider that as an option. But whatever you do, send them some stats, spread the message, and keep supporting them.

Letter number six, Two Years In by Kione Rodriguez. Dear reader, I write this letter to you before the sun has made her first appearance. The moon still rains on this day, 04/24/2026. At this same exact time, 05:00AM, Only two years prior,

my wife Lauren and I were both awakened dramatically to sirens, flashing lights, and brisk commands shouted over a megaphone. Kione Rodriguez, this is the FBI, come out with your hands up immediately, was repeatedly shouted.

Over 50 armed FBI tactical agents pointed their assault rifles at our chests. Drones, armoured vehicles, assault rifles, men dressed like GI Joe all swarmed the quiet, humble small town where we lived.

Once arrested, handcuffed, placed in the back of a police cruiser, Biden's lockies descended on my home like a swarm of ants hopped up on adrenaline. The drone was flown through the house, first to clear the way. The GI Joes followed.

Finally, the army of blue haired DEI hires and the puny men who looked like they would have been defeated by the thought of a single push up shuffled their way in. I knew the tech team the moment I saw them. They would be going through my hard drives and USB sticks.

I was most worried about my wife, who at this point was still detained in handcuffs. I was relieved when they let her leave and my worry immediately was directed toward my cat, who I knew would quite happily take advantage of the hubbub and the wide open doors to go on one of her unmonitored adventures around the village.

That is how my day started on 04/24/2024. Two years later I started my day markedly differently. I wake up at FPC Morgantown Federal Prison. I am told when I can sleep, when I can wake, when I can eat, when I can shower, what I can wear, and even to some degree, what I can think.

My days are structured around shouted commands over a loudspeaker and a book of regulations I am expected to follow. In prison, your identity is stripped from you. In here, it is us and them, convicts and guards, inmates and COs.

Don't get me wrong. Most of the COs are decent enough. They are here to do a job, and they do it well. Treat them with respect, and they don't mess around with contraband, mostly cell phones and vapes, and they will generally treat you well enough.

But at the end of the day, they go home and you don't. So here I am, inmate number 11404Dash511, a federal prisoner. Two years ago today, an overzealous and politicized FBI under corrupt leadership, under a corrupt presidential administration, acting under a corrupt Department of Justice that empowered a corrupt US attorney,

that delegated authority to corrupt AUSAs, indicted, raided, and arrested me and Bill, two American software developers, just another two casualties in the Biden war on crypto, Two small fishes with no political friends or influence.

Two guys who wrote software and gave away code that worked so well they had no choice but to change the rules of the game and go after us with the full force and might of the United States government.

And by God, their calculations were correct. Barely anyone cared. Bill and I couldn't even raise enough money for our legal defense. We were left high and dry to fend for ourselves against an adversary with unlimited resources.

The government took out the only effective non custodial, open source privacy tool in the entire space, and there was barely a whimper of protest. From some corners of the industry there was even celebration.

This wasn't a war on crypto. In a war both sides have a fighting chance. This was a massacre. There is no doubt that the war on crypto was started and waged fiercely under Joe Biden. But Biden himself has proven to be a ship without a rudder.

He was clearly a man who did not know his ass from his elbow. He was nothing more than a marionette puppet whose strings were being pulled by aids and henchmen receiving orders in secret from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and her self described anti crypto army.

The war on crypto truly belongs to her. The Trump administration inherited this war and won the election partly because the Democrats couldn't steal it in the same way they did in 2020. That was a trick that would only work once, but also because Trump appealed to young men of every race.

A major reason for this appeal was one, his promise to free Ross and two, his promise to end the war on crypto. In many ways, he has made good progress. Ross was freed as promised and the administration began to dismantle the levers of power that were the big guns in the war on crypto.

The SEC was reined in. The tide had begun to turn against the Luddite candlestick makers in favor of the electric lightbulbs. The Deputy Attorney General, now the Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, issued a memo early in the administration intended to rein in rogue prosecutors, explaining in exquisite detail

that America does not regulate by prosecution and does not hold responsible software developers for the acts of their end users. Blanche and the new administration drew a line in the sand.

The war appeared to be ending. What most people miss about this war on crypto is that it is not an ordinary war. It is not us versus them war. It is very much a civil war, an Us versus us war.

As such, when Blanche published his memo, when Trump ordered the end of the war, the infantry on the ground tasked with obeying those orders, the line prosecutors, the AUSAs, the army of unelected bureaucratic lifers ignored them, willfully and explicitly.

They continued just as they have always done: perhaps change a charge from B to C or change the language they use to make sure they get away with blatant insubordination. The administration has been dealing with this treachery from day one in all areas, not just crypto.

Trump identified the problem during his first term. He called it the swamp or the deep state. I call it the administrative state. The administrative state was a problem for him during his first term.

It orchestrated the biggest election heist ever witnessed in 2020. It then came after Trump attempting to put him in prison for life and it continues today, unabated during the second administration, Dismantling of the administrative state, followed by the full scale liquidation of the army of apparatchiks

that lord over us, will be, if he is able to achieve it, Trump's lasting legacy. So where do we stand now? The war on crypto is half won. The SEC has largely been reined in. The DOJ under Bondi and now Blanche has not brought forward new charges under these novel theories conjured up during the last administration.

So to some degree Blanche's memo did work. Elizabeth Warren and her anti crypto army have decidedly lost, just as the Luddites did, just as the horse carriage men protesting the automobile did.

She was always going to lose. It was just about how much damage she could do on the way down. With the war half won, a problem remains: combatants have been left behind. One of the US military's guiding principles is that no man get left behind.

Heaven and earth will be moved at extraordinary expense to retrieve a single American behind enemy lines, as has been witnessed in Iran. Well, in the war on crypto, men have been left on the battlefield, forgotten and left to bleed out. The war will not be won until Bill and myself are extricated from behind enemy lines.

The war will not be won until Roman storm stops being shot at with ammunition provided by the last corrupt administration and carried forward by the wolves in the henhouse of this administration.

When we are all home with the threat of retribution by the most powerful and mighty state bearing down on us no longer credible, then we can celebrate the victory of this war. Until the crypto prisoners are free, none of us are free.

Write to Kione, Kione Rodriguez, 1140411 FPC Morgantown Federal Prison Camp PO Box 10000 Morgantown WV 26507. Pardon Samurai. Free Samurai.