Live data from Hacker News

Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

fiod.nl

441–450 of 827 posts

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#441
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the purpose of this code is? There are people operating on blockchains in which transaction parameters are a matter of public record who: 1. May not want individual amounts and recipients to be publicly inspectable. 2. And are not criminals. It may not be a right, but Tornado Cash is absolutely a tool to increase privacy. It is not solely for criminals to liquidate blockchain assets.

Even if there is people who want that, that doesn't justify it. Privacy has limits, and there is some really bad people using crypto to transfer assets. Banks are required to report suspicious transactions, so working around banking laws by using crypto is clearly breaking the spirit of those regulations. If an individual wants privacy, there is a more standing if they do it themselves, but when a third party gets in…

When I traded crypto I just self-reported on my taxes. It's not that hard. It's already illegal to "evade" taxes, so we don't need to make it "double illegaler" by banning crypto used to evade taxes.

>Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.

The issue is due to FATCA as a US citizen I have no exit valve to simply leave and seek residence elsewhere because leaving the country still makes me a US person reportable to IRS by worldwide banks (and in fact also by legal self reporting requirements) and the US charges a oft prohibitive multi-thousand dollar exit tax renounce. If we're going to put these kind of imposition on people we should at least streamline renouncing and make the payment to leave the gang something almost as cheap as the walk to Mexico.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#442

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.

That's not how universal rights work. You can say privacy is not a universal right. But if it is, governments have no say on if it ever "ends."

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#443
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 question of "deployment" is an interesting one when it comes to smart contracts. When you deploy a contract, you're publishing the code to the network to run, not deploying it to a server you operate. I think we are going to need to have a much better legal framework around what exactly a person is doing, legally, when they deploy a smart contract to the blockchain.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering I have questions: did money laundering happen on the platform? Did the developer financially benefit from the money laundering? If the answer to both is "yes", then it sounds like the developer could be in a world of trouble, which is not related to crypto. If I build a picture-sharing board with no moderation, and…

They were also asked to implement some basic money laundering preventions. They did nothing.

Exactly. I understand the sentiment that people are sharing around, "They're just being arrested for writing code!", but intent matters. And it seems like, in this case, there may have actually been intent to develop this to assist with illegal activities.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comic proves the parent's point. Drugging and hitting people with a wrench (i.e. torturing) to extract information is exactly what police states do.

The comic has a non-literal meaning as well. (i.e. see the alt-text) The wrench can be a warrant, a confidential informant, or it can be a security camera, etc. Obviously, the world consists of more sources of information than encrypted data on your laptop and the information inside of your head. Crimes happen in the real world, not behind a cipher. Some element of any crime is unencrypted and unencryptable.

I have to disagree with the alt-text. (For me it says, "In actual reality, nobody cares about his secrets.") It's flippant and out of touch. Because somebody does care about his secrets, otherwise mass surveillance wouldn't have reached totalitarian levels along with privacy becoming increasingly criminalized. So the more resource-intensive using the "wrench" is, the more privacy is protected.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 reasons. Because it's not murder. Legislating that it is does not make it so. Full stop. That's like a government trying to legislate that the sky must always be blue, or that it's illegal to frown, or that 2+2=5. Just because it's a law does not make it just…

Murder is a legal category, it can be whatever we define it to be, so if legislation makes abortion murder then it is.

Is it intentionally ending the life of a human being? Well, what life, what is a human being?

It's intentionally terminating a pregnancy? Yes. Is that bad? Well, if the would-be-mother doesn't want it it's definitely bad, and if the would-be-mother wants it then it definitely seems cruel to not do it, but when society tries to impose whatever morals on these people the arguments start to look very silly very soon.

The main argument against abortion is a strange begging the question fallacy mixed with consequentialism: if the abortion would not happen then things would go great and a human would born (the implied assumption is that it's somehow unquestionably good).

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#448
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…

It doesn't have to "fly" if you can waste 10 years of his life in court and ruin his finances, relationships and employability. The effect on him and the deterrent to others is basically the same...

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#449
post #161

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…

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? I get that you really want to defend crypto, but I think a simpler explanation is that they have good reasons to believe that this guy was doing more than just the stuff you're trying to defend (making privacy code). It would be l…

No hacker should support this. Period. Don't let your hate for crypto blind you.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#450

He wasn’t just developing software, he seems to also been involved with operating the Tornado mixer service, thus enabling / facilitating money laundering and evasion of sanctions.

tornado cash doesnt facilitate money laundering, it just obfuscates the source of eth, like converting debit into cash, those funds still need to enter the real system in some "legitimate" manner in order to be considered laundered.
Post reply on HN