A Sad Day for The Netherlands
This is a sad day for The Netherlands.
It's a sad day for the founding principles of open societies and Western liberal democracies.
Today, crypto privacy developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to 5 years in prison by a Dutch court for developing an open-source tool that allows people to keep their crypto transactions private.
Today, they made privacy illegal in an EU country.
You think I'm overstating this.
Then tell me, what is the legal way to keep peer-to-peer crypto transactions private?
We have HTTPS for email and internet messages – what's the equivalent for crypto, and who's building it?
It doesn't exist because they're putting our devs in jail.
One judge called Tornado Cash a tool intended for criminals. How far we've fallen when our courts assume anyone using privacy tools is a criminal.
Your courtrooms should be celebrating cryptographers as the stewards of the hard-fought democratic freedoms passed down to us from the enlightenment – instead, you jail these patriots and strip the people of the only tools powerful enough to hold back a dystopic feudal age digital panopticon.
If your free society bans privacy and jails developers, then you no longer live in a free society.
The Netherlands has fallen. The EU is slipping.
Will America hold?
All eyes are on Roman Storm's case in the U.S.
David C