Bipartisan Senate Letter Urges DOJ To Stop Attacking Bitcoin Privacy Software
Two crypto-supportive senators have urged the Justice Department (DOJ) to reconsider its recent enforcement action against a popular Bitcoin privacy service.
On Monday, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) publicly shared a letter arguing that the DOJ’s “unprecedented interpretation” of what constitutes an unlicensed “money services business” (MSB) contradicts both Treasury Department guidance and the intent of Congress.
“This interpretation threatens to criminalize Americans offering non-custodial crypto asset software services,” read the letter, co-authored by Lummis and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).
President Biden's DOJ steamrolling the longstanding interpretation of FinCEN is legally wrong and threatens to criminalize Bitcoin software development in America. @RonWyden and I have sent a bipartisan letter to DOJ urging it to drop this interpretation immediately. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/iazbBhMcOv
— Senator Cynthia Lummis (@SenLummis) May 13, 2024
Late last month, the DOJ arrested the founders of Bitcoin mixer Samourai Wallet for allegedly operating an unregistered MSB, allowing criminals to use their service for money laundering.
Specifically, Samourai used CoinJoin transactions to enhance user privacy, which involves multiple parties combining the inputs and outputs of their transactions into one transaction, making the flow of funds difficult to trace on the blockchain.
While Samourai’s wallet did require a centralized server to coordinate CoinJoin transactions, the service never involved taking control of users’ actual funds.
That makes Samourai’s case a tricky legal topic, since the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) defines “money transmission” as “the acceptance of currency…and the transmission of currency…to another location or person by any
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