Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point that went right over the head of you and the head of the other authoritarian that he is responding to is that there is no victim, not even a risk of a victim or any other bad "externality" (to use a word I know you people love) to money laundering just as a standalone act. The crime is defined in statute as a matter of convenience for the state because having privacy regarding where money comes from/goes ma…
IANAL, not a US citizen and I have no intention to dig into how the US defines money laundering. That said, when I hear "money laundering", I exclusively interpret this as the act of whitewashing money aquired by illegal means (e.g. drug sales, extortion, fencing stolen goods etc.) in order to make it appear legitimate. In that regard, there is nothing that is not bad about money laundering (IMHO). Of course you coul…
GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
171–180 of 526 posts
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not after the creators. The contributors. People who were submitting code changes to an absolutely legal piece of software.
...that enabled nefarious people to go about their deeds unpunished.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GitHub had to do this. They only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction. It's not clear that they limited themselves to those. It would in fact seem to be hard to contribute in the limited time range between establishing the sanction and removing the project. There is also the collateral damage of removing unrelated projects that happened to be owned by these people. Couldn't github…
Any chance the blocked accounts had forks of the repository? That'd be an unsurprising heuristic.
Edit: Unless it was members of the organization who had direct write access to the repos? Which I saw mentions of in other comments.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tornado Cash is a protocol. It targets EVM, and has been deployed on Ethereum, Optimism, Avalanche, Polygon and other networks. It happens to be open source, the code was mirrored on GitHub for research and contributions. They are setting a precedent that any forks or similar implementations of this protocol will also be sanctioned. A comparison would be sanctioning the Matrix protocol because it facilitates end-to-e…
You can still use the Tornado protocol for handling double-blind experiments in a lab without fear of being sanctioned. You cannot launder money, though. This is forbidden regardless of which method you use (crypto, art, car washes, etc). These sanctions are saying "we consider this specific use of this specific algorithm to be illegal, so if you interact with it via these wallets you will be sanctioned too". But the…
Even then, the algorithm and Tornado are not the same thing. It seems unlikely you can use Tornado itself for this purpose, even if the algorithm itself is useful.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked? (It’s not clear from the thread whether the people blocked contributed after, or only before, the sanction.) For what it’s worth, I don’t see much evidence of people being upset at GitHub in the thread. There’s talk about decentralized alternatives, but not much actual pinning the blame on them.
This is the crux of the issue in my opinion. It seems ridiculous that the sanctions should apply retroactively to anyone who has dealt with a sanctioned entity at any time in the past - if the people contributed before the sanctions, they were not contributing to a “blocked person”, as the project was not blocked at the time. Imagine if, say, A foreign electronics company is sanctioned by the government - does this m…
We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly. Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors, regularly and without basic measures to address its risks.
This according to the treasury goes on for years since its creation, so everyone who actively contributed to the entity is considered a threat to national security and often, if you look at the sanctions list of OFAC sanctioned entities, rightfully so.
Retroactively, and to my knowledge, there is not a single investigation and OFAC sanction that got lifted by a court because the accusations themselves were wrong. And it's not like you don't have the right to appeal those sanctions. Entities and sanctioned people quite often do so, and fail.
See https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/judgments.nsf/C2B2FFF... for example.
Tornado Cash is not just a foreign electronics company that stumbled into an OFAC sanction because it accidentally sold a Toaster to Kim Jong-un, so he can enjoy a crispy morning toast.
Where you are right is, that OFAC sanctions are a significant impediment to commerce because you cannot predict who will be sanctioned in the future. That's why, as a company or even individual, you need to do due diligence on who you get in business with.
If you import fruits and someone gives you 5k per box of Avocados extra to import them from Mexico to the US asap, you can bet there are not just Avocados in those boxes. You can pretend you didn't know, but if you don't want to end up in jail for providing service to a cartel, you need to make sure there are only Avocados in those boxes and the premium is for extra fast shipping.
Everyone knows that virtual currency mixers are commonly used by illicit actors to launder funds, especially those stolen during significant heists. This is at least common knowledge since the Silk Road days.
So if you contribute to such a project, that has the potential to harm your fellow citizens and contribute to financing of terrorism, without making sure it is complying to Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations one hundred percent, you can't just cry foul play and say I didn't know anything of this. Especially if you understand code and the inner workings of said project or have a direct line to the people in charge if you frequently contribute.
So, in my opinion it's more than ok if everyone who contributed to Tornado Cash and enabling it to do what it is accused of, their life should turn to sh*t immediately and everything they touch from here on. Because getting people harmed or financing terrorism or foreign state actors is not a trivial offense. Laundering virtual currency for criminals hurts real people.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#176Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many other applications for Tornado Cash than “money laundering.” What if I don’t want my employer or friends to see what I do with my known wallet on a fully traceable public blockchain? Privacy is not illegal.
No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cut and dry if the open-source contributors are "blocked persons", but are they? They'd no longer be allowed to contribute to the project, but does someone having contributed in the past mean the sanction on the project extends to their person? Github themselves provided hosting to the project.
It's quite possible these contributors had forks, which is why they were blocked.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be that as it may, isn't this still an unacceptable collateral damage? So when you contribute code to an open source project, you generally do so under an open source license. All of them generally contain something akin to the following: IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (this particular excerpt is from the BSD li…
Why is it unacceptable?
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cut and dry if the open-source contributors are "blocked persons", but are they? They'd no longer be allowed to contribute to the project, but does someone having contributed in the past mean the sanction on the project extends to their person? Github themselves provided hosting to the project.
Yes it almost certainly does. Sanctions work because they are virulent.