This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity. Crypto lawyers have drawn on his prior decisions in the context of the Tornado Cash sanctions, for example.įaruqui spoke with Protocol about the power of his position, and what people in crypto should understand about the law. But the ways Faruqui has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster. Bitcoin’s immutable ledger was used to find the perpetrators.Ī magistrate judge doesn’t set precedent in the same way as a Supreme Court justice - stare decisis only must be obeyed by lower courts, and Farqui’s is not the highest. Particularly well known was a case involving a dark-web site called “Welcome to Video,” which had facilitated some 360,000 downloads of sexually exploitative videos of children to 1.28 million members worldwide using bitcoin. There, Faruqui prosecuted cases that involved terrorism, child pornography, and weapons proliferation. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., that called themselves the “Bitcoin Strikeforce,” and worked with agencies like the IRS and FBI in federal investigations. Rather, before taking the judge position Faruqui was one of a group of prosecutors in the U.S. His knowledge isn’t the product of spending time on crypto Twitter.

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