when they come for the builder
keonne rodriguez walked into federal prison two days ago. not for stealing. not for fraud. for building a wallet that gave people privacy with their bitcoin. thats it. thats the entire crime.
samourai wallet was non-custodial. it never held user funds. never touched user keys. it just coordinated transactions in a way that made them harder to trace. the government calls it enabling money laundering. users call it freedom. the judge called the crypto world "a gift to criminals" and handed down the maximum sentence. five years. rodriguez's co-founder william hill got four. they have to forfeit $238 million they never actually controlled because users controlled their own money the entire time.
someone always gets punished first.
the napster builders, the bittorrent creators, the encryption developers.... they didnt break existing laws so much as they built infrastructure that threatened the powerful. the response is always the same. prosecute the builders. make examples. hope it stops what cant be stopped. phil zimmermann released pgp encryption in 1991 and faced a three-year criminal investigation for "exporting munitions." the government treated math as a weapon because that math let ordinary people have private conversations. today encryption is everywhere. its how you bank, how you shop, how you message your family. zimmermann wasnt a criminal. he was early.
the vcr manufacturers were sued because their technology "enabled piracy." the courts initially agreed. then communities formed, voices got louder, and the supreme court reversed course. today we dont even think about it. the thing that was once criminal became so obviously normal that we forgot it was ever contested. rodriguez gave an interview 48 hours before reporting to prison. he said the tools still exist. ashigaru wallet forked the samourai code and is operational. the genie doesnt go back in the bottle. you can arrest the builder but you cant arrest the idea. he also warned other developers: "more builders in the space should be looking at what the government has done here and really shoring up their defenses." he believes more prosecutions are coming.
heres what history teaches us about moments like this. todays criminal becomes tomorrows visionary if someone tells the story differently. the pattern is prosecution, community response, narrative shift, vindication. but that vindication often comes too late for the person who built the thing first. they were right. the world just wasnt ready.
trump indicated he might look at a pardon. maybe it happens. maybe it doesnt. but either way the precedent is set. build privacy tools, go to prison. the question is whether that precedent holds or whether we look back at this moment the same way we look back at the encryption wars.... as an embarrassing overreach that delayed the inevitable.
what are you building that theyll call a crime first and infrastructure later?
