211–220 of 544 posts
Mixers never fail to astonish me. They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering. They are marketed as a way to wash illicit funds. And then the folks who run them get mad when law enforcement tries to shut them down?
Honestly, why can't we just have the government know every single website we visit immediately? We all have nothing to hide
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> Normally, there'd be an aspect of plausible deniability If it was publicly known that you had exactly 1 ton of legally acquired gold in your house, would you feel perfectly safe sleeping at night? Is there not 1 sicko out there that would be willing to torture your family to find the combination to your vault? Plausible deniability exists here. It's called wanting privacy, and there's perfectly valid and non-crimin…
> In an of itself, mixing or trading to obfuscate your identity shouldn't be considered a crime or unreasonable in the slightest. "Financial privacy" isn't a real thing, because you owe taxes on income and investments. Can you explain to me how your tax assessor is able, then, to properly identify your income and tax you on it as appropriate? (Money laundering and tax evasion do not always go hand-in-hand. Many laund…
Historically there is huge market for that.
"I sell x to y, y can only use crypto, y will be persecuted if I don't obscure my transactions from z, so therefore this is a good thing"
Yes we can all do the hypothetical "dissident in AUTHORITARIAN_COUNTRY needs to buy x and will totally be persecuted otherwise" but I want an actual production example not a moral whataboutism.
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> Tornado Cash is code, not a service operated by any entity There was a team of developers earning compensation, hiring and firing. That’s more than just code.
The sanctions are literally added to the OFAC's SDN list, and consists of addresses and contracts. Neither of those things are services or operations, they are quite literally just executable code. See for yourself: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
Guns are quite literally just atoms. The context matters. Not all guns are illegal. But ones used to commit crimes will get lawfully seized. The code exists in context, and the developers’ actions and intentions are relevant. None of this is novel.
Mixers never fail to astonish me. They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering. They are marketed as a way to wash illicit funds. And then the folks who run them get mad when law enforcement tries to shut them down?
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>> There are plenty of knives that are designed to facilitate murder, and they are correspondingly regulated. We don't regulate kitchen knives in that way, because they don't represent the same intent. I'm pretty sure the majority of knives used for criminal activities are rather kitchen knifes. Compare Tornado Cash with cash money and tell me how they are different. Being untraceable does not make it a criminal inst…
Yes, it is a crime to conceal your financial transactions from the government.
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> yet my claim is self-evident, while yours needs hordes of robe&badge clad bureaucrats You’re describing due process. That’s a feature. An AK-47 being metallic may be self evident. That doesn’t make it relevant to a murder investigation.
An AK-47 is not relevent to a murder investigation. There are thousands of them in the U.S. and owned by innocents. It would be unreasonable to come after all AK-47 owners because one was used in a crime. Rather, it would be up to the cops to find other facts about the weapon, perhaps how much more metallic it looked than your standard AK, and in which spots. Wear marks can be just as revealing as serial numbers.
Every mixer isn’t sanctioned. Just the one used to launder money by Pyongyang. None of this is novel.
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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…
Here's a thing: when technology is designed in a way that makes it hard to work within the bounds of the legal system, it's usually the case that the legal system wins, not the technology. The view of the legal system is focused around people and their intentions, regardless of how much you try and confuse things with technology. They will most likely view the smart contract and its wallet as one entity, despite that…
If this was true, Internet pornography would have been successfully squashed by the existing obscenity laws that heavily regulated pornographic material.
I think the crypto framing obscures the story here. If the government issued sanctions against a traditional financial organization engaged in money laundering, and then Goldman Sachs bankrolled a lawsuit arguing that the organization is allowed to engage in money laundering due to some quirk of the organizational structure, everyone would understand what's going on and nobody outside of the finance industry would be…
The sanctioned entity here is a piece of code that uses zk-SNARK cryptography, in a permissionless and immutable way. There are no admin keys, there is no ownership, it is code. It's not an organization. This is more like the FBI banning GPG because terrorists use it. FTA: > They contend that the Treasury Department lacks the authority to restrict access to a software program. This is the point. No one would have bat…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...
Can anyone defending Tornado Cash provide a concrete example of mixing crypto revenues in a way that is not clearly illegal? I've scrolled this whole thread, and there are a lot of people defending it, but none of them provided a full e2e example of "I sell x to y, y can only use crypto, y will be persecuted if I don't obscure my transactions from z, so therefore this is a good thing" Yes we can all do the hypothetic…
> One plaintiff in the lawsuit is a crypto investor who used Tornado Cash to send funds to support the Ukrainian war effort, hoping to preserve his anonymity and avoid retaliation from the Russian government.