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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#601

Post by caeril »

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…

> this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software

Stephen Watt had his life destroyed because he wrote some software. He didn't use it, he didn't directly victimize anyone; he just wrote the software that other people used[1].

Case law already exists that simply writing software can be a crime, so let's not fool ourselves that prosecutors/judges/juries will even remotely consider this line of defense valid.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2009/12/stephen-watt

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#602

Post by [deleted] »

carlosdp wrote: post #595
cantSpellSober wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.

The developers of Tornado Cash don't directly profit from its use (the article claims that erroneously), it's a fully permissionless immutable smart contract without a fee component. So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.

[deleted]

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#603

Post by nostrademons »

shkkmo wrote: post #556
RHSeeger wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.

The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.

Privacy is about much more than whether your transactions can be trade back to you - it's about who can trace them back to you. There's a huge difference between "VPN who already has all my IP addresses knows that I did business with it" and "Everybody on the Internet knows that I did business with this VPN provider". If you disagree, let's see you post your credit card history and tax returns on Hacker News - after all, your bank and the IRS respectively already have this information, so you're not gaining any OpSec by keeping it private.

For a lot of mixer transactions, your adversary is probably not the government - it's any hacker that you may want to prevent from knowing your Ethereum balance and the services you transact with.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#604

Post by optimuspaul »

alangibson wrote: post #578
teakettle42 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody (other than you, with that intentionally ridiculous claim) is ascribing a secret end goal; their goals are quite plainly articulated.

Links? I need to know who to send donations to.

donations?! you just buy guns and they get your money, and "bonus" you get a gun.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#605

Post by KyleJune »

pitaj wrote: post #585
KyleJune wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's like saying the developer of ransomware shouldn't get in trouble for making it if they just made it public instead of using it themselves. The fact that ransomware could be used for legal purposes(pen testing maybe?) isn't really a defense when you make it easily accessible to criminals by making it public.

> it's like saying the developer of ransomware shouldn't get in trouble for making it if they just made it public instead of using it themselves They really shouldn't. Neither should any other security researcher who publishes exploits. Neither should any other developer of cryptographic technology.

I think there is a difference between identifying an exploit exists and making a tool that makes it easy for anyone to exploit. I think if you are releasing a tool to act on security vulnerabilities it should be done so very carefully so that it can't be easily used to commit crime.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#606

Post by arbol »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #16
tiborsaas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone? TC was designed for privacy and bad actors _also_ took advantage of that. Prosecutors basically need to prove that privacy is bad, good luck with that.

>Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone? Not a valid comparison. Courts and law have long held the completely reasonable position that if the main intent of a product is not to commit crime, that those using it for a crime are held responsible, not the producer. Conversely, if a product is designed to facilitate crime, or is used significantly more for crime than not, then the liability star…

> and added features to assist that on purpose

Unless the service was redeployed (unlikely) or operating behind a proxy contract, it wouldn't have been possible to add new features.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#607

Post by tzs »

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.

> Then again, the US Constitution also says "All men are created equal"

Nope. You are thinking of the Declaration of Independence.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#608

Post by nostrademons »

acdha wrote: post #564
zmgsabst wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don’t want my employer knowing I spent my BTC/ETH/etc on a porn website — so I want a way to disassociate the payment address they know from my spending account? …or guns, alcohol, abortions, etc. People have a need for privacy and disassociating spending from receiving for perfectly normal and legal reasons.

This seems like a better argument for using a system which is correctly designed. A public ledger is a bad fit for currency and layering kludges on top isn’t as good as a better design, especially when that exposes you to being an accessory to criminal activity.

There are cryptocurrencies that are private-by-default, eg. Monero and ZCash. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and whether governments go after them as well, particularly since (I suspect) Monero is used for a lot more illegal activity than Tornado.cash.

The thing about Ethereum's public ledger approach is that it enables a lot of features - broadly advertised smart contracts, for example. Tornado.cash is literally an attempt to replicate the privacy benefits of ZCash inside of Ethereum's generalized blockchain. From a computing perspective that's quite interesting - you start with a public system and find a way to emulate a privacy within it.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#609

Post by peyton »

MaysonL wrote: post #554
phpisthebest wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be Fair, based on the History of " restrict guns " it is clear no amount of restrictions is enough to satisfy those that want to restrict guns, confiscation and total ban is the clear end goal it is NOT "bad faith" to say that, when there is clear evidence that no matter how many times compromise is reached they return the very next day asking for more and more restrictions

To be fair, banning guns seems to also ban mass shootings.

Only when you ignore all the countries it doesn’t. Somalia banned guns.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#610

Post by arcticbull »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #586
arcticbull wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD. CyberTruck. Humanoid Robot. Semi.

You’re confusing marketing hyperbole for vaporware.

A man jumping around in a suit being sold as a robot isn't hyperbole, it's vaporware.
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