Black Box Justice: What Bitcoin Developers Need to Know About How the U.S. Government Prosecutes the Blockchain
Bitcoin developers build open, permissionless systems, but the U.S. government increasingly treats that work as a criminal enterprise. From the prosecution of Bitcoin Fog’s alleged operator to the arrests of Tornado Cash developers, federal prosecutors are using novel legal theories, expansive readings of money transmission statutes, and unvalidated blockchain forensic tools to target the people who write the code. This talk examines the mechanics of how these investigations are built, the grand jury subpoenas, the blockchain tracing methodology, and the gap between what forensic software actually proves and what prosecutors tell juries it proves. As one of Roman Sterlingov’s trial lawyers, I have a front-row view of how these cases are constructed and where they fall apart. The government’s conviction of Sterlingov rested almost entirely on Chainalysis Reactor, a proprietary, black-box algorithm whose methodology has never been peer-reviewed, independently validated, or subjected to meaningful Daubert scrutiny. If you write code that touches Bitcoin, you need to understand the legal exposure that comes with it, what the government’s investigative playbook looks like, and why the forensic tools being used against developers deserve the same scrutiny we apply to any unaudited code.