TL;DR: Developers made a Bitcoin wallet that made transactions very private. Bad people used these privacy features for crimes. The developers are going to jail for writing code.

Samourai Wallet was a Bitcoin wallet built to give people real privacy using CoinJoin to break chain surveillance. The devs were arrested by US authorities for basically writing open-source code, and now the government is trying to criminalize privacy itself. This is bigger than one wallet, it’s about whether we’re allowed to use Bitcoin privately at all.

Some devs made a bitcoin wallet with lots of privacy increasing features. The main one being a CoinJoin coordinator. You could join at least 5 other ppl to make 5 new utxos by paying a fee to the Samourai devs that made the coordination. Once you pay once you could re-do the CoinJoin as many times as you wanted with different ppl, thus breaking any possibility of chain analysis from that point on. The US government hated this and claimed that it was 'money laundering' and other made up charges and cracked down the dev team. They have been trying to defend their case since then. It's an attack on privacy most likely to make an example out of them to suppress other ppl from trying to do the same, since it was all open source and all the dev team did was write the code. It seems the US gvmt hate if ppl make tools that anyone can use to gain more privacy.

I fukin hate the government. How did we let it come to this.