You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Sentenced For Building Freedom! Samourai Wallet's Keonne Rodriguez | Ep. 113

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

→ Sign the petition & financially support Bill & Keonne here: https://billandkeonne.org/From open‑source privacy pioneer to federal inmate, Keonne Rodriguez, the mind behind Samourai Wallet, sits down to explain why the DOJ’s “regulation‑by‑prosecution” saga matters to every crypto user, developer, and civil‑rights advocate. This episode was broadcasted LIVE on Tuesday, Dec. 16th 2025, 10am EST.→ Please like, comment, share & subscribe - to help me beat the suppressing big tech algorithms & gov. censorship. Thank you!-- SPONSORS --→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn → Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines: https://AbundantMines.com/Efrat – AFFILIATES –→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox Spike protein, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, with zero flicker and zero blue light, by design. Thank me later ;-) https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight → Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat → Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat → Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://bit.ly/zap_efrat

Hello and welcome. Good morning. I am here for a live show of You're the Voice with no other than the courageous, the amazing Keone Rodriguez. Hey, Keone. Hello. Thank you for having me, Efrat. Thank you so much for taking the time and being with me. I was just, what I was texting is the link to this live to a group of people that can hopefully push it out. So if you guys are watching us, whether you're on X, on YouTube or on Rumble, and thank you Rumble for hosting us live,

um please take the link and share it in all your social media channels in all your whatsapp signal telegram group wherever you are so that people can join us and watch this live with kioni and this is a very special special live for me a special opportunity to speak with you kioni and i want to apologize in advance if I'm making you repeat a lot of the things you've been saying over the past few weeks because you've been talking a lot and thank you so much for you know having the patience to go over this again and again with us and I know it's not easy especially in light of the fact that in three days you are going to prison and you have I am sure a lot of stuff to do family health

arrangements logistics and yet what you're doing most of the day is speaking to people like us and explaining to us why this is something that we should all pay attention to so first of all huge thank you for your time and your attention and doing this and secondly i'm with you how are you doing? Yeah, it's right now it's primarily trying to keep emotion out of it and taking care of all the logistical things that you mentioned, right? So things as simple as making sure healthcare is taken care of and dental care is taken care of, to making sure that my wife knows how to restart the router and knows how to fix the printer when it doesn't work. Things that I normally would do that she's going to now have to do. So I'm keeping emotion out of it and really focused on

making the transition as seamless for her as possible. But thank you for having me on the show. I don't mind repeating myself. I hope I don't wear out my welcome. But the way I look at it is that if I go in to prison on Friday, I will sit there in the cell knowing that I did everything I could I talked to everyone I could and I won't be sitting there wondering oh maybe I should have done this or that I went through every door that opened and I think that's all that I could can do I think that's a very healthy approach because I'm sure it can be mentally draining to be in the position that you are right now I just want to start by saying to our audience you know if If you guys don't know, if you're tuning in live and you don't know what we are here for

and what we're going to talk about, just to take you back a little bit. So Keone Rodriguez is an open source developer and privacy pioneer. He's an American small business owner, essentially, who is sadly turning into a federal inmate. And he's about to report to jail this Friday in three days to begin a five-year sentence, unless president trump is able to step in and offer a presidential pardon which is something that a lot of people in the community have been calling for so hopefully he will hear our message and just before we start with my questions there is a link that i want you guys to go to It is billandkioni.org.

We will put that link in the notes as well. And that link has two things. One is a petition that is very important for you to sign on in case you haven't. And two is a way to support financially this campaign. So please go to billandkioni.org and you can help already. So I'm saying this in the beginning. I'll say it again in the end. but this is super important so Bill and Keone are the founders of Samurai Wallet

and Samurai Wallet is a Bitcoin wallet that is supposed to help you preserve your privacy as you transact with what's yours your money and they have been prosecuted and put as an example for others to see and we need to kind of understand what's going on here we'll start with those of you who know, have been following the case, you may have seen that yesterday was a big day. And I want to give a shout out to the reporter, Sander Lutz, who had asked President Trump yesterday at a press conference in the White House if he had heard about the Samurai case. And Trump said that, yes, he heard about it. It didn't go too deep into it, but he has heard about it and he asked Sander in return do you think I should pardon them from your question

it sounds like you think I should and I think that was a really positive sign first of all to see that he knows the case he has heard about it and secondly that he's kind of interested I don't think if he would have taken the question if it was something that was not on his agenda so I think that this is a very positive thing what do you make of it Keone? Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've seen a lot of questions and answers with the president, with President Trump. And if he doesn't want to speak about something, if he doesn't really care about something, he moves on very quickly. He has no problem shutting a reporter down. The fact that he spent 37 seconds, I think I timed it, talking about this, responding to this question, I think was very positive. And it's something I've always said is, look, we don't have a lot of money. We don't have a lot of influence. We don't have a lot of power. So it's difficult to get the president's attention. It's difficult for just two everyday people to have the president know about you. So the fact that Sandra Lutz asked the question, I think, was huge. And then the fact that the president said he had heard about us and he directed the attorney general to look into it further is all extremely positive.

I think if the president does look into this case, we have a very good shot of being pardoned because he's been prosecuted by the SDNY. he's been gone after by a biden uh a biden administration weaponized department of justice he knows what it's like he knows what they do and he would see a lot of parallels in our case and his cases uh so i think the chances are good if we could get his attention and yesterday we got his attention so you know who knows what the future will bring uh we're cautiously optimistic though yeah i'm with you definitely positive and we need to keep pushing so that they keep looking at this case and i i'm gonna pause on where we go next for a second and just take you back so that the audience knows a little bit more about the case itself so let's start with the samurai wallet

itself the product what problems drove you to create a non-custodial privacy first bitcoin wallet to begin with and did it evolve as the ecosystem started growing yeah so i mean what drove us to create samurai wallet actually starts several years in the past so we started samurai wallet in 2015 but both bill and me got involved in bitcoin in 2012 and we were all about it we We saw it as a censorship-resistant form of electronic cash. And that's what everything, our whole motivation was towards. By 2015, however, the culture had somewhat shifted in Bitcoin. It became more about like an investment and an asset and a way to get rich.

All of that ended up being true. It was a way to get rich for some people. But for us, it wasn't about that still. It was still about censorship resistance and permissionless, non-intermediary form of cash for the electronic age. So we decided around then in 2015 that we would build software, a wallet in particular, that prioritized our vision of Bitcoin. And even if no one else wanted to use it, we wanted to use it and we wanted to make it for ourselves. So we did. We laid out the foundation very early on of what we saw Samurai Wallet becoming and the types of technology we would create to improve the default privacy proposition of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is open. It's a ledger that anyone can look at. And if your whole goal is censorship resistance, that's not really good. Because something that isn't private does not have a good censorship resistance properties. So they work together.

So we decided to build software that was non-custodial, meaning we never took custody of anyone's Bitcoin. We didn't want to be an exchange. We didn't want to be a bank. We wanted to be just to build software that let individuals hold and keep control of their Bitcoin and use it in a way that's very similar to cash, physical cash that you put in your pocket. And it didn't really change. we you know you asked if it evolved as the ecosystem evolved i would say no it didn't we didn't let the whims and of the ecosystem and what people prioritize change what we were doing we we had a very specific uh goal in mind and that was to turn bitcoin into physical cash

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for my audience. Learn more on abundantminds.com. Okay. And, you know, as you speak, the thing that comes into my head is that great sentence, be the change you want to see in the world. So you guys really wanted to, you wanted to, to implement the Satoshi's white paper in the way that you see that will be beneficial for people you wanted you tried to do something positive you even did it with legal advice i believe to make sure you're not passing any laws you're not like breaking any laws um and yet you were prosecuted so were there specific features in samurai that made it quote unquote a good candidate for the government to attack samurai specifically and why? Yeah, absolutely. There were the main headline feature that the government

really took issue with was something that we called Whirlpool. And what Whirlpool was is it's called a coin join. It's a collaborative transaction where you and a bunch of your friends or not even friends, people you don't even know, all get together and compose a transaction together. They're not sending it out anywhere. They're sending from one address they control in their wallet to another address they control in your wallet. But because there's so many people participating in this transaction, when a third party looks at the transaction on the public blockchain, it's difficult to understand what's going on. There's too many combinations of what could be happening uh and the point of this is to essentially disassociate the history of one

bitcoin in the past from what it's doing in the future right so imagine this imagine you go to an atm uh your bank's atm and you take out a hundred dollars in cash the bank knows you had a hundred dollars yep the bank knows you took out a hundred dollars but they don't know what you do with the $100 afterwards. It's none of their business. Their relationship with you has ended at that point when you took the money out. That's what Whirlpool did.

That's all it did. It didn't do anything more than that. Then stop it from the bank from seeing what you did with your cash once you took it out of the ATM. So the government really did not like this feature. And they really didn't like that we figured out a way to do this without taking custody, right? because this technology has existed since bitcoin was invented but you always had to give up custody

to a trusted third party to do it for you it was called mixing right so if i wanted to mix i would send my bitcoin to the mixer and then the mixer would send bitcoin back to me and it achieved the same type of uh solution right the past is separated from the future but you gave custody We figured out a way to do it so that you never gave up custody. You always were in control of your Bitcoin, thus keeping us on the right side of the law, right? Because the law is about custody. And the government really hated that. They hated that we figured out a way to do this, keeping on the right side of the law, that they had to take us out. And they did. so the analogy for this would be just like the example you gave before to make cash transactions illegal and like prosecute now everyone that that handles cash right and that's not crazy i mean they the for years they've had a war on cash the government hates cash yes they want every transaction to be trackable and traced they want to know everything that you're doing with your

finances and cash, this historic way that we obtain some form of financial privacy, it's thorn in their sides. Now, they can't just get rid of cash so easily, right? They have to do a bunch of little campaigns and push you onto payment rails and networks that are surveilled. But with Bitcoin, they could do it a little bit easier, right? They can see into Bitcoin without using a tool like we created. Bitcoin is open and public and the government is absolutely surveilling it with the tool that we created that threw up a roadblock to that surveillance just made it a little bit more difficult just made it a little bit more like cash they were really really mad about that i don't know if you had a chance to see yesterday um i saw paul atkins the

head of the sec speaking for four minutes about the new truly digital money era that we are stepping into and how the blockchain is completely exposed and you can surveil everything and governments are already doing that and there are companies doing that and that we do need to balance the privacy and anonymity to a certain extent and he goes on to give examples of why for example hedge funds or financial institutions would not benefit from having complete transparency over the blockchain and you know he gives the example to those institutions that that may you know it may the penny will drop for them when he says that but really you know he didn't give the the example of the retail of the the simple web citizen out there but he nailed it because this

is exactly it and we need to crack that balance between the transparency and the censorship resistance to the privacy and anonymity and and i think he gets it like i was i watched the whole four minutes and i think he really gets it and other people in the administration as well and i think it's so important to start raising those issues and and put more highlight on them because this is going to be the be-all and end-all of the transitory phase from the fiat monetary system that we're on to a digital monetary system whether it's bitcoin cbdc stable coins or any other instrument we have to deal with those um with those topics with those issues what do you think yeah i think you're absolutely right and i think that we have in the fiat system as it exists today

there is a level of financial privacy that everyone enjoys for example if i go to starbucks and I pay with my Visa card, the cashier doesn't know what my balance is. The cashier doesn't know what I spent last week or what I'm going to spend in the future, right? They just take the money and that's the end of it. That's not how it works with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin, if I pay the cashier,

that cashier could look at my past transactions. That cashier can figure out what my net worth is and what I'm going to spend in the future. That's something that no one would accept. That's outrageous and crazy. You know, and in the legacy fiat system, if my bank inadvertently hands out my data to a third party without my permission, that's a major privacy violation. They can be sued for that and they can be prosecuted for that. So we have financial privacy laws in the United States and around the world that we all are used to and take advantage of.

We should at least have that same basic financial privacy on cryptocurrency, on Bitcoin. And the SEC commissioner was absolutely right. He would focus on institutions and hedge funds and all this. But all that's very true. You can't run a business if your books are completely open and your competitors can see everything you're doing. That's insane. But it's the same for retail. We can't have that at the retail level either.

So it's great to hear the SEC. I think Trump has done incredible work, especially on the SEC side, because during Biden's administration, the SEC was a nightmare, right? They weren't telling people what they were supposed to be doing. People were going to them and saying, hey, we need guidance, and they were ignoring them, not even just ignoring, then they were prosecuting them. So Trump has done an amazing work on ending the war on crypto on the SEC side of things, on the securities and investment side of things. And unfortunately, on the DOJ side of things, it's moved a lot slower. The wheels of justice move slow. We all know that. But I think overall, President Trump is making good on his promise to end the war on crypto. And I think now that our chapter is out of the courts, out of the Department of Justice, and he really has the ability to make things right by granting a pardon, it becomes more possible. And I think he will make things right because I think he truly does want the United States to be the crypto capital of the world.

And you can't have the crypto capital of the world if you keep putting your software developers into prison. Right. It's not just me. It's Roman Storm. It's Ian Freeman. It's Roman Sterlingoff. All of these people are being unfairly prosecuted or unfairly incarcerated. And they're software developers. They're builders. They're not a financial institution. And the only way to bring innovation back or to keep innovation here in the United States is to make it a safe place to write code, distribute code without anything to do with crime, right? What we did has nothing to do with crime. The government said we built code that criminals could use, and therefore we were guilty of what those criminals did. that's a that's an insane proposition and it's going to chill the entire industry if they get away with it in a world hypnotized and sleepwalking towards totalitarian control and digital enforcement awakened voices rise to inspire change and radiate hope in december 2024 i had the honor

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I hope you find great value in it. So let's hone in on that for a second. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what actually is absurdly happening here in this case is that the DOJ decided that software providers are financial institutions. and they're charging you for treating software as money transmission where you don't even have custody of any money and still they're saying that you are a money transmitter. So hence they're trying to enforce KYC AML laws on you

but you don't even have any funds in your custody. Can you explain this absurdity? well i can explain it but i can't really explain it because it's it's absurd it makes no sense you can't make it make sense i can't make it logical right this is the first time they've they've come up with this novel theory that somehow a software developer who has put out code that allows individual users to manage their bitcoin manage their their you know transmit on their own behalf somehow the builders of that technology are responsible right for what they do the builders of that technology are a financial institution like a bank like western union like

coinbase that makes no sense right and it's not only doesn't make sense to us lay people it doesn't make sense to the regulator in charge of money laundering and money transmission the regulator in charge is called is fincen the financial crime enforcement network and in 2013 fincen had very common sense guidance they said in order to be a money transmitter you have to take custody of the money right how can you transmit something you don't have you need to have custody of it 2019 they said it again they wrote the guidance updated it and even said in 2019 said if you're an anonymity service provider or an anonymity software provider and you don't take custody of customer funds you are not a money transmitter right loud and clear loud and clear and we built

samurai using this guidance we understood this guidance everyone in the industry understood this guidance to say no custody no money transmitter no money transmitter no obligation to do kyc or AML. That's an obligation for banks and exchanges and money transmitters. It's pretty straightforward stuff. In 2024, the government changed how they view money transmission. Then they said, no longer do you need to have custody of control. But if you write software that allows people to send their own money, that's money transmission. And you're responsible for what they do and you're responsible for doing kyc and aml on them um it it makes no sense they don't care though they even i i don't know if you know this information

yeah they did so they actually before indicting us six months before indicting us they went to finsen and they asked finsen about samurai wallet and samurai and they said and finsen said to them they don't take custody so they're not a money transmitter they hid that they indicted us anyway one of the charges being not getting the license to be a money transmitter even though the regulator in charge of giving the license had just told them that we didn't need a license then they hid that information from us for over a year we found out over a year later that finson had said that uh it's unbelievable if that doesn't tell you everything about this prosecution i don't know what will and i think again when the president sees that information to you

during no it's not it's not no it's not it's called a brady violation the government is brady violation okay yeah the government is required to hand over to a defendant all evidence, whether it's good evidence or bad evidence. And we call good evidence for a defendant exculpatory evidence, right? This is evidence that actually shows weakness in the government's case. The Supreme Court has said they have to hand all of that over to us without us asking for it. That's a legal obligation the prosecutors have. And they didn't do that in this case. Not only did they not hand it over to us for over a year, we had to ask them specifically if they've ever had a conversation with FinCEN. That's the only reason they ended up handing it

over to us. And we tried to get judicial relief. We wrote to the judge. We told the judge about this. It wasn't even in contention. It happened. The government knows it happened. They admit that it happened. And the judge didn't want to hear about it. The judge dismissed the whole motion. and um that was that was kind of the end of our remedy seeking process how convenient so here's another um super critical important point that any of you that is listening to this live stream at the moment and has any ties with the current administration or with people that are connected to the president or or his people you can make that point this is this is really acute like the fact that that evidence was hidden and not part of the trial and then the judge dismissed it

i think this needs to be taken into the president's attention as well um okay and then And I'm not good at the details, but I heard that the Biden administration's over-criminalization executive order that was signed in May 2025 and the Bianche memos, correct me if I'm wrong, in April 2025, they both discourage regulation by prosecution. In what way did the Samurai case contradict this policy or these policies? Yeah, I mean, I've read the Blanche memo. There's no other way to read this memo than it talking explicitly about Samurai Wallet and Tornado Cash. That's what this memo is about. Can you say a bit about what's in the memo? So the memo, again, is basically telling all of the U.S. attorneys in the United States that from main justice in Washington, D.C., you are no longer supposed to target software developers for the actions of their end users. That's what it says in the menu, in the memo. It says explicitly in the memo, anonymizing software, mixers, and tumblers, as long as they don't take custody of funds, should not be targeted by the Department of Justice.

That the Department of Justice should go after actual criminals who use that software, not the software developers. Again, super common sense stuff here, right? And what's amazing in my case is throughout the indictment, throughout pre-trial, they never brought any criminals. They didn't go after any of the criminals that they say used my software. They went after me. They went after my partner, Bill. But of all the criminals they say use the software, they didn't go after one of them. And I'm an American.

I like safety. I don't like crime. I want my FBI and my Department of Justice to go after criminals. Get them. So this memo from Todd Blanche was excellent. I think it was excellent for us and it was excellent for Roman Storm in Tornado Cash. Unfortunately, the prosecutors at the Southern District of New York really do believe they are on an island, that what Washington, D.C. says, what President Trump says, what Pam Bondi says, what Todd Blanche says doesn't impact them, doesn't affect them. The way they see it is in four years, those guys are gone and I'm still going to be here. So I'm going to do what I want. And they ignored the Blanche memo. They ignored the executive order to end this type of regulation by prosecution.

They even ignored the memo, the executive order from the president on the strategic Bitcoin reserve. We had to forfeit $6 million to the government paid in Bitcoin. and they are supposed to keep that Bitcoin and make it part of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. No shit, seriously? Yeah, this is an executive order by the president. Did they do that?

No, they sold the Bitcoin immediately for dollars. No way. Yeah, they don't care what the president has to say. And that's why I've said to the president, when I've addressed him directly through these podcasts, he has a real problem. It's not Pam Bondi. it's not Todd Blanche. It's not Jay Clayton, who he appointed to the U.S. Attorney's Office in

Southern District of New York. It's the unelected, unappointed line prosecutors who think they can just get around all of these people. They don't care what the president has to say. They don't care what their boss has to say. They think they know best, and they're going to do what they want. And it's a real problem for this administration. You see, I'll go like one step further. Most people don't like doing that, but I do that. that's why maybe I have technical issues before I wanted to live streams and things like that but here's the thing this is I don't think this is a right and left issue I think this is the kind of the kind of deep state that people are referring to this is like a whole other

a whole other entity that is created of bureaucracy and people that are governed by some I don't know what kind of shadow entities are governing them and they really don't give an f about the rule of law they don't give an f about morals and values and doing what's right and wrong and they work in the justice department yet justice is like the furthest thing away from them i i just you know I think it needs to be called out. So. Oh, you're absolutely right. And Trump called it out in his first term. He called it the swamp, drain the swamp, right? Swamp was just a euphemism for deep state. That's what that meant. And you nailed it. This is the deep state. Again, it's not the people he's appointed. It's the bureaucrats that work there, right? And they survive between

administrations right so they've been around under clinton under obama under the first trump under biden and they're still there and they're the ones that really are pulling on the levers right they get an order from their their boss who was appointed by trump and all they can figure out all they can think about is how am i going to get around this order how am i going to you know go around what the the will of the president is and it's it's seriously detrimental uh it's seriously detrimental to the Republic, right? Uh, we, we can't have a justice system operate this way because like you just said, and it's so true, it's not left or right. It's, it's not about justice. It's not about truth to the, to these line prosecutors who are, um, driven by ideology.

It's, I don't agree with, you know, with the guy. So I'm going to do what I want. Uh, I'm going to do whatever i feel like because i'm gonna have this job in four years time and trump isn't and you know jay clayton isn't but i am and that's how they mold and they shift uh to their will and it's a it's a real problem and you know what kioni i i'm not an american citizen and i think that this is even a bigger problem yes i agree with you it's it's a problem for the republic for sure it's detrimental but it's also it's very international like a lot of my audience listening to us now is not American or not American citizens, but this is the state of the world right now.

The fact that we do have these kind of power hungry bureaucrats everywhere, like kind of drunk on their power in their positions, holding people to ransom, creating this twisted, completely convoluted reality in which we have to abide to laws that make no sense or they break the law by this you know whatever they're doing this is detrimental for humanity and this is a signal to what kind of low vibrational state humanity is in right now and if people like us don't especially you you know in a few days you're going to prison and yet you're taking the time to sit here with me and with others and explain why this is a risk not just for the united states or for democracy what people call democracy which i think don't

exist anymore this is this is a risk to humanity's existence to our values and our morals and our our moral duty as as human beings if we don't wake up to understand how we are being governed how we have given our power away to corrupt entities and how we are not claiming it back first by speaking out and second by building the world we want to see like brave people like you and and bill and many others that are being prosecuted right now that we are not taking the next step to understand that we have the ability to create technologies that will liberate us and that will preserve our rights as as humans and our property rights etc this is our duty today So I'm sorry. I'm just so upset that we have reached this situation, that you have to go to prison, that we have to do this campaign, that we have to do this live stream to kind of wake people up to understand the horror show that we live in right now.

And people don't live in urgency. They don't understand the implications of a case like this. today it's you kioni and bill in a few months but tomorrow it's me for just using any other non-custodial um service and and and all of us that want to use bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency or any other or even cash like down the down the line it's crazy and we really have to do something about this i'm sorry i went on a rant here completely oh you're you're absolutely right I mean, you're absolutely right. People don't realize it. They don't realize how much this does affect them. And that what Bill and I built is really the tip of the spear. And if it just one example, right, for crypto is the miners. Miners are an important aspect of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. okay if the developer of a wallet that all the wallet does is arrange a transaction and sign sign that transaction with a private key that's essentially all the wallet does it's it's literally

mathematics right if that's a money transmitter then how is a miner who accepts transactions and puts them into a block and transmits the block to the network how is that not a money transmitter of course the government is going to say it is and the government will say look if a wallet is a transmitter then a miner is a transmitter and if a miner is a transmitter they need to do kyc and aml on every transaction that's coming into the block they can't accept any transaction unless it's white listed from you know an exchange that's compliant and at that moment they have put their hands around the neck of crypto they have choked it out and it's not going to be what it's supposed to be uh so you know the the implications of this case are enormous

um and even pass crypto into cash as we talked about earlier they don't like cash cash is a problem to them and they want to diminish the use of cash we've seen it all over europe in greece it's it's illegal to spend more than 500 euros in cash if you try to you get reported and you know That's going to happen more and more and more because the state believes they have a right to see everything you're doing with your finances. And they've never had this right before. This is a new right they think they have.

And they want to make sure you're paying your taxes. They want to make sure you're not buying anything that they don't approve of. It doesn't have to be even illegal. It can be sex. It can be fireworks. It can be religious material in a communist country. It can be anything that the government deems unlawful.

And they've never had this power before and they want it desperately. And once they gain this power, they will never give it up. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Once they take something, they're not giving it up. Right. It only gets worse. And that was the whole point of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

And that's why it was so important to them to capture it and snuff it out. And we can't let them do that. We can't let them win. That's why the tools that me and Bill built were so important. and that's why it's so important that people don't look at this case and go oh i better not build because the government's going to come after me that was the whole point that's what they want you to think that's what it is it's a chilling exactly the opposite than what we need you keep building that's exactly one message that i want people to take away from this conversation

don't let that scare you that's right because that's what they're that's the whole point of what they did right they came after us they came out of row after roman and that set the stage don't build in this country don't build privacy tools in this country and that's the exact opposite uh message that we need to send it's we all need to build these tools these tools are more important now than ever this is exactly why we need them keep building exactly amen kiani we We see a lot of criticism and mocking about the EU and many other countries around the world, but especially the EU's and their draconian legislation on free speech, on harsh. Oh, do we have Keone? I'm here. I lost my camera for some reason.

Oh, OK. I don't know what happened there. Oh, that's that's an interesting one. But I can still hear you. Okay, I'm sorry. I don't know. I can refresh or we can just keep talking without seeing. No, let's keep talking. They're not going to stop us. F them. That's right. I've never had that happen before. That's a new one for me. I told you, a lot of funny things happen to me when I do things like that. So let's keep talking. Okay, so we see a lot of criticism about the EU and the draconian legislation on free speech, harsh MECA license,

and how the EU is pushing out innovation and investment from the EU zone. Isn't that exactly what is happening in the US now with this sentence? Here you are, you're back. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Can you talk a little bit about the implications of this case in terms of developing in the US, like going against what trump wants this to be the the crypto capital of the world whatever yeah i mean absolutely you can't like i said earlier you cannot be the crypto capital of

the world if you're putting your builders and developers into prison right so there has to be there has to be some protection that innovators in this country um know they can rely on some bedrock knowledge that they're not going to be held responsible for whatever their users end up doing like imagine signal uh the creator's signal being held responsible because some some whack job or some terrorist or some somebody used signal to plan a crime we would never accept that that doesn't make any sense or a a manufacturer of firearms being held responsible because some whack job shoots up a school like there's a separation right we know that the maker of a tool isn't responsible when someone misuses the tool and that's just been baseline legal precedent for

years and the way the government got around that in this case was not saying it was saying that we're not just a tool we're a financial institution and as a financial institution we have other obligations um and and that's where all of this increased regulatory burden that has come out of europe in terms of mica and um uh i forgot the other name of their regulatory regime on crypto assets yeah i forgot it's not fatf no it's not well they're they're another problem yeah i i yeah so so when they first proposed it um they weren't they weren't considering self-custodial or non-custodial tools any differently than banks and exchanges and luckily they went back on that and you know and and carved out an exception for software like what

we built. That needs to continue. And in the US, there's something called the BRCA, which is a law that would basically say very simply that non-custodial software developers are not money transmitters. That would be pretty helpful. That would be helpful for software developers in the United States to have some knowledge that there is some protection from an overzealous and weaponized Department of Justice, because we have a pretty decent president in terms for the crypto community right now, but we don't know what we're getting next time or the time after that. And if we don't have that certainty, if it's like a yo-yo where, oh, this president is great, but the next one starts cracking down and throwing developers in jail, you're not going to have the innovation

and the security that it takes to build these tools. These tools take a lot of time, effort, an investment to build. And you need to know as a builder that you're safe for 10 years, 20 years, however long it takes. And you're not going to end up being raided by the FBI at five in the morning like I was. So to be the crypto capital of the world, you need some security as developer exactly and you know they seem to be quite busy with creating regulatory clarity for crypto in the united states that's the number one clarity that they need to create in terms of legislation because if builders and developers don't know that they are protected to do what they're doing and to build you know this is this is the 21st century small business that's what it

it looks like in the digital era in the information era if people like you and so many like you around the united states and in other places around the world don't know that they are free and safe to do what they're doing then we have a problem houston we have a huge problem and it's not even asking for permission to do it we all everyone thought this is de facto we're allowed to do this we have certain rights as Americans, and we can build these things. And that's, I think, what the worst part is, right? You believe you have these de facto rights. You believe you have the right to freedom of speech. Code is speech. You believe that the law says this. So if you follow what the law says, you're going to be fine. And that's just unfortunately not how it works, right?

You think it works that way. It should work that way. But you have a weaponized Department of justice pointing a scope at you they're gonna fire they're gonna get you no matter what doesn't matter what the truth is doesn't matter what what court precedence says if they want you they are going to take you down and go after you and that's what we found with us we had an aggressive weaponized department of justice who hated crypto and a president who hated crypto and they came down on us and not only us but others um other builders in this way and it's it's a tough thing to to try to remedy and figure out how do we stop this from happening how do we because the laws were the laws they were we were on the right side of the law but that didn't stop a

weaponized department of justice coming after us and the the old saying is the process is the punishment and that is absolutely true hat even if we had been found innocent in these crimes i'm all i'm already still two and a half million dollars in debt to lawyers a million and a half dollars in debt to friends who loaned me money um and we never even got to trial right like this is millions and millions of dollars that i don't have to defend myself against an adversary who has unlimited resources who has every lawyer you know every every great lawyer on their side i have one lawyer and very little bit of money so defending yourself when the department of justice comes down on you is really difficult uh and really tough i am pretty sure and i want to

believe that the bitcoin community is going to stand behind you guys and support you and you know, financially and campaign wise, I don't think this is going to go anywhere until this is resolved because we all understand the importance of this case. I just want to say that when I was in Nashville, when was it, a year and a half ago at the Bitcoin conference 2024, Trump spoke there and I think it was clear to everyone that he understands the electoral power of the Bitcoin community starting from this event onwards, maybe a little bit before that too. But then there's no doubt that the Bitcoin community in the United States helped him

tremendously get over the line and and win the elections there were very powerful people both in quantity and in quality that were behind the scenes pushing people to vote for him even people i know personally again i'm not an american citizen but i know of people that haven't been voting for years and they came to vote just because they wanted to see legislation around bitcoin becoming more favorable and ending operation chokepoint 2.0 etc and he got in and yes he also kept the promise of releasing ross um but the bitcoin community is very vigilant it's a don't trust verify community it's a community of critical thinkers it's a community of people who are vetting you based on your actions not on your words and so i think that

if the trump administration um keeps paying attention to this electoral power and keeps honoring and and respecting the word that he has given to that community um i think that is going to help him once again at the midterms um and i think that this shouldn't be overlooked this is a very strong influence and power that this community has and i think everyone needs to remember that because this community if there is one thing that i understand since i've joined this amazing community is how powerful it is especially when something goes wrong you know the honey badgers yeah absolutely absolutely uh i i think that's true and i think the president knows that that's true right i think the president is aware of what a strong contingent the bitcoin community

when they're not fighting each other and they unite together over a common thing it's a pretty strong community absolutely and now just before we have a few more minutes before we have to end so i really want to ask you and pardon my ignorance would you have limited communication channels from prison you know in case you do go in in three days how can people continue supporting you when you're there how can we communicate with you yeah so i the the most reliable way of the the public communicating with me while i'm in prison would be through a letter, a written letter that's sent to me at the prison. And my address will be posted on billandkeone.org. And so will Bill's address. That's the most reliable way.

There are some people that I will be able to do like an electronic mail with. So for example, my wife, I will be able to email her through a special prison email system. It's not like normal email. Um, but for the majority of people who would like to get in contact with me, it's the old fashioned, what we call snail mail, uh, you know, where you write on a, write on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to the prison is the best way to do it. I'll respond to every letter I get. Uh, it will take a little bit of time because you can only, um, respond to like five a day based on the labels that you can print out in prison, but i'll respond to everyone who decides to write me i would appreciate that greatly for anyone who

does and um i'll also be communicating with my wife uh who she will have access to my twitter account my ex account and she'll be able to post on my behalf so if i want to say something to the world that's keep following my ex account because that's where it will be posted excellent so we're going i mean it's not excellent but you know what i mean like we're going back to snail mail And we're getting some periodic updates from you on X. Super important. And thank you for saying that we're going to send you letters. I'm going to make sure that we do.

What are the next actions you'd call our listeners to take? Yeah, I think the best thing that you can do right now still is signing the petition, sharing the petition, keep posting about this on X other social media use the pardon samurai hashtag all of these things increase visibility increase pressure um and and gets the word out and all of all of that is so important when you're trying to compete for everyone's attention on the president when he sees a group of people even if it's not the largest group it's a group of people who are fanatical uh about this and are talking about this and and sharing about this so please sign the petition that's really the most important thing

if you decide you've heard my story and you want to donate uh don't donate on change.org that doesn't go to bill or me it goes to change.org go to billandkeone.org click on donate and go to the give send go that will go directly half to my wife lauren and half to bill's wife Sabrina, to help them manage while both of their husbands are in federal prison. Super important what you just said. Don't donate on the change.org or change.com. Donate on billandchioni.org. Okay. I want to finish with a quote from a follower on X that said something so true. So I just quoted this.

This case is a test for financial freedom and open source development. A pardon would send a strong message. And that's what I want to end with. We need this pardon. It has a direct implication on your life, Keone, on Bill's life, on your family's lives, but it has indirect implications on all of our lives.

so a pardon will send a super strong message around the world what do you say yeah i absolutely agree i mean obviously for myself i agree but i think broader uh you're absolutely right look the power of the president or the executive to issue pardons is exclusively meant to limit the damage that an unfair prosecution and an unfair judicial proceeding can do on a person. When the president sees an injustice, the executive branch sees an injustice, he has the power to undo that injustice, right? There's very little he can do in the judicial branch due to the separation of powers. But what he can do is when he sees the judicial branch got it wrong. When innocent people are being persecuted or going to prison, he has the power

to change it. And that's an incredibly powerful thing he can do. And it would send a serious message that the executive branch of this country is pro-crypto, pro-innovation, and pro-privacy. And he said that at that Bitcoin 2024, that he was against the CBDC, against surveillance, he said that and this is a way to show that you know it's more than just words it's action and um i hope that he he takes that and does the what i think is the right thing amen kiani amen i am sending you a big hug and a big prayer from here and we're gonna keep being on your case uh we're gonna hold the light and the torch while you're there and we're not going to stop doing that

because you're amazing and this is an amazing case for all of us. So thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you inviting me, letting me tell my story. This is one of the last ones I'm doing and I think it's a great one to do.

I hope your listeners learned something, learned about this and care enough to make some noise and to say this is not this is not justice and the president has something he can do about it absolutely please share this video if you're watching this on rumble or on x or maybe even on youtube please share this everywhere you can and please go to billandkiani.org to sign the petition and to give your financial support kiani thank you so much have a great day the rest of of your day bye thank you very much ciao thanks for being with us please take a minute to give

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