They absolutely are, under this definition. By action or inaction they can prevent the transfer of money. Not just digital assets either, but every bank account mobile app too. They are clearly the largest illegal money transmitters in the world and have laundered trillions, maybe quadrillions in volume under these definitions 🤡 

 They would be. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that this is over broad and not the intent of the statute.  So hopefully the judge has a brain. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and the easiest place to draw it is by making control a prerequisite. 

 It doesn't make sense. The State doing state things. 

 Keep reading the DoJ document, it explains why. We need to level up here. 

 What is your honest take on this? The document sounds relatively reasonable. The big problem seem to be that Samourai was actively marketing their service for unlawful activities.

How feasible would it be to get a judge to say that the DoJ (or whatever) would first have to contact these business first and ask them to cooperate before indicting them? That would make the Phoenix people much less fearsome, for example. Maybe they did that in this case? 

 If someone is doing something wrong, they are aware of it and of the legal consequences. 

 The document has a section on fair warning, mentioning Ross Ulbricht as an example. They don't believe they needed to.

I don't believe marketing matters that much. The DoJ mentions it because it works well for them with media and jury. 

But Tornado Cash had very pro compliance marketing. Then they just went and looked for internal chats to find something to make them look like they don't care. If you're super careful about your chats, they'll send an undercover to a conference, get you drunk and then make you say something self-incriminating.

I think the only real metric is usage. 

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 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. 

 Then I am confused on what one should do and how to treat law enforcement. From what you're saying the best approach is for everybody to just close shop since they can come up with any excuse they want and get away with it?

What do you mean by "usage"? Like if there are no obvious criminals using your service you are ok or what? 

 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. 

 Because the courts decide the meaning of statues, even if the statute seems obvious to us. 

 One difference is that the samurai guys were getting paid and there's likely many transactions they can find were from some ill gotten bitcoin paying fees directly to them. Could be seen as a business that's getting fees for facilitating money transferring. 

 What USB cables do you recommend. Need one that's registered as a money transmitter. Should also be able to charge my phone. 

 Agreed, with their definition, our brains are money transmitters. 

 So we are all on the same page then that #Bitcoin is money? Because if it isn't, then none of this makes sense. If it is, a lot of other shit is about to make no sense.

I think the government is shooting itself in the foot with this one.
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 They shouldn't have been calling wallets wallets. Maybe key manager. Nobody would have cared.

And there's nothing in the wallet except for keys. 

 Or fiber optic cables and routers and kubernetes and AWS and pretty much all software and infrastructure connected to the internet. Ridiculous. 

 How is me paying for groceries in cash not money transmitting? It's just literally applying the English language definitions of transmit and money.  

 Not sure if this was rhetorical, but if not, it's because they payment wemt directly from the payer to the payee.

Using that same logic:

if you asked someone to pick up a pack of smokes at the store when they're out, they might be a money transmitter.

if you order something from uber eats, I believe they would not be the case. As I understand it, you pay uber and uber pays the business, so in each transaction is a direct payment.

As for the people who are suggesting ISPs would qualify as a money transmitter... the only logic I can think of for exempting them would be under "common carrier" rules.

I don't agree that these regulations are reasonable, just trying to explain where they're coming from. I am not your lawyer. 

 Thanks for the detailed response. Yea I don't think this stuff will actually hold up in court because it would be ludicrous.  But that is partially my point.  People on the Internet are trying to get us all riled up with this bullshit, but tbh I don't really even know where this shit comes from.  IMHO any reasonable lawyer could point out the absurdity of this garbage and get a jury to agree. 

 Layers matter 

 Then an ordinary wallet is also transferring money e.g.: from my home to the grocery store 

 It doesn't mention self-custody wallets.

But by facilitating coinjoins, they were facilitating the transfer of money between the coinjoin participants. 

Node operators routing lighting payments are also money transmitting businesses. 

 Routing LN can be seen as a decentralized effort that isn't profitable.

If you knowingly open a channel with a sanctioned criminal that's different than just routing in a decentralized manner.
 

 and browsers....
I mean... browser extensions...
This is some scary shit ... 

 The more rules the State makes, the less effect the body of rules has. This is end game for them. 

 solid point 

 ISPs ARE money transimitters🤣 

 Data transmitters are money transmitters? 

 The absolutely insane Pandora’s box this “interpretation” would open makes me all the more confident that the lawyers who are Bitcoin-facing will annihilate any attempts to pass this through in court.  🙏 

 In retrospect
protocol-level fungibility would've made this all unnecessary. 

 Why do you even try to make sense of laws that are permanently bent, violated, or outright ignored by the people supposed to be upholding them ? 

 the logical conclusion here is that money that can be self-custodied is illegal. 

 ISPs also fully surveil your data and backdoor the govt 🫠 

 Also custodial wallets 

 value transmission = money transmission what legal difference Ask Attorney General please 

 anything of value (cowdung, dogshit , satoshishit) can be converted to money or viceversa in barter system - barter can happen between virtual <-> physical or virtual<-> virtual
what if offical state money is NOT involved at all?  law can interpreted just for benefit of state apparatus and to manifest the power over jurisdictions 

 Craigslist is facilitating money transmission 

 But wallets don't transmit any money. 
They allow for the modification of a field on the ledger to alter the private key that has access to the Bitcoin. 

 If I trick a politician into saying a seed phrase during a game of charades he is an illegal money transmitter


THINK DIFRNET 

 The coin-join protocol that Samourai used was custodial meaning they moved other peoples money making them a transmitter. WHOOPS 
Almost as if all custodial software is a scam 

 No, Whirlpool is a non-custodial protocol. However, the coordinator was fairly centralized. 

 Why the fuk is privacy such an afterthought to Bitcoin. At the very least, bundle core with Tor and set it as default.