Samourai Devs Arrested is a Wake Up Call for Crypto
Samourai devs arrested is a wake up call for crypto by rvolz.eth1470 🥝 • 2y • 0 views • 0 clicks | |
AI summary of the linked articleThe article, written by someone associated with the DarkFi project, argues that privacy projects that rely on doxxed teams or centralized infrastructure, and that ask users to "join our Discord," lack commitment to anonymity and should be dismissed. It cites the US state's money laundering charges against Samourai Wallet devs and the earlier case involving Tornado as evidence that the state is targeting anyone who challenges the status quo. The author calls for fully dark, anonymous ecosystems, and says DarkFi, which uses anonymous p2p chat and an anonymous DAO, will continue to thrive even if its developers are jailed. | |
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 Not upvoting this: But it goes deeper than that because the state is also assasinating people (Jstark, John McAfee and Nikolai Mushegian). I don't have any insider knowledge or special details, but to claim that Nikolai Mushegian was assassinated is a tablet-magazine-level fact, and even his parents have come out and said that they'd like this conspiracy around his son to end. Besides this, I'm just not a fan of the framing here. A lot of crypto, even from decades ago, was explicitly NOT about disrupting states. A lot of it was of course. But a lot of it is also about building a fairer and better internet, which is a political fight too, but one that happens mostly on a commercial level, for example, against the common browser vendors or big tech. If you read more on privacy, it is framed as contextual integrity, so I don't comprehend the vision of generally "going dark." If a project's chat room is generally open for anyone to join, I don't see how someone caring a lot about cloaking their identity would prefer Tor+Discord over "DefaultEncryptedChat"; to me, those offer the same value proposition. That said, if you're aware of H. Nissenbaum's writing on privacy, then "going dark" is a strange framing of privacy as all data is shared, and it then really comes down to the reason for the disclosure of private information and the supposed flow. "Going dark," in that case, to me, seems to want to short-circuit this process by saying: "fuck it, we're not negotiating privacy (future flow and reason for disclosure). We want no data to leak ever." In any case, I think there are much smarter strategies as declaring the state your number one enemy "in plain sight." No wonder people get arrested. | |
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