At 5am, Lauren Rodriguez woke to laser sights, a drone flying through her house, and 40 armed federal agents raiding their cottage, all because her husband built a Bitcoin wallet.

Keonne Rodriguez co-founded Samurai Wallet in 2015, a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with privacy features including Whirlpool, their CoinJoin implementation. For nearly a decade, the wallet operated openly on the Google Play Store with no issues. Then on April 24th, 2024, the FBI and IRS launched coordinated raids on the Rodriguez home in Pennsylvania and co-founder Bill Hill's home in Portugal.

The charges: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business and conspiracy to money launder. The problem: FinCEN's own guidance stated that non-custodial wallets are not money transmitters. And six months before indictment, prosecutors asked FinCEN directly whether Samurai was a money service business, FinCEN said no. The prosecutors buried that answer, a Brady violation.

Lauren walks through the full story; the raid, the discovery process involving 17 terabytes of evidence, the sudden judicial switch from a neutral judge to a former chief of the SDNY criminal division, the five-minute hearing where every defense motion was denied without explanation, and the impossible math of a plea deal versus a 25-year trial exposure with a hostile judge.

Keonne is now serving a five-year federal prison sentence. Lauren is fighting for a presidential pardon for both Keonne and Bill.

Sign the petition and support their case at BillandKeonne.org.

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

Lauren Rodriguez: https://x.com/leamuirleyn

Sign the Petition & Donate: https://billandkeonne.org/

"5 to 10% is going to cause immense damage. When cash flows stop at the margin, everything collapses because of leverage."

Nik Bhatia returns to break down the macro landscape as war in Iran sends oil to $100, the dollar surges, and volatility clouds the outlook.

Nik explains why he's wiped the slate clean on his macro thesis, why the US economy may still avoid recession despite the chaos, and how the Genius Act could reshape the global dollar system through stablecoins.

We also get into AI job displacement, why treasuries are still the bedrock of global finance, Bitcoin's decoupling signal, and whether the four-year cycle is finally dead.

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

Nik Bhatia: https://x.com/timevalueofbtc

Is Bitcoin's four-year cycle still intact, and what does that mean for the next six months?

In this episode, I sit down with The Rational Root to break down where we are in Bitcoin's cycle, why on-chain data is flashing bear market signals despite Bitcoin holding up through the Iran war, and what the bottom formation could look like from here.

We discuss the shift from retail hype to institutional adoption, why OTC buying from ETFs and treasury companies dampened this cycle's price action, how gold and AI stole Bitcoin's mindshare, and whether passive flows from the likes of Saylor could prevent another leg down. Root walks through his key on-chain charts and explains why he thinks there's still a probability of one more drop before Bitcoin starts its next move up.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

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BITKEY

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Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny

The Rational Root: https://x.com/therationalroot