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GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

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Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#341

Post by bilekas »

syzygyhack wrote: post #296
bilekas wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly high rate of money laundering in relation to the entire flow of cyrpto. You should know comparing traditional fiat against crypto doesn't make sense.. But I guess I'm the one who's ignorant. There is a good paper overviewing a lot here : https://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/dipartimenti/... It's more of an essay but all all stats are referenced. Also another good read : https://ciphertrace.com/q3…

> You simply can't argue that money laundering isn't rampant on cypto currencies. Actually, I can quite easily argue that. Neither of your sources give evidence or numbers that justify your assertion. In fact, less than 1% of transactions are shown to be illicit activity, and the majority of that is scams, not money laundering. Here's a report from your 2018 source, CipherTrace, only using more recent data: https://c…

Just to comment one thing lastly.

I think we have two different opinions on a side topic of Money laundering in regards to Tornado.

The original OP is the US Gov and GH overreaching and on that I fully agree.

I don't think your comments should be downvoted to oblivion at all. You definitely make some good points. I don't have all the real data in front of me so I'm just suspicious when there's a tool like Tornado.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#342

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

tromp wrote: post #290
skywhopper wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they fail to take steps to prevent it, they are often punished. Here’s a few big ones from 2021 alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/03/24/le... Why aren’t these banks put on the sanction list where it’s a crime to do business with them? Because the vast majority of what they do is not money laundering and when they are discovered money laundering, they generally stop. And when they don’t,…

> and nothing was done to stop it. What could be done to stop it? It's just a contract run on the blockchain. I suppose they could limit throughput, but not much else?! Similarly, what could the Monero or ZCash developers do to stop money laundering on their blockchains? Here, not even throughput can be limited since amounts of transactions are completely hidden.

Well, there's a lot of obvious strategies that money processors in similar positions employ. They could confirm the identity of their users so that known criminals can be filtered and blocked. They could manually audit large transactions and require documentation demonstrating that they're legitimate. I understand why they don't want to do things like this, but I'm just not sympathetic; it sounds to me like a group of bankers in 2012 announcing their strong ideological commitments that LIBOR manipulation is good and they should be allowed to continue doing it.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#343

Post by TruthIsHeresy »

revscat wrote: post #333
dogman144 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be on the “be reasonable” side of this I suppose. Plenty of organizations in the past have chosen what side of this conceptual line to stand on. One can end up looking like the EFF with a long term, very strong reputation of standing up for clear boundaries of what’s right in the legal code context and go to court over it, or you can end up looking like GitHub.

Honestly, I don’t care what happens to crypto bros. They put profit before environment. Fuck em.

It’s amazing how well the media is able to reprogram the minds of the masses into mindlessly regurgitating its talking points. “Crypto bad” seems to be a big one for 2022.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#344

Post by matthewdgreen »

junon wrote: post #7

People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned . > These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person. This is, unambiguously, di…

GitHub is, by their own choice, a massive global library or bookseller of code. They effectively made the choice to take books off their shelves and cease accepting new ones from specific authors, because the US government made them afraid. This should not happen in a country governed by our First Amendment. And, having chosen to take on this responsibility, GitHub/Microsoft’s attorneys should have to courage to stand up for those principles and be rightly criticized if they fail to.

Note that hosting code and free developer accounts does not require GitHub to accept or pay money to the developers (who are not named explicitly in the sanctions order, by the way.)

ETA: Big tech companies have a lot of resources and freedom to devote those resources to defending their users (see Google and Twitter lawsuits.) But they’re self-interested and won’t do that if they think their user-base won’t hold them responsible for doing that. I think GitHub is responsible here and I wish the HN commentariat would recognize that their opinion matters. By excusing the company’s cowardice here, we are incentivizing more of it in the future.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#345

Post by jakelazaroff »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #318
jakelazaroff wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say this about anything, though. "My university requires us to use Blackboard, therefore it's a de facto monopoly." "My work email account is through Gmail, therefore it's a de facto monopoly." They're still not. If another party requires you to use a service for some reason, that's between you and the other party.

Common carrier is a more useful limit function. Common Carrier

Replace "monopoly" with "common carrier" and my comment still reads the same.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#346

Post by Bedon292 »

dogman144 wrote: post #330
Bedon292 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its important to make a distinction between GitHub attempting to ensure they are in legal compliance with a sanction and approving of the sanction happening at all. You can disagree with the sanction while still being understanding of GitHub trying to cut ties with the sanctioned entity. Or be critical of them being heavy handed in their compliance but agree with the sanction in general.

You’d be on the “be reasonable” side of this I suppose. Plenty of organizations in the past have chosen what side of this conceptual line to stand on. One can end up looking like the EFF with a long term, very strong reputation of standing up for clear boundaries of what’s right in the legal code context and go to court over it, or you can end up looking like GitHub.

What grounds would there be to fight? I don't think GitHub has any standing to fight the sanctions themselves. And if an entity is sanctioned all US persons and companies must stop providing them services. Hosting a git repo for them certainly counts as a service, doesn't it?

Perhaps there is some grey area as to what qualifies as a service being provided to that entity. Is my fork still a service being provided to them? Or is it a service being provided to me? But that is still something useful to the sanctioned entity, so am I now providing them a service? In which case GitHub is still a party to providing them a service.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#347

Post by [deleted] »

dogman144 wrote: post #337
revscat wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don’t care what happens to crypto bros. They put profit before environment. Fuck em.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#348

Post by salawat »

bhaak wrote: post #31
wesleywt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is code speech? To me it is the equivalent to nuts and bolts of a machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States > After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.

The 9th Circuit has also ruled that bees are fish[1], and has regularly bucked precedent that to most of the country is settled jurisprudence. [2] This escalating to a point one of the Circuit's own judges began lambasting the Circuit itself. [3]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/us/california-bees-fish-court...

https://www.courthousenews.com/carrying-guns-in-public-is-no...

https://reason.com/2022/01/26/a-federal-judges-satirical-opi...

You'll understand if what the 9th Circuit declares has lost a touch of automatic deference from an intellectual, rational consistency, and linguistic abuse point of view, I hope.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#349

Post by jakelazaroff »

dogman144 wrote: post #337
revscat wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don’t care what happens to crypto bros. They put profit before environment. Fuck em.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

The whole point of the energy critique is that it's being wasted on something either useless or deleterious. You can argue with that take, but all you're doing with the "but what about dishwashers?!" response is asking them to pass a moral judgment on dishwashers, which isn't relevant to this discussion.

Also, Ethereum has been "soon to be env-friendly PoS" for years now. Let's revisit that if and when it actually happens.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#350

Post by andsoitis »

blagie wrote: post #209
oliwary wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - GitHub can block whoever they want. But doing so despite not being required to by law is a valid reason to criticize them.

No. I disagree. Github should not be able to block anyone they want. We went through this about a century ago with railways, antitrust, and Standard Oil. I won't step through the details, but can provide more background if anyone cares. We landed with the concept of a "common carrier." Railways, as well as telecommunications companies, ISPs, public airlines, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, cruise ships…

> As an individual or a small business, ones does not have an alternative to github

Why do you say that?

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