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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#111

Post by viridian »

p49k wrote: post #86
DocTomoe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 importan…

Ironically, I find your interpretation of the parent comment uncharitable, because I never would have framed the core argument the way you did.

I don't think the behavior and results of airplane hijackings pre 9/11 fall into common knowledge, even on hacker news. That's a pretty niche, specific collection of 20+ year old historical facts.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#112

Post by oneplane »

hansvm wrote: post #100
closewith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous cash transactions in the Netherlands over €10,000 are already illegal ( https://www.amlc.eu/cash-limit/ ). The government intends to ban cash transactions over €3,000.

The way I read that, large anonymous cash transactions in a non-professional capacity are still fine? Could I not gift somebody a million cash euros or buy a home with cash?

I doubt any company wil accept that, and suddenly owning a new house with no data on where that money might have come from will raise so many red flags, you'll be able too start a new flag company.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#113

Post by whatisweb3 »

alkonaut wrote: post #93
Tepix wrote: post #29

Wow, 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…

> Wow, 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. Does that really make a difference? I’d not worry about writing anything and putting it online saying “this can be used for evil so don’t do that”. But if I was approached by a criminal who ask…

This is not a criminal hiring a contractor to work on Tornado Cash. It is an open source project on GitHub that many developers and researchers contributed to, in the interest of privacy.

To use an analogy, see the open Matrix protocol, a tool for privacy that can facilitate encrypted communication between criminals.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#114

Post by whatisweb3 »

sva_ wrote: post #37
Tepix wrote: post #29

Wow, 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…

People getting arrested over crypto mixers is nothing new at all.

US sanctions on mixers in the past have been associated with an individual, not a piece of code. This is the first sanction to target an open source and non-custodial mixer.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#115

Post by jagged-chisel »

hansvm wrote: post #100
closewith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous cash transactions in the Netherlands over €10,000 are already illegal ( https://www.amlc.eu/cash-limit/ ). The government intends to ban cash transactions over €3,000.

The way I read that, large anonymous cash transactions in a non-professional capacity are still fine? Could I not gift somebody a million cash euros or buy a home with cash?

In cash? Anonymously? Probably not, even without regulation.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#116

Post by whatisweb3 »

phphphphp wrote: post #3
Arnt wrote: post #2

So a software developer is held responsible for the software. If the software is largely SaaS, then I can see the sense in that. A software developer of SaaS is also a service developer, arguably even a service operator although that depends on how the service is developed and operated. I'm sure the judge will be thrilled to have to listen to arguments about the with the nuances of dev, ops, devops and a distributed…

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 this logic, all E2EE and open source privacy tools should have their developers arrested. Matrix, Tor, PGP.

The stated goals of TC was privacy. Privacy is not a crime.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#117

Post by throwoutway »

Tepix wrote: post #29

Wow, 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…

I think the only real case the gov would have is if he ‘knowingly’ supported laundering for sanctioned nations, like if he noticed it, and commented on Twitter or discord to a friend like “Ha! Look, DPRK used my tool”.

However, if that did happen, the gov also just gave him threee days lead time to delete any evidence of that, which is extraordinary. I’m surprised the arrest and sanction did not happen on the same day

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#118

Post by biglearner1day »

Jensson wrote: post #99
willcipriano wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you it's even easier to find the CEO of a major bank.

Yeah, but then they would imprison the CEO and not the developer. Very different, especially since it is easy for CEO's to say that they weren't aware of any criminal activity. A developer who directly develops the feature is much easier to blame.

> Yeah, but then they would imprison the CEO and not the developer.

While they do get blamed, the Netherlands doesn't seem to care all that much. They seem very selective with how they react to supposed money laundering

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ing-groep-settlement-mone...

https://www.dw.com/en/how-ing-bank-in-poland-helped-russians...

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#119

Post by aqme28 »

sph wrote: post #36
Tepix wrote: post #29

Wow, 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.

My pet theory is that he's just one of the myriad of early developers who made hundreds of millions from crypto and keep relatively private. At that point he'd have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by revealing himself.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#120

Post by egorfine »

Tepix wrote: post #29

Wow, 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…

This is perfectly going to fly if they find one small chat where he admits he merely knows that his code was used for money laundering.

If memory serves me correctly, the ground for convicting Phantom Secure was the fact that one of the founders admitted that he knew that his service caters to criminals, although the service itself is not illegal.

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