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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

#371

Post by gaspard234 »

TruthIsHeresy wrote: post #343
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.

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.

In what way has 'the media' pushed crypto is bad?

Seems like every celebrity and talk show host was pushing NFT's, be it Kardasians, Kimmel, Fallon, even Bill Murray released a collection 1 month ago. Ultra stars like Tom Brady to Mark Cuban were investing and (still) talking about crypto companies they are heavily invested in. Half the superbowl ads this year were advocating for people to waste money on crypto.

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

#372

Post by fuzzythinker »

bkq wrote: post #2

For those wondering Tornado here appears to refer to Tornado Cash [1]. [1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/8/us-announces-sanctio...

Ya, really need to change the title. Tornado is known to many as the python web server.

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

#373

Post by tromp »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #342
tromp wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I don't see how blockchain devs can do any of these things. Nodes and miners run the network, not devs.

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

#374

Post by Nursie »

dogman144 wrote: post #312

The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.” - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The cas…

I don't find "facilitating mass money laundering" to be as compelling as the other cases, frankly.

This doesn't mean that any/all measures taken against them are automatically justified, but it's large-scale crime, and it's not in the realm of "information wants to be free", it's actual money laundering, for actual criminal cartels and actual rogue states.

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

#375

Post by cortesoft »

whitepaint wrote: post #134
kube-system wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s morally deplorable to demand office workers risk jail time just because you want a free service. If you want to run git for free, run it on your own computer.

I am not demanding anything. I am just saying they have clearly done the wrong thing.

Are you suggesting the right thing would have been to refuse and risk going to jail?

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

#376

Post by klyrs »

paulgb wrote: post #11
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…

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.

> Does Tornado being sanctioned mean that everyone who has contributed in the past also needs to be blocked?

I'd say that this is a significant risk that people doing DeFi need to have a long, hard think about. Without a clear organization, without clear leadership, one cannot draw a bright line around those who deserve sanctioning. In court, efforts made towards plausible deniability might pay off. But github is not the courts, its interest is its own liability.

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

#377

Post by andrewjmyers »

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.

So I'm actually interested in these figures.

Bitcoin alone is estimated to use 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.

The US Department of Energy estimates that there are 80 million households with dishwashers in the US (although they believe 16m never use them, but we will ignore that). It appears that the average dishwasher uses 251kWh annually (at the avg of 215 cycles per year).

So this would put the US annual dishwasher power consumption to around 20 terawatt-hours. This would mean that the rest of the world would need approximately 518 million household dishwashers used 215 times a year each, to make up the rest of the power usage for just Bitcoin.

When you start factoring in the size difference in dishwashers between countries, the power usage differences between 120v and 220v in different parts of the world, the overall adoption rate of dishwashers etc... it makes it hard to believe that they could compete with crypto power usage.

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

#378

Post by bad416f1f5a2 »

toolz wrote: post #314
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> circle has blacklisted any USDC address that has been owned by the tornado cash protocol, which means anyone using tornado cash for legit purposes will lose every dollar they had in USDC Wasn’t aware of that. Fair enough. Innocent people will get harmed. That said, innocent users whose USDC was frozen haven’t lost their money. They’ll have to show they weren’t laundering money. When they do, they should be able get…

> They’ll have to show they weren’t laundering money. When they do, they should be able get it unfrozen. I hope you're right, but the process to make this happen will be painful and slow and the damages will not be compensated I suspect. > If you don’t want to run the risk of your stablecoin getting stuck, don’t use mixers. Particularly after they’ve been publicly identified for laundering money. Following this logic…

Morally speaking? Yeah, you should probably not use those banks if you care about the ramifications of money laundering.

Practically speaking? HSBC laundered $881 million in 2012 – but they had trillions of dollars of assets under custody. They may have to pay a big fine, but your ability to get at your money will not be impacted.

And even if you deposited your money into your account at "Money Laundering Bank N.A." where everyone but you was a specially designated national, you still have legal recourse to those funds backed by decades of case law. That same case law might help you if you keep money from a mixer in stablecoin that becomes frozen, but it's going to get way hairier.

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

#379

Post by blagie »

chii wrote: post #246
blagie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Microsoft Word, github, or Facebook. Google Docs, gitlab or bitbucket, and as for social network there's plenty out there. None of those are real monopolies. They _might_ be best in class, but there's no rule that says you must be allowed to use the best in class service.

Let me make this simpler, since there are a lot of comments like yours:

1) If I want to exchange redlined documents with lawyers, I need Microsoft Word. I cannot run a successful business which deals with law firms without Microsoft Word. Most businesses need to deal with law firms. If Microsoft shuts me out of Word, I cannot have a business.

2) If I want to promote my local business, I need to be on social media platforms which my likely customers use.

3) The same goes for niches. If I'm supporting K-12 writing teachers, I need to support Google Docs.

It's not a question of alternatives, best-in-class, or anything else. It's pure network effects. If a platform is >50% dominant in my market, I need to support it, or I'm out-of-business. No one will switch from Twitter to Mastodon or Parler for the sake of doing business with one small business. They'll go next door.

Once a firm has that level of market power, I think it ought to be regulated, both for the same reasons and in the same ways as railways were in the days of Standard Oil.

These companies can literally just kill a small business if they chose to. That's not healthy.

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