Roger Burlingame is the defense attorney for William Hill, co-founder and CTO of Samourai Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet. Zack Shapiro is the head of Policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
In this interview, discussion around the legal case against Samourai Wallet and the implications for Bitcoin privacy and non-custodial tools. We also get into the historical context of the Bank Secrecy Act, comparisons to cases like PGP and Tornado Cash, and the impact of discovery challenges and legislative advocacy on the outcome of this pivotal case.
Awesome interview, thanks for sharing! This case is probably the largest and the most important battle in our war for digital freedom. Cypherpunks have been waging it for decades, as was rightfully mentioned.
Privacy was put at the heart of Liquid Network, and the Samurai case was the main reason we launched our exchange in the browser project. This is reductio ad absurdum of the "money transmitter" definition.
When you load an open source code and run it in your browser, there is no "money transmitter entity" involved. The "transmission" is made automatically by the code in response to your actions. We give the code our wallet keys when the page loads, but don't control what it will do with them.
We expect to go live (Liquid Mainnet) in about a week, when CT discounts are activated. So stay tuned!
Wumbo Rating: 19 out of 21
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:04:02 - The Bank Secrecy Act
00:09:34 - CoinJoin vs Custodial Mixer
00:17:53 - Crypto Wars
00:29:17 - The Samourai case
00:35:08 - Funding a Legal Case
00:49:18 - The Lummis/Wyden letter
00:57:58 - Implications of the case for Bitcoin
01:07:25 - Support the case
Clean link BTW, not sure why but OP included a link with ad trackers https://youtu.be/c1I2WsWkCrI
Was a good interview. Solid share.
Cool share! Useful background information for understanding privacy legislation.