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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#391

Post by amanaplanacanal »

akimball wrote: post #329
epolanski wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Financial privacy is definitely a right. The question is whether that right is respected by any given institution. Since it is against the interests of existing institutions to do so, they will not unless compelled by a greater force. Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights . (Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many looph…

I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#392

Post by emkemp »

dcolkitt wrote: post #363
kube-system wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 5th doesn't give you privacy to anything outside of your thoughts inside your head, which isn't related to anything being discussed here. Everything else in the US is covered by the 4th.

Wrong. For example courts have consistently ruled that you can’t be compelled to unlock your phone or decrypt your hard disk if you’re invoking the 5th

"courts have consistently ruled that you can't be compelled to unlock your phone ... if you're invoking the 5th."

This is demonstrably false.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/nj-supreme-court...

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#393

Post by jvdizzle »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #276
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.

So we're all suppose to become techno-anarchists? HN has a great balance of both, it's just mostly the crypto-obsessed that decry government encroachment because they're still struggling to find a useful purpose for the technology before they get regulated.

It's one thing to be a techno-anarchist and it's another thing to be reasonably skeptical about government and what it considers "justice" and the ramifications of that "justice".

The way the government has been approaching cryptography and privacy in general is very much "throw the baby out with the bath water, we don't need it". What is happening in the financial privacy space (i.e. developments in crypto) should be alarming to anyone who believes in democracy, in my opinion.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#394

Post by JumpCrisscross »

akimball wrote: post #377
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

The attachment of provenance to an item makes it non-fungible, removing it's moneyness, until and unless that history can be removed. Just-so stories based on implausible premises -”didnt have surplus labor" lol- are conspicuously unpersuasive.

> stories based on implausible premises -”didnt have surplus labor" lol- are conspicuously unpersuasive

Versus stories about neutral money?

Insufficient labor is a hypothesis. The archaeological evidence is engraved clay and stone markers. Long-distance trades settled with commodities. Bullion being traded between kings and kingdoms, seldom by merchants, and abandoned stores of value holding jewelry, precious stones and spices.

International trade in multipolar worlds does fine without a "neutral" money.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#395

Post by sangnoir »

formerly_proven wrote: post #340
chitowneats wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

a) Interesting choice of words b) Donating to PP is aiding murder (née abortions), it's a small step to abetment.

Personhood is a prerequisite to murder. No jurisdiction has granted this to the unborn, but it's an interesting thought experiment if some chose to: thinking up "unforeseen" second- and third-order effects is a fun exercise (life insurance, HOV lanes, tax deductions, censuses & electoral maps, broken websites which assume all persons have names, birthdates in the future, null birthdays on death certificates)

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#396

Post by akimball »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #391
akimball wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial privacy is definitely a right. The question is whether that right is respected by any given institution. Since it is against the interests of existing institutions to do so, they will not unless compelled by a greater force. Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights . (Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many looph…

I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.

Authors who have given robust analytical treatments of rights include Rawls, Habermas, and Kant.

I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#397

Post by akimball »

akimball wrote: post #314
seanw444 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The greater the threat which a community represents to the vested control hierarchy, the more intensely it becomes infiltrated and coopted. This is an Iron Law.

As evidence, see the moderation immediately above.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#398

Post by dcolkitt »

ABeeSea wrote: post #92
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…

If you are told repeatedly that your work is facilitating money laundering and you keep doing that work, don’t be surprised if you get arrested for facilitating money laundering.

Told by whom?

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#399

Post by implements »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #286
implements wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(From Wikipedia) The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ensures that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be se…

> unreasonable > arbitrary There is no absolute right to privacy.

Of-course, but then there are no absolute rights that I can think off - property can be taxed, movement restricted by imprisonment / laws against trespass, labour can be forced by military draft or prison work, speech restricted by laws against defamation / abusive conduct, life can be taken in self-defence or during military service, etc.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#400

Post by [deleted] »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #361
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…

> As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there. First thing, you can't arrest people for prior donations as postfacto laws are unconstitutional. Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good…

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