I am not a very trusting person. I don't believe for a single moment that the US government (or any other government) intends to allow people to freely and privately transact. All this stuff that the current US administration is peddling about "the war on bitcoin is over" and no more Chokepoint 2.0 is marketing fluff.

It seems to me that developers who make privacy preserving software remain very much at risk of being attacked by the government. Don't let the politicians fool you. They feel that they know better than the people they govern and that they therefore are justified in surveilling us and curtailing our rights in service of their governance efforts.

Here are some excerpts from Sterlingov's letter:

But here I am. Five years away from my family and friends. Stripped of everything I had, bound by an enormous 400M forfeiture order of money I never had, that I can never repay, and therefore will never be able to own any assets ever. And locked away for twelve and a half years in federal prison — for a sentence that named no victims, no violence nor fraud, no one who ever filed a complaint, while the events in question appeared to be from a whole decade prior to the prosecution.

The government openly said at my sentencing that it was so lengthy in order to establish "general deterrence." That is the language someone would use when they want to punish someone not for what they did, but for what they want to scare others from doing. It is the language of political theater, not justice. I had become a symbol in a larger campaign about cryptocurrency and financial privacy, rather than a person entitled to individualized justice and mercy.

The Blanche Memo seems to have said that the war was over. That it was time to see what good the new technologies could do for the people. It mentions in particular that mixers in general should not even be prosecuted for crimes of their users. But it seems that some parts of the government didn't get the memo yet. I am still here, wasting away in a cell, while the policy has moved on.