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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
81–90 of 827 posts
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#82Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right. Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important. And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers? This…
Financial privacy is not a human right.
Moreover the kind of financial privacy you think of is from other citizens to not know your financial movements, it doesn't apply to nation states for obvious tax reasons and money laundering purposes.
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can easily turn into a big deal if the arrest means you're locked in a cell for awhile.
What is the alternative?
Summons the person to court and only issue an arrest warrant if they fail to appear.
This is SOP for the bulk of nonviolent crimes in the US.
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#84There’s a big legal distinction whether the developers are collecting fees from operation of the service, since that’s very different from merely developing open source software. I’m curious how this develops > It is suspected that persons behind this organisation have made large-scale profits from these transactions.
Exactly like original of developers of Bitcoin, it's not because they are not running the nodes themselves that they are not benefiting from facilitating ponzi or money laundering. Nodes are running the network, and developers earn through increased coin value and both are necessary part of the operations of the service.
Coders logic != legal system
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although Bitcoin is resistant to the "charismatic leader" problem, his second coming would give him incredible fame, following but also personal danger. Yet I do not think any human would resist a moment in the spotlight, if not to renounce its child and its current direction.
I think someone who believes that it will bring certain death could resist. It wouldn't surprise me if he destroyed his private keys to prevent himself from ever succumbing to the temptation. Those coins are of little value when using any of them would kick off a race to track you down and kidnap you with the intention of rubber-hosing the key out of you before going short on bitcoin. Having a secret in your head tha…
He must have lost the keys very early, when Bitcoin was just a fun experiment, and that would still be dubious: how did he imagine his creation would be so big as to prompt destroying his keys right there and then? The common human response at that idealistic stage would be greed.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what world would they want to encourage hijacking or even remotely benefit from hijacking ? It doesn't make any sense
"Not doing everything to prevent hijacking" is not the same as "encouraging hijacking". Semantics and formal logic matters.
From the guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
The person's core argument was obviously that "airlines do what they can to keep people safe rather than financially benefiting from criminal activity" which distinguishes Tornado from airlines and web browser developers.
As an aside, it was less important to prevent hijacking before 2001 because the end result of most hijackings before then was that nobody got hurt if pilots complied, so there would be no reason to place a cockpit door. That strategy obviously changed after 9/11.
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly like original of developers of Bitcoin, it's not because they are not running the nodes themselves that they are not benefiting from facilitating ponzi or money laundering. Nodes are running the network, and developers earn through increased coin value and both are necessary part of the operations of the service.
Yup exactly, the mistake these guys did here is, instead of creating a token that you have to buy to use the service, then giving yourself 50% of the token supply, and having 50 of your keys control a "DAO" for governance, they decided to flatly price.
You've inadvertently explained why a transparent ruse like that wouldn't work.
If you want to develop serious privacy technology, make it open source and don't benefit from it financially
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you design software to do a thing and then the software is used to do that thing, it follows that you’re responsible. Whether you believe that the sanctions make sense or not is one thing, but to argue that the developer of tornado cash is not responsible for… the behaviour tornado cash… feels like a hard sell.
By that logic why haven’t the developers of Metasploit also been arrested? It’s hard to argue that the behavior of the software isn’t/couldn’t be used for nefarious purposes and to commit crimes. Anonymizing spending on it’s own is not a crime. Clearly the line is crossed if the developer is promoting the use of the software for illegal purposes. I’m only vaguely familiar with Tornado cash, was that the case? If not,…
Software doesn’t come to be through immaculate conception: the authors created it, knowing it could be used in this way.
If a company releases software that is used nefariously, there are very common legal actions to hold them accountable. For example, Facebook has extensive legal obligations to meet to do with behaviour on their platform.
I am not arguing that tornado cash should be illegal (or that encryption should be illegal) rather I am arguing that people are responsible for the software they have created.
If I commit a crime, my intent is absolutely a part of the equation when determining legal action. Why should it be any different with software?
If you wish to argue that the right to privacy is so great that it exceeds any risk of criminal activity, and thus the developers of tornado cash were doing something for the greater good, so be it (that’s probably the position I would take) but it doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.
Taken to the extreme, if I build a piece of software that can save the lives of murder victims by killing the murderer: I am responsible for the killing of (intended) murderers. We might decide that the activity is justified, that the software is operating for the greater good and is therefore permissible, but that doesn’t change my responsibility.
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#89A message is circulating in russian crypto groups, that two more developers were arrested: Roman Panchenko in Seattle, and Nikita Dementyev in Tallinn.
(I can't verify the veracity of this report, but if true, this looks like it was a coordinated international police operation)
Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash
#90Wow, just wow. Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity? There must be more. Perhaps he also deployed it? That would be a different story. The article is quite murky in that regard. Perhaps they don't know yet. In there is an interesting paragraph explaining what Tornado Cash is: … The ( criminal ) origin of the cryptocurrencies is…
Satoshi has demonstrated inhuman levels of restraint. The only explanation is that he is dead. The others are that he is not human, or that it's a committee defying Hanlon's razor: i.e. not governed by stupidity like most human affairs, but malice. Both are equally improbable.
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