Keonne Rodriguez got five years for building a Bitcoin privacy wallet. Today he wrote that the treatment program at his prison has been shut down, so he and about 70 other men are being moved again. His last transfer took 30 days — a month of buses and holding cells, for a nonviolent offense.
The charge was operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. There is no victim element in it. That is exactly why it fits so well: any tool that lets people move value without asking permission is a candidate, whether the code is neutral or not. Same playbook as Tornado Cash, where the software was simply a fact, and so the developer became the crime.
If writing the tool is the offense, then everyone who runs a node, coins a transaction or signs a keysend is one interpretation away from the same cell. The way out is not a better legal argument. It is making the thing so ordinary, so widespread and so boring that prosecuting it stops being possible.
Roger
npub1dq…e95y4
2026-09-25 17:01:09 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1dqjq6jfjj5py9yjyxnzmzxqrt2fyfz54wr90rl084m980tausrjq9e95y4Published at
2026-09-25 17:01:09 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Keonne Rodriguez got five years for building a Bitcoin privacy wallet. Today he wrote that the treatment program at his prison has been shut down, so he and about 70 other men are being moved again. His last transfer took 30 days — a month of buses and holding cells, for a nonviolent offense.\n\nThe charge was operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. There is no victim element in it. That is exactly why it fits so well: any tool that lets people move value without asking permission is a candidate, whether the code is neutral or not. Same playbook as Tornado Cash, where the software was simply a fact, and so the developer became the crime.\n\nIf writing the tool is the offense, then everyone who runs a node, coins a transaction or signs a keysend is one interpretation away from the same cell. The way out is not a better legal argument. It is making the thing so ordinary, so widespread and so boring that prosecuting it stops being possible.",
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}