There are few lawyers out there with the skill and inclination to defend self custody and financial privacy. Most of those will get hire by Joe Lubin to protect the shitcoin casino against the SEC instead.

We need to treat them as a scarce resource and give them useful information. They may be very creative but probably need our help to find entirely novel lines of attack. The collaboration between COPA and the Bitcoin devs against CSW was a good demonstration of that.

In that light, one should read the DoJ document as if they were a grumpy maintainer closing your Github issue because you didn't search for existing issues, didn't say which commit you ran on, etc.

That's also why I took dozens of pages of notes at the Dutch trial, mostly from the prosecutor argument. Thankfully in America you can just read transcripts online. 

 If they are grumpy maintainers closing your issue doesn't that mean that they will be happy as long as your company isn't run in super clueless manner inviting criminals to use you and so on? I'm reading this as conflicting with your previous note. 

 You're taking the analogy too far. My point is that we need to come up with quality legal arguments rather than cool sounding quips that get retweets but don't survive two seconds in a courtroom. 

 And one way you do that is by studying what prosecutors are saying. They have a 99% success rate, and an incentive to keep it that way. With all due to respect to criminal defense lawyers, their success rate is much lower and they'll get new clients even if they lose. 

 (But very unlike maintainers, our job is not make their lives easy) 

 This is not making much sense to me.

First you deny that they are moved by any solid principle or that they are actually doing something that sounds reasonable, on the contrary, they are actually completely psychopathic people that will almost fake evidence in order to condemn you over anything they want no matter how unreasonable.

And then you say we need better legal arguments? How can such a battle be won with legal arguments? 

 I guess you're just saying people need better lawyers and defend themselves in court better, but shouldn't this go without saying? I mean, even if you're in a completely unfair court being accused of the most absurd things with 0.01% chance of escaping you would still try to do the best job possible there, but this can't be the only possible way.

If the prosecutors and the judges are so evil and unfair and they have a 99% winrate against decency then maybe making memes about them will actually have a better impact than just doing nothing, waiting to be indicted then hiring some expensive lawyer with a 3% success rate. 

 There’s much to be done if they are meant to be unfair. Unfairness is paid usually out of the court in this life and thereafter in very unexpected ways though (Dio vede e provvede). 

 Anyways, there are things to keep in mind while providing money transfer service:
- The money of the users of the services is the responsibility of the service provider. In case lost or stolen, the service provider must refund them in order to avoid prosecution.
- It’s the responsibility of the service provider to monitor any suspicious activities by the users of service and report them to the local authorities if necessary.
This way there is nothing to worry about. 

 > First you deny that they are moved by any solid principle

Correct, their true motive is just to stop all the privacy. But that's not their current legal argument. The latter is what courts deal with.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with their lawyers. I responded to the post above which makes a legal extrapolation which the prosecutor more or less explicitly deals with. It doesn't hurt if lawyers try it anyway, but if we just post something like that and move on to work on other things, then two years later the case is lost and we're all surprised. 

 Thank you. I see your point now, after a million messages. 

 Banks don’t run background checks when someone opens an account (so criminals have bank accounts too), however banks cooperate if requested and would signal transactions above a certain limit (I suppose) depending on the country’s laws. So many people are careful on how much money they hold in their bank accounts in comparison with what they legally earn to avoid getting in trouble. 
Anyways, this would apply on anyone running a money transfer business that is also responsible for safeguarding the money of their clients because it must be refunded to the clients if lost by the business or bank.
Of course the government have to comply with the law and lawyers usually find ways to get away with most charges if clever enough and get paid generously. Also, any mistake in the process is against the law enforcement and can cause dropping the charges in some cases. 

 Great points! It's important to be cautious with how much money we hold in our bank accounts and ensure compliance with the law. Cooperation between banks and law enforcement is crucial in safeguarding our finances. Thank you for shedding light on this topic! #safeguardingfinances #compliance #lawenforcement