Yesterday, President Trump signed a full pardon for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. This was a tremendous victory for the Bitcoin (and Libertarian) movement.
It proved with some time, effort and political coordination, the Bitcoin network state, to borrow a term from Balaji Srinivasan, can facilitate real and important change via the highest levels of power at the nation-state level.
While we should surely take a moment to celebrate, we should also keep in mind others in the Bitcoin and broader crypto space are currently facing unfair sentencing and we should be acting on their behalf. These others include the developers of Samourai Wallet, who are currently wrongfully being charged with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.
In this case, not only is the freedom of the developers involved at stake but our ability to use the privacy tools they’ve created.
Now we have to do #freesamorai to ensure noncustodial wallets remain legal! https://t.co/Jq1UDbe9dl
— Matt Corallo (@TheBlueMatt) January 22, 2025
And so this time around, let us right wrongs before they result in unfair sentencing, like we saw with Ross.
To do this, you can donate to the Peer-to-Peer Rights Fund to help fund the defense for the Samourai case (and others like it). We have to do our part to stop regulatory overreach and to protect the freedom of those who have helped to further enable our own via the tools they’ve created.
