Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on Today at 07:14:08 AM

The indictment documents against Samourai state that “KEONNE RODRIGUEZ and WILLIAM LONERGAN HILL, the defendants,
owned, controlled, managed, and supervised Samourai, which was engaged in the business of transferring funds on behalf of the public." That is not how Whirlpool works but prosecutors are counting on jurors being too ignorant to understand that a non-custodial service does not meet the definition of a money transmitting business. Even some forum members who have many years of experience with Bitcoin did not understand that the coordinator never holds any user funds.

Let's discuss if the parties who were arrested were transferring funds on behalf of others.

If they were in fact not doing that, then how do we justify them receiving a fee for transfers done through the wallet? What was this fee for, paid by who and for what exactly? What was Samurai's purpose, why did they set up a company etc.

If Samurai was 100% decentralized and there were no owners weren't established through an official company, maybe there would be plausible deniability. FEDs could go as far as to order a code repo shut down, but who would they go after? An expansive open source dev community? Pseudonymous code authors? Decentralized network node-runners?

Certainly users who were running the Samourai software weren't receiving it from a vague or decentralized source. And in the process of running the software, they were exchanging information and financial transactions with Samourai's company directly. So I think the defense would be pretty weak in terms of the liability part.

Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on Today at 07:14:08 AM

It will be difficult to win against a rigged justice system, but with a strong defense some of the charges might get dropped, which might limit the harm they want to inflict on privacy providers and Bitcoin users.

Of course here we're always judging this based on the current network. Other jurisdictions may be affording more freedoms to open source devs to develop whatever apps however they want.
Honestly certain rulings the U.S. justice system has delivered are pretty tyrannical and more often than not when an individual or a corporation is set to fight in court against the government it's a guaranteed loss for them. Like the case of the Developer traveling to NK I mentioned in the OP, he was nearly forced to plead guilty to avoid a huge sentence.