Quote from: SamReomo on September 11, 2023, 01:34:36 PM

Sometimes they are so concerned about data mining that they forget that innocent people can also face tough times

They don't forget - they simply don't care.

The government don't care in the slightest when banks launder literally trillions of dollars. They get a completely meaningless token fine and that's it. No arrests, no criminal charges, no seizures, no shutdowns, and allowed to continue to launder more money in the future. This is all fine because the banks bribe our politicians and freely hand over all your data to the government when they want it. But when a piece of open source code allows the average person to maintain some semblance of privacy against the government's various mass surveillance programs, then all hell breaks loose and they absolutely must prosecute someone. They don't actually care if the people they prosecute are actually guilty, as long as the set an example to the rest of us that you should be good little citizens and never step out of line. This is not about preventing money laundering in the slightest - if it was, they would clamp down on the banks which do it constantly. It's about surveilling and controlling the populace.

Quote from: nutildah on Today at 04:07:08 AM

But these aren't very realistic outcomes in real life. If Chainalysis were to fold tomorrow, you can bet there'd be at least a handful of similar entities vying for their old contracts & market share.

Absolutely. We already have dozens of blockchain analysis companies out there. My point was that if everyone who used bitcoin stopped using things like centralized exchanges or wallets like Wasabi or Trezor which all directly fund these blockchain analysis companies, then that would cut off a large part of their funding and many would cease to exist (not to mention making general blockchain analysis much more difficult since you would no longer have KYC linked addresses and such).

Quote from: nutildah on Today at 04:07:08 AM

The code should absolutely be auditable... I agree with the overall sentiment in this thread that its ridiculous to put someone behind bars for what is potentially a very long time without thorough "due process." If Sterlingov was indeed just a user of Bitcoin Fog then it would be an egregious miscarriage of justice to sentence him based on potentially faulty analysis.

It's pretty damning just how desperate Chainalysis are to not let anyone who even remotely understands bitcoin view their code.