Samourai Wallet Gives In With Guilty Pleas, But It Was All Their Risk

Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodrigeuz and William Hill have both taken plea deals that have resulted in the dropping of conspiracy to commit money laundering charges in exchange for pleading guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission service. 

While to my understanding this doesn’t set an official case law precedent (no decision-making on core issues was done by the judge and published in a ruling or opinion), it is still a guilty plea to these charges by parties doing nothing more than developing self-custodial software that can be cited in other cases. This is absolutely not a good thing, and is a chilling outcome that will have consequences across this space, and potentially affect software development in general. 

The court system has successfully coerced software developers into accepting the responsibilities of a custodial money service business when even the relevant regulators themselves said no such responsibilities existed on the part of Samourai Wallet. 

This is a horrible precedent to set for the entire ecosystem, even if it is not strictly speaking a legal case law precedent. 

That said, I think it’s important to step back and maintain proper context and perspective in the wake of this outcome. While this outcome can still have wider consequences in the ecosystem, it would have also required two people to take on serious personal risk in order to try to achieve the best possible outcome in terms of wider consequences beyond themselves. 

Keonne and William were both risking up to 20 years in prison for the conspiracy to commit money laundering charges. No one else in this ecosystem had that risk, just them. Whatever the wider consequences of this outcome are, none of us had to bear any risk or cost in trying to maximize that wider outcome, only they did. 

It does no good, and is frankly indefensible, to put that at their feet when engaging in greater risk on our behalf would impose no real cost on any of us. Twenty years in prison is a long time, and none of us had to risk actually living out that reality in the end. 

It’s important to remember that when it comes to reacting to their plea deal and whatever comes afterwards, they judged the situation regarding risks that they bore and made what they thought were the best decisions for themselves. I can’t fault them for that; I didn’t bear any of that risk, and neither did any of you.