Crypto News

Attorneys for Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm filed a motion asking the court to reconsider the motion to dismiss the case due to the prosecution withholding exculpatory evidence in the form of communications with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) dating back to 2023.According to a May 16 letter from Storm's attorneys to Judge Katherine Polk Failla, the FinCEN documents show that non-custodial crypto mixers do not fall under the legal definition of a "money transmitting business" and that prosecutors have known this since at least 2023.Despite having knowledge of the FinCEN guidance on crypto mixers, state prosecutors still proceeded with cases against the Samourai Wallet developers and Tornado Cash, the attorneys alleged.Letter sent by Roman Storm’s attorneys to Judge Failla. Source: Court ListenerUS prosecutors denied they withheld the evidence, claiming they submitted the FinCEN communications within the stipulated timeframe to produce the documents for the defense and the court during legal discovery.Storm's defense cited the same legal documents and the same argument the Samourai Wallet developer’s attorneys posed to the court in a May 5 legal letter. Storm's attorneys wrote:"The disclosures in the Samourai case reveal that the government, at the very least, played fast and loose and, at worst, affirmatively misled this Court with its arguments about FinCEN guidance when responding to the motions to dismiss and to compel discovery."The letter went on to argue that although the government continues to claim that the cases bear only "superficial similarities" to each other, they share the core characteristics of cryptocurrency mixers under the law, thus making the FinCEN documents salient to dismissing the case against Storm.The 2023 communications between US prosecutors and FinCEN. Source: Court ListenerRelated: Crypto group asks Trump to end prosecution of crypto devs, Roman StormRoman Storm's trial moves ahead despite sanctions against Tornado ruled unlawfulFederal Judge Robert Pitman issued a ruling on April 28 denying the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) the ability to reimpose sanctions on Tornado Cash — setting a legal precedent for non-custodial mixer cases.Despite this, US federal prosecutors still moved ahead with the case against Storm although the charges have been modified.Magazine: Tornado Cash 2.0: The race to build safe and legal coin mixers

Economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, has weighed in on the ongoing debate over spam inscriptions on the Bitcoin network, suggesting he would “throw in a few sats” to fund a full-time developer focused on making Bitcoin spamming more difficult and expensive.Ammous made the remarks in response to a thread initiated by the pseudonymous developer GrassFedBitcoin, who called for Bitcoin Core to merge pull request #28408, which would enable node operators to filter inscriptions more easily.According to GrassFedBitcoin, the lack of inscription filtering tools contributes to unnecessary blockchain bloat and undermines Bitcoin (BTC)’s role as a monetary protocol.“No one running a node wants to relay inscriptions,” he wrote, arguing that the OP_RETURN limit increases were justified in the past under false assumptions. He pushed for a configurable, default policy discouraging the use of Bitcoin for storing JPEGs rather than monetary data.Blockstream CEO Adam Back challenged the proposal, describing inscription filtering as an “arms race.” He noted that spam data embedded in Bitcoin transactions can be endlessly modified using code structures, requiring constant updates to filtering tools.Source: Adam BackRelated: Bitcoin Ordinals vs. Ethereum NFTs: A comparative overviewAmmous compares Bitcoin spam to emailAmmous compared the Bitcoin spam issue to email spam — another arms race society continues to fight without abandoning the system.“It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying to help bankrupt the spammers faster,” Ammous said. He argued that fighting spam is not censorship, noting that node operators already reject invalid transactions.“So a node runner looking to remove retards' spam is no less valid than retards' spam,” he added.The debate drew commentary from other users. One participant suggested Core developers treat spam-coding employees at certain startups as “unwilling QA engineers” and simply unstandardize every trick they deploy.Ammous took it further, proposing to “deprecate” the work of developers building spam tools and even hiring outside coders to overwhelm their systems.Source: Saifedean AmmousThe conversation reflects ongoing tensions in the Bitcoin community over the network’s intended use. With inscriptions continuing to congest the network, calls for technical countermeasures — and pointed critiques of those defending spam — are growing louder.In a Feb. 4 report, Mempool Research said the adoption of inscriptions could drive the Bitcoin network’s average block size as high as 4 megabytes (MB) per block, far higher than current averages.Bitcoin’s average block size — the amount of data in each block posted to the network’s public ledger — is currently around 1.5 MB.Magazine: Arthur Hayes $1M Bitcoin tip, altcoins’ powerful rally’ looms: Hodler’s Digest, May 11 – 17