Full legal verdict:

ecli-nl-rbobr-2024-2069-en.pdf

489kB

So I think the highlight from all of this comes from https://twitter.com/valkenburgh/status/1790370694766657735

Interestingly the ruling concedes that TC does not actually mix cryptocurrency. That's correct! Unfortunately this fact did not matter to the 3-judge panel. Apparently designing any cryptosystem with the intent to allow others to "break the transaction trail on the blockchain" is sufficient to prove intent to launder money in the Netherlands.

Which boils down to: any privacy tool that can be abused is deemed illegal and the FOSS developer a criminal by merely authoring it and distributing it.

And all tools can be abused.

So it seems like for now the Netherlands government is being anti-american, values wise.

From my point of view, if you exclude the arguments of profit with the dao, it boils down to this example in a very crude and inaccurate way:

Take BitTorrent and encrypt a USD digital dollar, euro, pound etc. Use GPG to encrypt it, then connect to Tor to try and hide your privacy. Trade it in DeFi for something else, and because you obfuscated the chain of custody: aka used privacy technology (encryption)... you are now a criminal, and the developers of BitTorrent, GPG, and much of the FOSS community are implicated as outlaws because their technology got mis-used by the bad guys.

To me this logic is really asinine and the logic tree does not end. It basically implicates everything because digital value is data, and all communication tools can be used effectively in any technical design if you really wanted to do this.

You could use any P2P E2E chat as a coordinator, or even a centralized one and do this and get roughly the same outcome. Heck that logic even crosses over to Samourai wallet.

I honestly find the logic appalling and I honestly hope both the governments of Netherlands and other nation peers watching really look at this hard and consider the negative implications for their citizens civil rights.

Do you think this is right? Did the Romans do something really wrong that is being lost in the noise? How will this implicate P2P development, privacy, cryptography, and most of all DeFi development?

Want to get other perspectives on this and what should be done, and the US trial is still looming...