Today, closing summations wrapped & Judge Failla is now explaining the charges to the jury. This was my first time in a district court for a criminal proceeding, and in addition to learning I don’t have the art skills of @davidzmorris, including some observations from closing:

The government wants you to believe this case is simple. Specifically: “Remember, this is a simple story — a tale as old as time. It’s a story about greed.” But, it’s clearly not simple. We are talking about a decentralized financial innovation for a privacy-preserving protocol, which - like, hello, even that phrase alone needs multiple definitions. The government & their witnesses all acknowledge multiple times that Storm and his founders had “control of everything — except the pools.” This is a *significant* caveat. This caveat works reaalllyyy reallyyyy hard in the government’s case.

And, not for nothing - but it feels *very* big brother when the government says “normal ordinary people” don’t need financial privacy. When they say “the market is the criminals,” they ignore the realities of transacting on public blockchains & the very real reasons why someone might want privacy-preserving tech.

No one is contending that crime didn’t take place on Tornado Cash. It clearly did, but as the defense said in their closing: 👉“The software was not illegal.” 👉 “They do not have access to people’s money… and that’s the whole point” 👉 “Hacks & scams were not helping their one source of income” (aka TORN token prices) 👉 “Tornado Cash is not a money transmitting business”

It will be very interesting to see how a jury of our peers internalizes the evidence that was allowed to be presented in this case, but tbh: the government gave me the ick. The defense called the case “really disturbing” — referring to the “lengths they are going through to stretch things” to create an emotional appeal to the jury, and that rings true. It feels to me like there were too many weird moments & coincidences that took place during the course of the three weeks of this trial, so I am very eager to see if the jurors feel similarly.