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Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

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Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#661

Post by colinmhayes »

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.

Big difference between writing a report on a vulnerability and writing malware that exploits it.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#662

Post by joe_the_user »

fleddr wrote: post #104

How many people listed in the Panama papers have been arrested? Their assets seized? Fines? Zero. London's "the city" is pretty much one giant laundering operation for Saudi and Russian dirty money. Money laundering, monetary privacy, wealth obfuscation is perfectly fine. It only becomes an issue when it becomes accessible to us simple minded folks too. The urgency to stop this tech really tells the tale. Or in other…

Sure,

I've even heard speculation that the leak of the various money-laundering documents involve an effort to monopolize laundering to a even small group.

That's as maybe but no kind of money laundering should have our sympathy. Most money laundering does damage - the kind that isn't for directly illegal activities often involves local corrupt exploiting their control of local resources (Iran, a major oil producer, burning 4% it's oil for bitcoins to escape sanctions, for example).

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#663

Post by akomtu »

babypuncher wrote: post #513
seanw444 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.

Would that really be a bad thing? Most other developed nations seem to get by fine with very strict rules on gun ownership, and coincidentally they have far lower rates for gun violence. When something has far more capacity for harm than practical utility, it makes sense to regulate the crap out of it. Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.

If reincarnation exists, I hope that such people who are busy restricting others freedoms get all assembled together on a big island where they all get to live a very long life restricting each other to the ground, and when their nation makes Orwell blush, they get to live another 1500 years, enjoying each others company in a zero-freedom society, until they finally learn that it's not their f-ing business messing with others freedoms.

Edit. In this type of society, your freedoms are being gutted constantly for arbitrary reasons: one of your neighbors complains he's feeling unsafe around firearms so police comes and takes them all; another neighbor complains about cars making him feel uneasy, so you have to ride a bicycle; then a random passer-by complains about you using harsh words, so a court puts a non-removable collar on your neck monitoring your speech; then some worried activist complains about food and from now on you can get only approved food from the food-police. But you aren't wasting time: you complain about your neighbor's green lawn, then force him to live in a tent, restrict his water consumption for climate-concerns, make him reduce the size of his pets and so on. I'd argue the downward path of restrictions has no bottom.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#664

Post by colinmhayes »

beeboop wrote: post #383
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…

Let's be clear - this isn't money laundering. Money laundering is taking illicit funds and making them look legitimately sourced. Tornado Cash does not do this, it is clear that the source is Tornado Cash, and it does nothing to legitimize funds. To spend crypto you still most likely need to convert it to fiat and that fiat money will still be under scrutiny for its source.

Tornado is absolutely money laundering. You’re moving the coins from a dirty wallet that is being watched by the government to a clean one that has plausible deniability. It’s not the end of the process though, you still need to sell something to the wallet to make it look like you earned the coins legitimately. That’s where NFTs come in.

If you just go dirty wallet -> clean wallet -> exchange it’s trivial to see that the exchange coins came from the dirty wallet. If you mix the coins from the dirty wallet to the clean one there’s no way for the exchange to say the coins came from the dirty wallet, all they know is the coins came from the mixer.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#665

Post by operator-name »

dannyw wrote: post #166
paulsutter wrote: post #10

There’s a big legal distinction whether the developers are collecting fees from operation of the service, since that’s very different from merely developing open source software. I’m curious how this develops > It is suspected that persons behind this organisation have made large-scale profits from these transactions.

There is no fee paid to the developer when it comes to Tornado Cash, although there is the TORN token, which is a "governance" token.

Unless you count relay nodes, but they were run by more than just the developers.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#666

Post by epolanski »

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…

> Financial privacy is definitely a right.

Unless you prove it is, it's not. It's not encoded in the UN's human rights charter, nor in pretty much any legal system out there.

Governments should protect you from other individuals accessing your financials except the government itself, but that's it.

> Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights.

I am absolutely against the use of "cryptography" (which by the way any transaction system uses) and cryptocurrencies as there is one and only one purpose for such a thing: tax evasion and money laundering. There's literally no other purpose except far fetched arguments.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#667

Post by vkou »

phpisthebest wrote: post #624
MaysonL wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Banning gun Free Zones, and allowing armed citizens will do the same thing See Indiana Mall Shooting

Or, you get a bloodbath, like what happened in Kenosha, where everyone (except the first person who was killed) involved was convinced they were the good guy with a gun.

In the fog of war of an active shooting, nobody has any idea of who is the threat, and who is responding to the threat, and nobody has time to sit around and wait for 8 months for a jury to determine whether the shooting was justified or not.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#668

Post by threeseed »

BobbyJo wrote: post #257
threeseed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather than going after the people actually committing crimes Actually they go after the people committing the crime AND those facilitating it. > Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right (a) Not a human right, (b) not enshrined in any country's law, (c) does not absolve illegal behaviour.

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

4th amendment is specifically limited to unreasonable search and seizures.

It doesn't mean that you have the right to privacy in any and all situations.

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#669

Post by conductr »

KyleJune wrote: post #580
colechristensen wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting a money laundrymat and expecting not to get charged with a crime is a bit absurd. Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "privacy" not money laundering because crypto is special... is likewise absurd.

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.

By that reasoning, gun manufacturers are mass murderers?

What about automobile manufacturers? They kill almost as many people as guns (in the US, quick google search)

Re: Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

#670

Post by preseinger »

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…

Financial anonymity is _actually bad_. KYC and anti-money-laundering regulations and etc. are _actually good_. These positions are the result of thousands of years of human history and economic activity. Ignore them at your peril (shrug)
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