This is the reason interview. I'm Zach Weissmuller filling in for Nick Gillespie.

And today I'm speaking with Keone Rodriguez, founder of Samurai Wallet, a privacy tool that allowed users to anonymize their Bitcoin by mixing it with other Bitcoin.

He's now facing five years in federal prison. And Samurai's former CTO William Hill is facing four.

We recorded this conversation 48 hours before Rodriguez was supposed to report for prison.

This is the recent interview with Keone Rodriguez.

Keone Rodriguez, thank you for talking with Reason.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on the talk.

Yeah.

So we're speaking about 48 hours before you're set to report to federal president

to serve a five-year sentence for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting

business, which you did plead guilty to.

We're going to talk about why you did that and why a guilty plea isn't actually as

indicative of real guilt as it might seem in today's legal system.

But first, I do want to acquaint everyone with the essentials of the case.

You launched a product called Samurai Wallet about 10 years ago.

What is it and why did you create it? Sure. Yeah. So Samurai Wallet is what we would call a non-custodial

Bitcoin wallet. Non-custodial only means that the user of the wallet or the software is the one

that maintains total, complete control of their private keys or of their Bitcoin, as opposed

to custodial, which means, which is like a relationship that you have with your bank, right?

You walk into the bank, you give them $100. That $100 is

yours, but the bank is the one who's holding it for you. So we built a non-custodial open source

piece of software, a Bitcoin wallet named Samurai wallet. And the reason we did that, well,

...