181–190 of 544 posts
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The US military itself uses Tor. They don't want to ban it, because even if the traffic on Tor is illicit, it still serves to mask the military's own traffic. Don't forget that Tor was originally developed by the US Navy.
I hear NK uses it too, it should probably be made devastatingly illegal therefore.
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I have no problem with Tornado Cash being openly available software under a permissive license. I have a problem with people running a Tornado Cash-based service that is really just a money laundering service. You should take a step back: "open source" does not rinse away the underlying properties of a service. I can't write and deploy a web application that contracts hitmen and use the MIT license as a defense; the…
Money crimes should be prosecuted and solved at their start points and endpoints, not within the financial system. Failure to adhere to this standard is why we no longer really control the money in our bank accounts anymore. Want to send a wire to your friend living in the middle east with a sketchy name? Might get flagged. Want to purchase something out of the ordinary for you online? Your debit card will probably b…
That's easier said than done. It's drastically easier to catch crime by it's results (money) than in the act. Famously that's how Capone was caught. And what would be the advantage of that, to anyone? I doubt that erroneously flagged transactions are a real problem. Do you have any numbers on the matter?
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You're almost clever... Tornado is accused of being designed to facilitate money laundering and, realistically, has very little other purpose. By contrast, a hotdog stand is typically designed to cook and sell hotdogs and, in the rare instances where money laundering occurs, it's not a primary service the hotdog stand offers to clients, and will still get the owner arrested.
> You're almost clever... Tornado is accused of being designed to facilitate money laundering and, realistically, has very little other purpose. It does have other purposes, hiding transactions from the public, which I have used Tornado Cash for many times in the past. > I used Tornado Cash (non-US citizen here) for hiding transactions from the public (not hiding from the government), and when I filed my taxes, I sti…
You can do this. But it doesn’t come without risk.
If you kept using Tornado even after it was found Pyongyang used it to launder money, yes, you lose your money. It’s analogous to local law enforcement announcing a laundromat has been laundering money for the mafia, and then—months later–someone getting upset the clothes they dropped off have been seized. They may eventually get them back. But there is reasonable suspicion in the meantime.
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How much of it is used for legitimate reasons versus illicit ones? If the overwhelming majority of the transactions are illicit, it makes sense to ban it.
How much of $100 bill use is for legitimate reasons versus illicit ones? If the overwhelming majority of the transactions are illicit, it makes sense to ban the $100 bill.
That's the reason checks or 200€+ bills are very rarely accepted anymore in businesses (in Europe at least), because they were very often fraudulent.
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You're almost getting it. We still allow hot dog stands to exists, even though you could launder money via them. Instead, we let police investigate cases where money laundering is happening, and if it happens to be via one hot dog stand, take down that specific one. Rather than banning hot dog stands in general. Same goes for Tornado Cash. It was not designed for money laundering, although you could use it for that.…
> take down the entities doing the money laundering instead of attacking a tool This is what they’re doing. North Korea laundered money via Tornado Cash [1]. Authorities announced it and watched Tornado Cash do nothing. So it got sanctioned. Every other mixer is untouched. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/north-korea-likely-behind-10... .
North Korea also used HTTP for navigating websites which helped them hack targets and also launder more money. Banning Tornado Cash is like banning the HTTP specification/IETF for that, instead of going after the group in North Korea doing the money laundering/hacking.
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"Might be used for illegal purposes" is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands. Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they're facilitating legal filesharing, or that they're entirely agnostic to the content being shared…
> chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherland Also, law enforcement publicly announced Tornado was used to launder billions by North Korea [1]. Months ago [2]. Everyone continued as if nothing happened. This wasn’t based on hypotheticals. [1] https://hub.elliptic.co/analysis/the-100-million-horizon-hac... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/…
There is a possibility that miners could collude not to authenticate blocks with tornado cash transactions in them, but that gets into some interesting game theory in a globally distributed system. Not every miner is subject to US law.
It's a very fascinating story.
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/15/tornado-cash-adds-c...
This is definitely a pandora's box type issue. I believe it is different from the "code is speech" series of arguments around PGP because a deployed smart contract is not merely source code / compiled bytecode, but also a wallet containing funds. Of course, you still need the Ethereum "world computer" to make it run, and Tornado Cash is not very helpful without a significant amount of liquidity to sufficiently provid…
When a smart contract is deployed, literally all that happens is that the code is broadcast to the network. It is true that the contract itself has a wallet and runs operations, but it operates autonomously outside the control of the person who deployed the contract. If a smart contract does something illegal, the person who deployed it has no more responsibility than if someone does something illegal with encryption…
If I rig up my car to explode when someone walks by whistling the right tune, am I without responsibility? I didn't blow up the car.. the car blew itself up.
Obviously I'm at fault. There is no debate here. Any automation you create is acting on your behalf - and you are liable for it. If I hire a hitman.. I am guilty of murder.
AI or software isn't some clever loophole here. If you deploy an autonomous money laundering system.. you are doing money laundering.
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"Might be used for illegal purposes" is a significant understatement. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands. Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability: torrent index operators can, for example, rightfully claim that they're facilitating legal filesharing, or that they're entirely agnostic to the content being shared…
> chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherland Also, law enforcement publicly announced Tornado was used to launder billions by North Korea [1]. Months ago [2]. Everyone continued as if nothing happened. This wasn’t based on hypotheticals. [1] https://hub.elliptic.co/analysis/the-100-million-horizon-hac... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/…
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impossible to answer that question - what if the 1% of activity continues to grow and encourages billions more dollars of pro-social economic activity in the future? All we can know for sure is that shutting down a white-market financial service or worse, blacklisting its users, has the guarantee that innocent people will be harmed. Further: disrupting a single avenue of finances for the funding of illicit activity a…
What's the legitimate use case for using cryptocurrency mixers? What would be this kind of activity that would grow and encourage "pro-social economic activity?" What harm is encountered by these innocent people? From my perspective, an economically rational actor would want to minimize overall money transmission costs, so they'd avoid cryptocurrency mixers unless they had a particular reason to.
I'm sure there are other examples, but this is a good one off the top of my head and I personally have used mixers for this very purpose - to allow someone to pay me for a white-market trade without exposing how much crypto I owned in my wallet.
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https://bsaaml.ffiec.gov/references/regulations Here ya go. By the by, all of this is to be known or planned out before becoming a money transmitter . I.e., if you cannot do this, you are not legally allowed to serve as a money transmitter .
But - here ya go - crypto is not money, it's real property. Tornado cash is not a bank, it allows you to swap random Pokemon cards between its' users.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...