They were misrepresenting their enterprises as "churches" and telling their customers to report their transactions as "church donations". So it looks like the fraud, wire fraud etc. charges might stick.
Feds allege that about every unregulated crypto exchange of any kind.
It does seem like this particular business was relying upon legal hacks and obscurity more than following the established rules for financial firms, probably for ideological reasons.
I don't know, this seems like straight up money laundering versus just operating in a grey area of the law. They setup a tax-exempt church and ran over $5M through it. Now I think driving an armored vehicle into this guys house was excessive but I don't think he's innocent either.
I noticed that as well. Typical for the Feds when they deal with technology, unfortunately. Read about the old "operation sun devil" raids way back when to see how long they've been overreaching.
I'm going to take a very, maybe excessively, cyclical view on this and claim that the feds were using basically excessive force specifically to intimidate anyone who might get a similar ideas. Then again without raids, it's possible that laundered money could have been hidden while the feds were biding their time.
Is the 97% for how many were executed that way, or for how the warrants were issued? Could it be that they're just defaulting to asking judges for the more permissive version of a warrant so that they have it in case something makes them want to do it that way, but often actually knocking and executing the warrant the same way they would if they hadn't got a no-knock one?
Of course that still wouldn't be good, but less bad than actually using the ability to perform a no-knock raid 97% of the time.
There is no Bitcoin economy here and the libertarians didn't build the economy that does exists.
TLDR;
A group of bitcoin enthusiasts convinced 20 local business to accept "some form of" bitcoin as payment and also spent years operating in a legal financial services grey zone. The Feds arrested them.
What I did find distressing about this article is the level of violence the police used used to arrest someone with no history of violence.
For anyone interested in reading more about the libertarian movement in NH, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is an interesting read.
I do get the RATM ethos and the libertarian ideas. I don’t support them but I do get where they are coming from.
Given that, can somebody explain to me how does BC solve any of the things they don’t like? Instead of a faceless bureaucracy, there is now a dynamically complex computer system controlled by God knows whom the inner workings of which are even less transparent to a layman than those of the us monetary system. How exactly is this better? Don’t tell me it being “open source” solves anything. BC is an emergent function of a large network of thes open source nodes depending on policy and configuration for much of its functionality instead of the specific math which, as all crypto, relies on people not advancing too fast and people can only hope is properly implemented.
