Thread by @ricburton

I am in the court behind @alex_pertsev

I have no idea what is going on

But I do know one thing:

Freedom fighters should not buy a Porsche

He should return the €

We should send all our $TORN to the 0x

The VCs who encouraged him to launch a token are nowhere to be seen

🌪️

If you really want to #FreeAlex

You need to accept the truth

The Dutch government has a great case

The @TornadoCash team and their investors made bank from the code

It was not an open source project

It was a for-profit company pretending to be “decentralised”

$TORN is shite

He is not just an open source developer

He is a token creator

I have no idea why the $TORN token even exists

It makes no sense to me whatsoever

If you look at the distribution of the tokens, you can see it is run by a few wealthy guys

We should destroy the “DAO” immediately

This trial should be a lesson to founders of protocols:

Stop launching tokens to get rich

Only launch a token if you absolutely have to

Does your project NEED a token

Or do you WANT to dump a token

We are learning as Ethereans that certain tokens will put you in jail

🪬

My conclusion so far is simple:

You cannot say “oh, fuck” to OFAC

The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") of the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy”

home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/…

Their case is great: don’t profit from privacy

Our case is a giant pile of horse shit

UNLESS

We burn Tornado Cash to the ground

Start again

Without a stupid fucking VC pump token

And we do encrypted Ethereum properly

The way the old cryptographers did

Like badasses 🪬

If you are gifted with an attention span of 33 minutes, watch this for me:

All I can tell you is: I don’t understand Dutch, so I don’t understand much

But I like his lawyer, a lot

But he is really busy

Alexey deserves full time legal representation 🫶

I am willing to fight for a man who is in jail for no good reason

But I think the American government have some very good reasons to put him away

He violated everything they stand for

And made bank doing it

The people I hold responsible are @1kxnetwork & @dragonfly_xyz

🖕

If @lalleclausen & @hosseeb do not burn their $TORN

I really do not know what to say

They are flying around the world in private jets

Meanwhile one of their founders is in jail

They could have touched down in Amsterdam

But instead they are hiding

Behind their laptops

🤬

Time and time again we see VCs torching communities for their LPs

They suck up all the community liquidity

I know how much money these douche bags are making

All their addresses are really obvious

They think they are clever investors

But when you go to prison

They vanish!

The Ethereum community was warned during the ICO boom of 2017-2018

Be careful with your ERC20 standard

Then the “investors” showed up and wrapped all the deals up in “SAFTs”

Then during the next bull run investors dumped their “investments” on manic retail buyers

It’s awful

Yet no one went to jail

But then you HAD to go and launch a fucking money laundering ponzi that helped the North Koreans and put your investors into the next comma club

This was a serious mistake

Infrastructure that runs on Ethereum can just… run

Uniswap & Tornado are …

… meant to be utilities for the community

Instead they have been taken over by investors, “liquidity miners” (another thread in itself), and total charlatans

You don’t think people scammed the airdrops for both systems?

The SEC is coming for $UNI

OFAC took down $TORN

👁️ 👁️

In truth, I am pretty happy that the old crop of people is being slowed down

A new breed of founder is emerging:

They launch code freely into the world

If people use it they can make a profit

If no one cares about the project, it dies

Privately funded tokens are not cool 😤

If you make something people need

There will be a way to make money

But what you really have to ask is this:

Do you absolutely, unequivocally, totally NEED a token?

Or is it just sad that you are jetless?

How much money do you NEED?

How much money do you WANT?

I am $TORN

I have left the court and I am going to rest

See you all soon

#FreeAlex

I want to be crystal clear: I want Alex to be free

But you have to see the world through others’ eyes

The case does not look good to anyone who is new to it

My goal was simple: try and understand

I will put my shoulder to the wheel for any Etherean

This is scary stuff 💪

In any debate, you have to see the world from many different lenses

I have spent a lot of time and money on this case

I have done my best to help

But after a lot of thinking and listening, I think the case is not as simple as the crypto media are portraying

That is my view

It also turns out to be the view of people who really care about him

My goal, as always, is to help founders

If you go to prison for being an Etherean, I will try and help you

But you have to start to understand the system that put you behind bars

Governments are seething

We are stripping away their powers and getting rich doing it

You have to pick your battles

I am not saying people should not be wealthy

I am saying if you decide to push against the system, you need to do it carefully

Stripe changed things with great counsel and investors

Ethereum is more chaotic, of course

But that does not make the consequences any less serious

Nation states will not hand over their power lightly

And you have to think carefully about *how* you make your money

They are going to use it against you

That is what I have seen 🪬