According to Gizmodo, Keonne Rodriguez, the co-founder of the privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet, was recently sentenced to five years in prison. In an interview released on Tuesday with the TFTC podcast, Rodriguez issued a stark warning that Bitcoin miners are likely the next target for U.S. lawmakers and regulators. He argued that if the government’s “money transmission” logic used against Samourai is followed to its conclusion, then miners are the only ones actually transmitting value on the network by selecting transactions for blocks. Rodriguez suggested regulators could force miners to only process transactions from whitelisted, identity-linked entities like Coinbase, effectively censoring “unhosted wallet” payments. He believes this is the government’s path to controlling, not destroying, Bitcoin.
The Chilling Miner Censorship Logic
Here’s the thing: Rodriguez’s argument is legally terrifying because it’s not completely insane from a regulator’s warped perspective. If creating an unsigned transaction that hasn’t been broadcast is “money transmission,” then what is the act of finally confirming and settling that transaction? The miner’s role. It’s a classic case of regulatory overreach searching for the next pressure point. And the proposed method—whitelisting transactions from regulated exchanges—hits at the very heart of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer promise. It turns the network’s decentralized validators into compliance officers for the state. We’ve seen this movie before, too. The article mentions an MIT proposal from nearly a decade ago that suggested paying miners to censor certain addresses, which was immediately rejected as an attack. But now, the “payment” might be avoiding a prison sentence.
The 51% Problem (And Why It Might Work)
Now, the immediate counter-argument is the 51% rule. For this censorship to work network-wide, you’d need a majority of miners to collude. So, couldn’t honest miners just keep processing the “illegal” transactions? In theory, yes. But in practice, the mining industry has a well-known centralization problem. A few large pools control a huge portion of the hashrate. If the U.S., China, or the EU strong-arms the major publicly-listed mining companies and the biggest pools, you could get to 51% a lot faster than we’d like to admit. They wouldn’t be “rounding up miners,” as Rodriguez says. They’d be serving subpoenas to corporate boards and threatening their executives with the same charges he just faced. The compliance would come from the top down.
Winners, Losers, And A Trump-Shaped Wildcard
So who wins and loses in this scenario? The obvious winners are the giant, regulated custodians like Coinbase. Their transactions get fast-tracked, and their business model of being the regulated on/off ramp is cemented as not just a convenience, but a *necessity*. The losers are anyone using Bitcoin as intended: for permissionless, peer-to-peer value transfer. Privacy tech, decentralized exchanges, and even simple self-custody become exponentially harder. The article throws in a massive political wildcard, though: the Trump family’s involvement in Bitcoin mining through American Bitcoin. Would a regulator really crack down on an industry the President’s family is invested in? It’s a messy variable that makes predictions even harder. But it also highlights the corrupting influence of centralized power—something Bitcoin was literally created to bypass.
A Fight For The Soul
Basically, this isn’t just about legal technicalities. It’s a fight for the soul of the system. The push to decentralize mining further, like taking transaction selection away from pools, is no longer just a nice-to-have technical improvement. It’s a critical defense mechanism. If Rodriguez’s warning is even half-right, the resilience of Bitcoin will be tested not by hash power alone, but by the courage and decentralization of the people running the machines. The government might want to control it, but the final line of defense is a network that’s truly uncontrollable. The question is, have we built that yet?
