I don't know why the sensation is that the subpoena is not such a big deal but I am worried about eXch. What will you do? Are you going to face them on November 16th...? Or... are you going to be absent and see what happens...?
Besides, I see in that paper that it's stated that it should not be made public... What if they will find about the post from the forum?
Is it a big deal for mixers who certainly received many of them already but without a public disclosure? You know the answer, therefore the same applies here. I have purposely linked this post
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.62858665 in the subpoena post to demonstrate that it's an ordinary situation for us to handle, however, I will quote the relevant part from that post here:
Now, in regards to law enforcement requests:eXch was built with an idea to make operators identity disclosure practically impossible so the service can be resistant to law enforcement. Operational security was our priority #1 from the first steps of the project creation.
We have very strict data retention policies that can be compared to most mixers on this forum. We do not log IP addresses (having .onion domain is a proof for that) or any other user metadata and delete order database records 15 days after order completion. We also provide users with an option to request data deletion immediately after order completion which can be done by pressing the "Delete data" button at the order's page (you can find more information at
https://exch.cx/tos).
Keep in mind that we don't differ from any mixer on this forum in regards to risks associated with unwanted data disclosure, since any mixer is also a centralized entity that uses the same database technology as we do and a single database can become a weak point of any service anytime, independently of how many times their marketing speech repeats the words "privacy" and "anonymity". We don't use these words much and instead we use full disk encryption on all our servers to prevent any unwanted situations as much as possible. An unexplained reboot of some server is a sign that a server was compromised and it's a clear attempt to compromise our LUKS keys with a modified bootloader.
We do not cooperate with law enforcement nor have to do so, since we are an anonymous entity that works with cryptocurrency only. A few events that could serve as a proof:
In the first half of 2023, users deposited a total of 9,983 ETH (approximately $17.72 million) into eXch, and deposited a total of 6,608,354 ERC20 stablecoins (approximately $6.6 million) into eXch.
(Note: they were only able to gather these statistics on the Ethereum blockchain, since we use a single aggregation address
0xf1da173228fcf015f43f3ea15abbb51f0d8f1123 for all Ethereum & ERC-20 exchange operations)
Note that it's not the first subpoena we have received and published, nor it it will be the last, since we know how to handle such situations. You shouldn't worry about eXch, but should worry about mixers instead.
Note also that Twitter discloses subpoenas to their affected users independently whether there is a gag order or not, because it's their company policy:
[Twitter link] [Nitter link]Our policy is to do the same, except producing information related to exchanges since we don't have it nor obligated to have it, because we do not operate with any financial instrument according to the current legal definitions of cryptocurrency.
Other than that, eXch please don't forget about my
previous post, in case you missed it.
I am fine with all kind of translations in case there is some interest in doing so. This is a community after all.