The rivalry between the two privacy wallets — Samourai and Wasabi — which the Bugle record documents in two incompatible registers. The news desk covered it in 2023 as a feud that ended in a negotiated peace. The podcast panel, from 2024 onward, never once treats the two as equals: Wasabi is a defector and Samourai is a martyr, and neither the ceasefire nor the parity it declared is ever mentioned again. Neither wallet holds a wiki page of its own; both exist here only as things other people say.

Who’s in it: Samourai Wallet · Wasabi Wallet · characters/rod-palmer · characters/richard-greaser · characters/frank-corva

Related: storylines/samourai-wallet-saga · storylines/church-of-compliance · storylines/fincen-kyc-surveillance · storylines/feds-in-bitcoin

The ceasefire (2023)

The feud’s documented terminus came first. In May 2023 the two projects declared a ceasefire on their official Twitter accounts, citing the need for privacy advocates to unite against CBDCs, having reportedly worked through years of bad blood via professional mediation.¹ Max Hillebrand was quoted welcoming the end of arguing with “Samourai trolls”; a handful of individuals from both teams were reported to have quit in protest.¹

By December the news desk had turned on Samourai alone, crediting it with a marketing strategy borrowed from soccer: flopping, and accusing others of censoring its product, as its usage declined amid high network fees.²

irl: Samourai Wallet’s founders were arrested and charged in April 2024; the Bugle’s 2023 coverage predates that.

The compliant coinjoin (2024)

The podcast record opens with the wallets already sorted into a moral hierarchy. Answering a boost about which CoinJoins have “affinity with NGU”, characters/rod-palmer redefined the primitive entirely: “I think the best coin join is a Bitcoin meetup.”³ characters/richard-greaser supplied the compliant implementation — everyone pulls out Wallet of Satoshi at a meetup and pays $25 to the person on their right, in a circle — and approved of Coinbase blocking deposits from Wasabi and “Samurai” as “on the noncompliant side”.⁴ At this point the two are still a bloc, and the bloc is the problem.

The bloc broke six weeks later. Rod recast Wasabi’s exit and return as a labor action: “So Wasabi was joining the compliance strike. CIA” — it struck against a noncompliant government until the CIA “somehow convinced them to come back to the fold”.⁵ His diagnosis of the arrangement was that “it’s not symmetric privacy”.⁶

Adjacent to the wallets, and only adjacent, the panel later crowned Monero the coolest shitcoin on the grounds of undetectability: “you don’t even need to tell anybody that you’re using Monero This is one of the reasons why it’s the cool shit coin is because people won’t even know you’re using it.”⁷ Greaser ruled Monero boosts unreadable in the same breath; Rod’s justification was that reading them “doesn’t go with the ethos of privacy.”⁷ The beat’s attribution to this storyline is marginal — it concerns privacy tooling generally rather than either wallet.

Compliance as retrospect (2025)

Asked what was going on with the Samourai case he covers, characters/frank-corva reported having lectured the defendants outside the courtroom: “I tried to stress to them the importance of compliance. You know, they made a mistake,”⁸ — and relayed that the devs had come to understand that Bitcoin never needed to be mixed, it being a foregone conclusion that any transaction can be traced anyway.⁸

Rod ran the opposite argument a month later, reasoning from the premise that coinjoins are not illegal to restitution for plebs whose coins were seized in coinjoin busts: “so the people who have lost their coins for that matter should get those back.”⁹ No wallet or defendant is named in the passage, which surfaces inside a bit about the CIA laundering money in Ukraine; the Samourai reading rests on the coinjoin-bust framing around it.

The asymmetry got its explanation in May 2025. Greaser observed that some defendants lack “meme power” — hadn’t “paid a bunch of designers to make, you know, cool branding” and a catchy slogan, free samurai.¹⁰ The panel worked out why Samourai draws a defense fund and Wasabi never could: “free samurai” is a shirt that sells out in an hour, and “Free wasabi sounds like something that a Japanese guy yells before he climaxes.”¹¹ Nobody, it was noted, is putting free wasabi in their Nostr profile.¹² Greaser drew the operational lesson: everyone should focus on brands and memes now, so that when they are jailed it is easier to raise money for a legal defense.¹³

Meme quality, on this account, is the actual determinant of who gets rescued. It is the closest thing the storyline has to a verdict, and it does not favour Wasabi.

Disputed

Did the ceasefire hold? The record does not say, and its two halves cannot both be right.

• The news desk reported a mutual, public peace in May 2023, with both projects optimistic and setting an example for the rest of the industry.¹
• The podcast record from April 2024 onward never acknowledges any peace or any parity. Wasabi is described as having been brought back into the fold by the CIA,⁵ the arrangement as “not symmetric privacy”,⁶ and the two wallets’ fates as divergent enough that only one of them is memeable enough to be worth rescuing.¹¹

Henry’s note: the possibility that the ceasefire simply collapsed is not documented anywhere — no source reports it breaking. The panel writes as though it never happened.

Span. This page previously gave the storyline as 2023-05 to 2023-12 and sourced it to a breadth sweep of headlines. That was the news layer only. The episode record extends the arc to 2025-05-17; the span and sources are corrected above.

Footnotes

1. Bugle News, 2023-05-04 — “Samourai and Wasabi Declare Ceasfire And Agree That Bitcoin Privacy Is A Team Effort”. The article’s slug does not match its headline. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Bugle News, 2023-12-11 — “Samourai Wallet’s Marketing Strategy Similar To Soccer Flops”. ↩

3. Bugle Weekly 5 @ 1:00:38. ↩

4. Bugle Weekly 5 @ 1:02:31. ASR renders Samourai as “Samurai”. ↩

5. Bugle Weekly 11 @ 12:14. “Sabi” at the preceding cue is ASR for Wasabi. ↩ ↩²

6. Bugle Weekly 11 @ 12:08. ↩ ↩²

7. Bugle Weekly 36 @ 54:12. ASR renders Monero variously as “Mirror” and “the narrow”; Rod’s justification is at the same cue. Beat confidence: medium. ↩ ↩²

8. Behind The Podcast 9 @ 47:53. ASR renders Samourai as “samurai” throughout. ↩ ↩²

9. Bugle Weekly 50 @ 15:51. Beat confidence: medium — no wallet or defendant is named at the cue. ↩

10. Satarize the System @ 1:09:41. ↩

11. Satarize the System @ 1:10:33. ↩ ↩²

12. Satarize the System @ 1:10:13. “nostril” is ASR for “Nostr”. ↩

13. Satarize the System @ 1:11:03. ↩