It's a sad day for the Netherlands.
It is 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 exaggerating.
So tell me, what is the legal way to keep peer-to-peer crypto transactions private?
We have HTTPS for email and internet messages. What is the crypto equivalent and who builds it?
It doesn't exist because they put our developers in jail.
A judge called Tornado Cash a tool for criminals. How far we have fallen when our courts assume that anyone who uses privacy tools is a criminal.
Your courtrooms should celebrate cryptographers as stewards of the hard-fought democratic freedoms handed down to us since the Enlightenment – instead, you imprison these patriots and deprive the people of the only tools powerful enough to hold back a panopticon digital dystopian from the feudal era.
If your free society bans privacy and imprisons developers, then you no longer live in a free society.
The Netherlands has fallen. The EU is going off the rails.
Will America hold on?
In the United States, all eyes are on the case of Roman Storm
Alexey Pertsev of Tornado Cash sentenced to more than 5 years in prison for going bankless
He was convicted of money laundering.
![](https://bankless.ghost.io/content/images/2024/05/039bb67b-0c08-487a-9271-636bc970ec97.webp)