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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#141

Post by Bedon292 »

lizardactivist wrote: post #45

Sad to see the EU bow down to the criminal racket that is the US financial system. Even if this developer is not extradited, the US has again succeeded in maintaining the culture of fear, where they can get their slimy hands on anyone anywhere for any reason they want.

I'm not sure I follow. Is this not an arrest for violation of laws in place in Netherlands? Their criminal investigation started two months ago, not because of the US sanctions. How is this the EU bowing down to the US financial system?

The timing of the arrest could be a reaction, if they thought it might spook the suspect into fleeing or something along those lines. But that doesn't equate to bowing down either.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#142

Post by nootropicat »

Governments started the offensive. Now decentralization actually starts to matter.

Ethereum is switching to PoS at the last minute, PoW miners are very easily forced to enforce sanctions because they can't hide due to enormous physical and legal presence. Home stakers can easily hide and break the law.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#143

Post by whatisweb3 »

paulsutter wrote: post #129
whatisweb3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic every blockchain developer should be arrested. The TC developers are not collecting fees directly, but they probably did give themselves a large supply of tokens to maintain control over the protocol, since the tokens were designed for governance. You can name any blockchain and see the same pattern. You can name many applications on top of blockchains, like Uniswap, and see similar. All of these protoc…

No this means that you should talk with a serious law firm before you start one of these projects. OFAC, KYC, securities, AML/CFT, so many laws apply and without expert advice you can end up in a bad spot Expert lawyers do exist, example: https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/professionals/j-dax-hansen.ht... "Dax has advised and continues to work with many of the leading companies, industry associations and consortia. Proje…

There is still no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny." If there is another US sanction that targets a non-custodial smart contract and open source project, please do share.

Devastating that it has come to "do not code an E2EE privacy tool because you might find yourself in jail one day."

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#144

Post by shawabawa3 »

sph wrote: post #85
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I think it's likely when they started Bitcoin they used a "genesis" account which they never intended to keep the keys of

They probably also had other keys that they mined early coins on that they did keep, this would be consistent with Satoshi being Hal Finney or Nick Szabo

> 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.

1. They probably made enough off BTC to retire rich already, why go through any trouble to make even more money (not everyone has the drive to accumulate billions when they already have millions)

2. If they've destroyed/lost the original keys there is no way to prove they are Satoshi and nobody would believe them, like Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi and started a BTC fork which picked up very little traction

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#145

Post by diogenes1 »

threeseed wrote: post #66
once_inc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a mixing service that allows people to buy stuff without their employers being able to track it is a legitimate, non-trivial reason. These mixers are privacy enhancers. Privacy is a general term, and doesn't have to relate to evading the government. If you don't want your employer to know you've bought an NFT from your company's direct competitor, that is a privacy request too.

Except that privacy is not some human right enshrined in law that usurps other laws. If you facilitate money laundering that is still a crime even if the intent was for legitimate reasons like privacy.

so when are we arresting engineers who built roads and trucks that were used for money laundering?

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#146

Post by bathory »

wolongong942 wrote: post #133
PeterisP wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC you can't buy a house anonymously in Netherlands, no matter if you pay with cash or not, you'd be required to register the transfer of ownership in the cadastral system, and any real estate deals must be with a written contract that identifies both parties. And I believe the NL tax reporting for large gifts also requires you to identify the donor. In essence, the limitation is not on the method of payment but on…

I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west. Typically all large transactions get auto reported to the financial intelligence unit, with the tax man getting access to the data set as well. If paid via crypto they'd find out when the recipient cashes out, forcing him/her to do source of funds.

Wrong. Germany for example is known [0] for money laundering through properties, because big cash purchases hardly ever get reported.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-15/germany-t...

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#147

Post by closewith »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #140
wolongong942 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west. Typically all large transactions get auto reported to the financial intelligence unit, with the tax man getting access to the data set as well. If paid via crypto they'd find out when the recipient cashes out, forcing him/her to do source of funds.

At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names. Last time I sold a house, the only reason I met with the buyer directly was because I didn't use an agent for the sale.

What about 1099-S reporting?

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#148

Post by rdbell »

lysergia wrote: post #101
sph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Committee? Like as in Satoshi was a team of people? That’s one possibility. As a side note the Nakamoto Institute website archived all of Satoshi’s emails and ‘his’ IP is Californian. Make of that what you will. For all we know it could’ve been one of Musk’s side projects that caught on and went viral.

Musk’s specialty is selling vaporware and big promises.

Satoshi released working software without prior announcements and did hardly anything to promote it.

I don’t know how anyone really thinks Elon could be Satoshi.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#149

Post by sidewndr46 »

closewith wrote: post #147
sidewndr46 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names. Last time I sold a house, the only reason I met with the buyer directly was because I didn't use an agent for the sale.

What about 1099-S reporting?

Home sales do not universally count as income. Also, it is important to realize that 1099-S reporting applies to individuals like a licensed realtor. Which I am not.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#150

Post by agotterer »

Sebb767 wrote: post #107
agotterer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Anonymizing spending on it’s own is not a crime. Money laundering laws very much disagree with this.

I’m not familiar with the money laundering laws. But do they state that you can’t buy something anonymously and without an audit trail? Because spending legally obtained cash seems anonymous to me. Is anonymizing your digital spend with legally obtained capital that different?
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