Keonne Rodriguez, who was recently sentenced to five years in prison for his work on privacy-focused bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet, has warned that miners could be the next part of the Bitcoin ecosystem to be targeted by lawmakers and regulators in the United States. The warning came during an interview with TFTC released on Tuesday.
“I think more builders in the space should be looking at what the government has done here, and really shoring up their defenses,” Rodriguez told TFTC host Marty Bent. “At some point, the government will come knocking.”
Rodriguez went on to explain that miners make the most sense as the next target if the money transmission arguments used against Samourai Wallet are taken to their logical conclusion.
“If you really want to put it through that lens, then the only people who are actually performing ‘money transmission’ on the Bitcoin network are the miners because they’re the ones that are selecting which transactions go into a block,” explained Rodriguez. “All of the transactions Samourai Wallet created, while unconfirmed… there was no transmission. Nothing moved. It wasn’t until the miner included it in a block that it became a transaction for real.”
Rather than simply rounding up miners and throwing them in jail, Rodriguez thinks they will simply be told to only process transactions from whitelisted entities such as Coinbase and other regulated exchanges. Simply put, a transaction would be ignored if there were no real-world identity tied to it in some way. In various forms of crypto legislation around the world, these transactions have been referred to as payments derived from “unhosted wallets.”
Operating in a peer-to-peer method without trusted, hosted wallets controlled by third parties was the original point of Bitcoin in the first place. However, much of the industry has strayed far away from that original intention, particularly when it comes to the rise of stablecoins.
“To me, this seems like a pretty obvious next step for a government that wants to—not destroy Bitcoin because that would be counter to their desires—they want to control Bitcoin, and that’s a great way to do it,” Rodriguez added.
Notably, an implementation of this sort of scheme by researchers at MIT caused controversy nearly a decade ago. At the time, the method of financially incentivizing miners to only process transactions from whitelisted addresses was universally rejected by Bitcoin users as an outright attack.
It should also be noted that such a scheme would require coordination from at least 51% of Bitcoin’s network hashrate to work, as transactions would otherwise still get processed by non-compliant miners. To achieve network-wide compliance, a majority of miners would effectively need to censor non-compliant transactions and also reject mined blocks that included non-compliant transactions.
Mining has routinely come up throughout Bitcoin’s history as a major aspect of the system that has a troubling degree of centralization involved. In addition to the potential for these sorts of 51% attacks, the centralization of mining has also held back potential technical developments such as sidechains.
If you only learn one thing about the OP_RETURN drama, make it this.
From a network perspective, the most important risk to Bitcoin’s longevity is mining centralization, by far.
Just when we’re on the cusp of making transaction selection decentralized with Braidpool, P2PoolV2,… https://t.co/d2nrRM1zTn
— Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) October 8, 2025
While there has been a push to further decentralize the mining process through schemes that take transaction selection out of the hands of pools and into the hands of individual mining operations, these innovations have yet to see widespread adoption.
Of course, President Trump’s own family is also heavily involved in the bitcoin mining business through American Bitcoin, which means a crackdown on the industry may be less likely—at least while Trump is still in office.
Trump has faced accusations of obvious corruption associated with the pardon of a former crypto exchange CEO who was convicted of money laundering charges that aren’t too dissimilar from the kind of crime involved in the Samourai Wallet cases. The Samourai Wallet developers are now seeking pardons of their own, but it’s unclear if a lack of a business relationship with a Trump-affiliated crypto company means the developers will be out of luck.
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