The US government tends to follow this pattern. They did it with bittorrent and Covid. They make examples to scare the public into compliance. They don't tend to try to enforce things that are impossible to enforce at scale. They depend on compliance and self policing. Translation. Stay strong. Live as free as you can. Consider the tradeoffs and don't become a target. There is strength in numbers. We need to make it hard and painful for them to come for us.

Yes. There are examples. Current state marijuana laws contravene Federal law and everyone ignores it. They would really have a tough time trying to track lightning nodes worldwide. They would need to print lots more fiat for the effort.

False, this is the same mistake people are making here... if it doesn't survive a court challenge its not law.

The state can make up whatever charges it wants, citing whatever law they want... it means nothing until a court says it does.

There are more gamers that bitcoines... if they attack the gamers, they lose more votes... it's their game, "how we get votes?". We are a target because they think we are an easy one, they have no idea, like always.

I'm going to keep running my node. Don't shoot the messenger. This case has to be challenged.

This is sad. The network keeps running however, there is at least one case in Canada when LN node was considered as money transmitter.

Yes, that would improve decentralization and might be healthy for the network. Still, I hope we all don't start taking sides and deeming certain players or use cases bad. For example, LN advocates expressing happiness that Samourai gets attacked because they don't like conjoins. Or small nodes attacking rich LSPs. We're all under attack unjustly. If they don't knock on your door today, it might be next week.

This hung me up for a long time. Coincidentally, I took a CLE course 2 days ago. It is well settled law in the US that for money transfer services, transferring anything of value qualifies, and specifically "cryptocurrency".

I agree, but why? Is it just a coincidence that this happens months after BlackRock, run by Larry Fink, who is incredibly well connected to the government, gets their spot ETF? It seems like a blatant attempt to make sure bitcoin is controlled and run by Wall Street.

Maybe it is a good strategy to tell on every corner that the service is compliant. I think it is time to stop paying attention to that.

Great way to identify bad actors... as I always said.. Fuck UMA.

So wait. This is good news? I feel better now.

Seriously, I do agree with a lot of what you wrote. With #1, though, I think there is a high likelihood that we will see guilty pleas very soon. That's how it works in the federal system. Either one defendant will roll on the other, or some Russian oligarch will take a hit. Either way, plea bargains almost always involve guilty pleas to all charges.

From the Grasping At Straws Department, there is the argument that bitcoin never "moves". What is called a transfer is simply reassigning keys to identifiable bitcoin in the blockchain. FYI- judges really hate these types of arguments.