The recent action by the United States, to arrest the founders of the bitcoin (BTC) wallet Samourai Wallet and disable the functions of that wallet, has been the subject of criticism and questioning by the bitcoiner community, which repudiates what they describe as an attack on privacy. In the arrest of Keonne Rodríguez and William Lonergan Hill, who founded one of the most private bitcoin wallets in the ecosystem. Edward Snowden, a former CIA agent, was one of the first to criticize the American advance against Samourai Wallet. For him, the Department of Justice went back to “criminalize the developers of an application that restores financial privacy.” In his opinion, the way to solve this problem “is to make money private by default.” “Privacy should never be 'exceptional' or it will be made a crime,” he warned. Along similar lines, the bitcoiner known in X as P. holdulbricht, rejection the measure against Samourai Wallet, remembering that the team behind that wallet “has built the best privacy tools for Bitcoin.”
“This is not an attack on the Samourai Wallet developers, it is an attack on all Bitcoin users. “They must be free, building the code that bitcoiners need,” he indicated. Peter Todd, one of the most iconic Bitcoin developers, formed part of the criticism against the United States for closing Samourai Wallet. In a message he said that privacy is a human right and that «the only bad thing» that wallet did was «not have very good privacy.» Yan Pritzker, co-founder of Swan Bitcoin, it states that a “war on privacy” is underway. He suggests there is government overreach “and it must be fought.” «Samourai was doing a good job leading the charge in this fight,» Pritzker said. «The war on privacy must be won by making privacy the default option,» he added.
Less freedom and more absolute control
For his part, alias @Multicripto also joined the protest and pointed out that the creators of Samourai Wallet They were arrested “for helping thousands of people transmit BTC with privacy.” This, coinciding with the bitcoiner and podcaster Lunaticoin, for whom it is now necessary to “arm Bitcoin nodes and learn about privacy.” Bitcoiner Marc Vidal also reacted to the American advance against Samourai Wallet. He said in X that “in the world people continue to organize against freedom and in favor of absolute and total control.” He agrees with Cristian Borghello, a security consultant, who states that “difficult times are coming for those of us who believe in privacy.” From his perspective, “U.S. “The US is cruel to BTC” by arresting a developer who created a wallet that bypasses state controls.
Jameson Lopp, another leading figure in the bitcoin industry, reacted to the Samourai Wallet news with satire. In Precisely the same allegation of the US authorities to suspend that BTC wallet. Alex Gladstein, director of strategy at the Human Rights Foundation, said in X that the accusations against the founders of Samourai Wallet «are quite weak.» As he sees it, «you can't put someone in prison for that.» «The most damning things related to the hackers' profits are mixed together, but the judge would probably need to see evidence that Samourai knew this was happening,» he noted. Other BTC was created “to address censorship.”
As reported by BitcoinDynamic on Wednesday, April 24, the Department of Justice announced the arrest and indictment of the founders of Samourai Wallet. They are pointed out conspire to enable money laundering and to operate an unlicensed money transmission platform. In addition to the arrest and indictment, the US government seized the Samourai Wallet servers and disabled the functionality of that wallet. In fact, they requested the removal of the wallet mobile application from the Google Play Store. Samourai Wallet is one of the wallets that best protects the privacy of users. It has a transaction mixer that helps preserve the anonymity of operations carried out with BTC. One of the main reasons for the US to go against that entitysince they have no control over the transactions that run in the wallet.