[sangnoir]

> Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering

I have questions: did money laundering happen on the platform? Did the developer financially benefit from the money laundering? If the answer to both is "yes", then it sounds like the developer could be in a world of trouble, which is not related to crypto.

If I build a picture-sharing board with no moderation, and I profit from illegal pictures being shared, I would be in trouble for facilitating crime, that doesn't go away because I implement the picture-sharing on a blockchain. Using crypto to implement any system doesn't make it kosher: as far as the law is concerned,a system is what it does, not how it does it.

[ABeeSea]

They were also asked to implement some basic money laundering preventions. They did nothing.

[eric_cc]

Didn’t they throw away the keys to the smart contract a long time ago?

[Vespasian]

If they did that probably doesn't matter.

"I built a bomb I can't disarm" is not a credible defense.

It'll be especially nasty if they profited from the service after throwing away the keys and "learning" of the money laundering going on there.

Walking away a year or two ago would argueably have helped them.

[jjulius]

Exactly. I understand the sentiment that people are sharing around, "They're just being arrested for writing code!", but intent matters. And it seems like, in this case, there may have actually been intent to develop this to assist with illegal activities.