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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#291

Post by dimensionc132 »

kube-system wrote: post #259
clippablematt wrote: post #60

Ah 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…

The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law. Every country recognizes warrants for this reason.

Except the Seychelles. There is a reason why dirty money and shell companies make the Seychelles their home as well as the wealthy elites mentioned in the Pandora Papers.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#292

Post by suoduandao2 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #209
suoduandao2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justifiable by what, exactly? International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on. Is the argument that every government should have an unchecked ability to enforce its will on the medium of exchange?

> International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on Do we have such a money supply? If not, do we have international trade? Is the world not multipolar? This claim fails on face value. Most of history was multipolar, international trading and reliant on money states de facto controlled. (You’re not moving tonnes of gold without the state’s…

>Is the world not multipolar?

An argument could be made that the US stopped being the arbiter of last resort wrt the medium of trade since the Ukraine war, but before that point, it was certainly not multipolar. There was one political entity that, along with its allies, controlled the value of money, and they were disincentivised from cheating too hard by the fact that they could dictate terms to the rest of the world if it was important enough to them.

But I grant you, heavily-guarded ships full of physical gold would still work today. If that's a future you're on board with you may want an answer for how the piracy problem will evolve if trends around the cost of kinetic weaponry continue.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#293

Post by seanw444 »

tgv wrote: post #77
ucha wrote: post #11

This makes so little sense to me. I don't know how much information is made public by the Dutch justice system but I would really like to see an affidavit or something like it to understand what specific charges are levied against that developer.

Once the trial starts, certainly journalists should be able to read all of it, unless the court decides some of it is too sensitive. The verdict will be published at rechtspraak.nl.

A trial that has far-reaching effects on the populous, being hidden from the populous. That would be entirely unsurprising.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#294

Post by WFHRenaissance »

kube-system wrote: post #259
clippablematt wrote: post #60

Ah 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…

The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law. Every country recognizes warrants for this reason.

> The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law.

Sufficiently good use of sufficiently good privacy technology would make this judgement impossible. What happens then? Good luck not becoming a police state.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#295

Post by jiggawatts »

yawnxyz wrote: post #274
dcolkitt wrote: post #260

A lot of the apologists for this are making arguments along the lines of "being decentralized doesn't make you exempt from the rules" or "imagine if a bank laundered this much money". The problem is it doesn't make sense to treat protocols like companies. And it definitely doesn't make sense to treat protocol devs as if they were the executives of those companies. The CEO of a bank and the lead dev of a protocol have…

Isn't this kind of like the dev of SMTP getting arrested because two people committed a crime by communicating through email?

Or arresting Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, or Leonard Adleman for helping criminals hide their communications from law enforcement.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#296

Post by seanw444 »

greatgib wrote: post #239

It is said that they are prosecuted for:. "environmental crime" Good example again of low profile laws that are abused by government and police forces to get to their objectives.

Thanks to government bloat. Have less minute laws, have less agents to enforce minute laws, have less funding to hire agents to enforce minute laws.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#297

Post by giaour »

sneed-oil wrote: post #241
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't open source privacy code. Whether or not someone else does something bad with it isn't relevant. Until you can face what it really is, you aren't going to come to terms with what's happening. This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations, then complaining "but I'm not the burglar, I didn't kill anyone" when you get shut down. This is and always has been the obvious ex…

> you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides Maybe you don't, but that's what happens by default when using cash

Cash is unwieldy in large amounts, which is why most authorities don't care about cash transactions. When cash is used at scale for anonymous transactions (e.g., when the US airlifted cargo planes full of cash to Iraq in 2004 to pay government workers without an Iraqi paper trail), it is international news.

If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD), I guarantee that no one in authority would give a shit.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#298

Post by agotterer »

Sebb767 wrote: post #284
agotterer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't speak for the US, but in Germany, transactions between countries over 10k€ must be reported to the Bundesbank. There are similar limits for inner-country transactions with businesses, especially financial ones. I assume the USA has similar rules. So small cash transaction are fine, but as soon as larger sums are involved it's going to be very problematic. Since crypto currencies, nearly by definition, don't c…

These are fair points and I believe there are similar laws in the US.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#299

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #204
whatisweb3 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem to believe that if a tool is illegal, as long as it's open source and the people making it don't have a criminal background, and as long as you call it something like "privacy software," somehow it's suddenly not illegal But this is a tool whose specific purpose it is to make it difficult to track illegal transactions. Of course this is happening. Programmers get way too wrapped up in "but I called it open s…

Same as Bitcoin is going away?

Please.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#300

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

tinco wrote: post #219
whatisweb3 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time a developer of open source, non-custodial and autonomous smart contract code has been arrested comes days after the US sanctions the same smart contract. Probably just a coincidence.

It says in the article that the person has benefited financially from this. It's not about making open source, I don't know why people are raising that red herring. Implementing a mixer is (probably) not illegal in The Netherlands, putting one in production and setting it up in such a way that you benefit from it absolutely is. I don't believe it's a coincidence that the sanctions and the arrest happened close togeth…

But it WILL be about open source and dec networks when someone forks it.

Same as the Silk Road/darkmarkets argument.

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