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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#351

Post by jasonlotito »

seanw444 wrote: post #255
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN in its current avatar would probably cheer on if the Patriot Act was enacted today. Been on this site for a decade. Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.

Yeah when I first discovered this site in like 2017, it seemed to be a place of tech-literate counter-culture folks. Now the counter-culture seems to be non-existent, and actually looked down on. At this point, the majority of the comments I read sound like a CNN anchor script. Ha, maybe it's their web developers.

> when I first discovered this site in like 2017, it seemed to be a place of tech-literate counter-culture folks.

Yep. I could see why you would think that.

> Now the counter-culture seems to be non-existent, and actually looked down on.

What changed?

> At this point, the majority of the comments I read sound like a CNN anchor script.

There it is. Your attitude. Your comment.

HN is still mostly what it was when I first joined. The issue isn't that HN isn't counter-culture.

Rather, you aren't.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#352

Post by fisf »

seanw444 wrote: post #303
dannyw wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does contributing to an encrypted messaging app, like Signal or Matrix, also mean you're enabling / facilitating child pornography and terrorism? Keep in mind that a cryptocurrency private key is just a bunch of bytes, like this: `KwTHJw865SLeTAjK7otYb5bL5mwutBb2vDxxF7kGf5XvY7QttnvM`

The popular consensus on HN seems to be that the government having absolute monopolistic control and power over personal finance is inarguably good. "But money laundering!" so? "But evading taxes!" so? You can catch people in the act of attempting to commit these crimes if your agents aren't lazy shits. Forcing everyone's transactions to be public and traceable just so it's easy for the government to arrest people is…

The consensus on HN regarding crypto, privacy, and free speech has shifted considerably over the years.

I have a hard time pinpointing the time, or identifying the reasons, bit the current sentiment towards some of those topics is chilly.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#353

Post by glennvtx »

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

You don't have the ethical right to force people to disclose their financial transactions, either. Nor use threats of violence against people for designing tools that allow people to keep their transactions private. Doing so is the action of tyrants. Many people in the world do not have the luxury of immunity from state violence for supporting activism, and this technology is meant to shield them from such.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#354

Post by akimball »

seanw444 wrote: post #272
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…

Everyone keeps mentioning how "it's why criminals use cash, so there's no point in banning this, as they'll just resort to using cash." But they must fail to notice that various governments of the world are trying to implement a trackable digital currency to replace cash. They don't even like cash either.

Halting grey and black market transactions would destroy ~15% of global GDP, causing mass disruption, poverty, starvation, global unrest. Bad idea.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#355

Post by matthewdgreen »

sva_ wrote: post #325
whatisweb3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A piece of code that has been actively maintained by a group of people.

Maintaining code is, in the US, likely a 1st Amendment-protected activity. Operating live services like a mixer (including any RPCs needed for Tornado) is not. (And yes I know this arrest was not made in the US, so that might be the distinction.)

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#356

Post by BobbyJo »

rchaud wrote: post #347
BobbyJo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is very much enshrined in US law, it's the 4th amendment to our constitution.

Strange how the NSA can just skate through this. Then again, the US Constitution also says "All men are created equal" and that was a bunch of horseshit for centuries.

Laws need people willing to uphold them. It's a good thing when laws are unreasonable, and a bad thing when people are unreasonable.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#357

Post by lalaland1125 »

chitowneats wrote: post #330
dcolkitt wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the international law enforcement community is really trying to go after "all cryptographers" why do you think we haven't seen more arrests? Why do you think they only arrested this guy? Because the standard playbook for "cracking down" is to first win cases against the least sympathetic, most prosecutable targets. Once that's under your belt, you gradually expand outwards to increasingly ordinary people. It's w…

"Some will ... arrest anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood" This is a hysterical prediction.

Yeah, you can't make postfacto laws.

Sure, the government might make it illegal to donate to Planned Parenthood in the future but per the constitution they can't make prior donations illegal.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#358

Post by akimball »

probably_wrong wrote: post #341
yawnxyz wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my opinion, this (very popular!) line of reasoning is missing the forest for the trees. A knife is widely regarded as a tool that's legal to own and that, save a few precautions, you can carry with you. Switchblades, despite being also knives, are widely considered dangerous and their sale and possession is overall restricted (presumably) due to a strong correlation between the presence of a switchblade and stabbi…

That presumption would be incorrect

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#359

Post by puszczyk »

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…

> This is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control.

Who is “they”?

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#360

Post by JumpCrisscross »

akimball wrote: post #338
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's a future you're on board with I'm rejecting the premise that we need a neutral money supply. (I reject the notion such a thing can exist. Money--monetary value, even--are social constructs.) International trade in a multipolar world with sovereign currencies and commodities works. It has since at least the Bronze Age. So yes, if someone wants to cart around gold or use crypto, that's fine. But it doesn't mag…

Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money. Since 1971? Yes. That is a very brief experiment in monetary history, and quite Lindy. It can be validly estimated to have 51 years of life left in it (albeit with vast error bars, difficult to calculate).

> Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money

"Neutral money" has no meaning in an era when information travels at the same speed as trade. (It arguably lacks any meaning today.)

Bronze Age civilizations didn't have the surplus labor to haul around gold. (Nor to test it.) Though they didn't have coins, they used token money--from engraved clay and stone markers to shells and beads. Commodity money was traded in representative form locally and physically over long distances. Commodities, not bullion, were used because they preserved value over distance--a Hittite trader couldn't know what a gold bullion would exchange for in Hispania or Egypt when they got there.

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