Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 526 posts

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

#361

Post by 7steps2much »

peterbraden wrote: post #298
jakelazaroff wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an individual or a small business, ones does not have an alternative to - Microsoft Word — Google Docs? Apple Pages? Zoho Docs? OpenOffice? - GitHub — GitLab? sourcehut? Bitbucket? Gitea? - Facebook — Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? SnapChat? The thing about Git is that it's free software. Anyone can run their own server for very little money. If you get banned from the railroad, you can't just get your own train.

So what if the company you work for requires github?

In that case use your company provided account. Just like all tools I would expect that to be provided by the company and as such availability of these tools wouldn't be my problem.

Also, use a private account for private stuff, if that wasn't obvious

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

#362

Post by bad416f1f5a2 »

WoahNoun wrote: post #231
jacooper wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes Then american banks should be sanctioned, they are also involved in money laundering too.

Banks make good faith efforts to prevent money laundering. (KYC and SARs in particular). If tornado had KYC, this wouldn't be an issue. :)

"I'm the compliance officer for a crypto mixer" sounds like a job you do in purgatory.

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

#363

Post by moron4hire »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #230
moron4hire wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone want to dispute that Tornado Cash is a money laundering tool? When at least 20% of the money that has moved through it is already known to be ill-gotten gains, with the rest being indeterminant, it's kind of hard to say it's a anything but a money laundering tool. I've only seen childish arguments that "money laundering is a fake crime", not that Tornado Cash isn't a money laundering tool.

It is a tool for privacy, full stop. Criminals can use this for criminal activity, law abiding citizens can use this for law abiding activity. Also see end-to-end encrypted chat apps, VPNs, onion routing and other privacy tools that are widely used by criminals. also consider applications that might be illegal but often considered moral like paying for an abortion with tornado cash ETH in a state where abortion is il…

So "privacy of money movement" is not "money laundering". I see.

Y'all always wanna talk about what people could use the system for and never what people actually are using it for.

Well, if it's just about privacy, then I guess those people could use other forms of money laundering. Aherm, I mean "privately moving large sums of money around to avoid regulatory oversight".

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

#364

Post by whatisweb3 »

zaphar wrote: post #352
whatisweb3 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you are, in two ways: 1. You are using and supporting the same protocol that they are also using. As the application grows and improves because more people are using and supporting it, the criminals are also being helped. 2. You are creating cover. The more people that use Tor and Matrix, the more secure it becomes for all users within the network. If you and a criminal are both using the same Matrix server, nei…

You seem to be arguing as if this is an all or nothing proposition. Instead there are definite degrees of intent and interaction here. In the E2EE case the degree of interaction and intent is quite low. In the mixer case the degree is quite high. The line I believe should be drawn somewhere in the middle. But the Mixer case definitely is on the wrong side for me.

E2EE is all-or-nothing. You don't see Matrix adding a special case in the encryption technique to notify authorities if the phrase "nuclear" or "minor" appears in a message. The intent of E2EE and Tornado Cash is exactly the same: privacy. The line you draw here is arbitrary based on your own subjective view of the space.

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

#365

Post by shakezula »

SXX wrote: post #24

This is a good time time for EFF to step in. This is open huge so many terrible ways for abuse. 1. Make some random crypto project. 2. Motivate people contribute to it, see DigitalOcean hacktoberfest. 3. Replace the code with Tornado.Cash source. Everyone's account is banned by Microsoft. Also I wonder what happen if you didnt sent PR yourself, but someone crafted git commit with your email and added it to such repos…

I would encourage everyone on both sides of this argument to watch this [1] video from Peter van Valkenburgh at ZCON. It lays out a very clear argument why this is really much more serious than just a sanction against a bad actor.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpTrCA3tEKM

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

#366

Post by whatisweb3 »

moron4hire wrote: post #363
whatisweb3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a tool for privacy, full stop. Criminals can use this for criminal activity, law abiding citizens can use this for law abiding activity. Also see end-to-end encrypted chat apps, VPNs, onion routing and other privacy tools that are widely used by criminals. also consider applications that might be illegal but often considered moral like paying for an abortion with tornado cash ETH in a state where abortion is il…

So "privacy of money movement" is not "money laundering". I see. Y'all always wanna talk about what people could use the system for and never what people actually are using it for. Well, if it's just about privacy, then I guess those people could use other forms of money laundering. Aherm, I mean "privately moving large sums of money around to avoid regulatory oversight".

People are using the system for these reasons. Vitalik himself has gone on record saying he has used Tornado Cash to donate large sums of money anonymously to Ukraine.

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

#367

Post by moron4hire »

whatisweb3 wrote: post #366
moron4hire wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So "privacy of money movement" is not "money laundering". I see. Y'all always wanna talk about what people could use the system for and never what people actually are using it for. Well, if it's just about privacy, then I guess those people could use other forms of money laundering. Aherm, I mean "privately moving large sums of money around to avoid regulatory oversight".

People are using the system for these reasons. Vitalik himself has gone on record saying he has used Tornado Cash to donate large sums of money anonymously to Ukraine.

Conveniently no way to actually verify that

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

#368

Post by bdw5204 »

kranke155 wrote: post #207
outsidetheparty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant. You'd think after 16 years I'd be used to it, but it still kinda blows my mind that the social network designed for context- and detail-free hot takes is the one people use for political discussion.

Most political discussion fits your description perfectly, so of course it does. Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct.

> Having to explain yourself long form leads to people attacking you and often being correct.

Typically, people just take a paragraph or so of a long form political argument out of context and use it to call the person making the argument evil. Which is basically the same principle as the typical political attack ad where you take a sentence your opponent said out of context to make your opponent look like a crazy extremist.

With a short form discussion platform, you can just go straight to the personal attacks, name-calling and out of context distortions of the other side's beliefs. Then we wonder why we suddenly live in a country where the 2 political parties can't compromise on anything and where one of the top political priorities for both parties is prosecuting and jailing their political opponents. I think its very dangerous to view most political discussion being short form context free hot takes as either inevitable or healthy for a government based on free and fair elections (such a norm, however, is probably beneficial to the long term stability and security of a dictatorship). In a society with a democratically elected government, you need free, civil and respectful discussion of issues and a basic level of respect for those who disagree with you. Remove those things and democracy dies just like a plant dies if you deprive it of water and dirt.

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

#369

Post by kube-system »

freeone3000 wrote: post #321
kube-system wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two lines in the list were not ETH addresses: > TORNADO CASH (a.k.a. TORNADO CASH CLASSIC; a.k.a. TORNADO CASH NOVA); > Website tornado.cash;

Which is a company name and a website, not people. A company name listed in this manner does not extend to its employees unless they are acting on behalf of the company; any sanctions against individuals specify the individual's name.

That’s correct. But given that GitHub is a publicly available website, the only way they can prevent employees of that company from being aided by the GitHub website is to remove that company’s code from their website. And because users can create accounts freely without proving employment information, their only way of determining which users could be affiliated is by activity.

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

#370

Post by pessimizer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #193
tromp wrote: post #144

Earlier 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…

> only had to block accounts that contributed after establishing the sanction The people who built Tornado Cash are already in trouble. The crime--facilitating money laundering--has already been committed. OFAC is an enforcement office. Its lists are more like wanted posters than rules. GitHub is cutting ties with people likely to be charged with federal crimes. If some of them are going to continue contributing to t…

> GitHub is cutting ties with people likely to be charged with federal crimes.

This is a far different standard. If we're talking about banning people because they seem like they might get charged with something, that's just a blacklist.

> If some of them are going to continue contributing to the project, GitHub doesn't want to be the conduit through which it is done.

That's why you delete the repositories. These are not sanctioned persons, this is a sanctioned project.

Post reply on HN