Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering
Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering
Prosecutors are alleging Samourai Wallet laundered over $100 million in criminal proceeds.
"Prosecutors are alleging Samourai Wallet laundered over $100 million in criminal proceeds."
These are the kinds of things that occur when you try to obtain privacy on a public ledger. This is not the last we will hear of things like this for sure.
Doesn't really have anything to do with the public ledger aspect. They got busted because they were maintaining a backend service that their wallet was dependent on, and they were making money from it. Simply releasing a wallet with privacy features is still presumably legal (IANAL) due to free speech protections applying to code. The government can still prosecute end-users directly, but the same is true for users of dedicated privacy coins.
In these adversarial environments, you definitely do not want control over any server where people would come to do something with your service. If they want to prosecute people, they have to go after the end users in a peer-to-peer system of privacy, such as Monero. And that's extremely expensive for them.
And again, one of those places goes bust. Why do people still use them?
"those places" ?
He thinks this is an exchange