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Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

nytimes.com

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Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#251

Post by woodruffw »

npc54321 wrote: post #171
woodruffw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The features don't matter. What matters is intent and demonstrating that intent. Both the Treasury and Dutch authorities have reason to believe that Tornado Cash was operated with the intent of facilitating money laundering. It's up to a court to determine the veracity of that accusation.

Guilty until proven innocent (they are blacklisted/sanctioned) I see.

Not only am I not a court of law, but I specifically said that it's up to a court to make a decision of legal guilt here.

In the mean time, yes: the government is allowed to halt activities that it believes are part of an active criminal scheme. Every country with a functioning legal system proscribes this, and establishes a broad swath of controls to ensure that the government can't indefinitely tie up resources.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#252

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #237
ASalazarMX wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are explicitly a product for user privacy That's the facade. In my experience, Bitcoin is still the main ecoin demanded in phishing/ransomware incidents, even when more privacy-friendly ecoins exist. A tumbler's purpose is distorting Bitcoin's public blockchain (one of its core tenets), and that's very attractive to criminals.

Of course its attractive to criminals. Same reason they love cash. Doesn't mean that we should ban cash

> Doesn't mean that we should ban cash

Mixers aren’t banned. A mixer that was used to launder money by North Korea was.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#253

Post by Bombthecat »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
mikece wrote: post #3

Banning a service because it "might be used for illegal purposes" is insufficient. This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work. This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more. I would rather money-launderers ge…

"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…

Sooo buying and using monero is automatically money laundering?

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#254

Post by JumpCrisscross »

x86x87 wrote: post #209
georgyo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more crazy that that are so openly breaking the law. The same is true with all the loto and gambling crypto sites. They run without any oversight and are blatantly breaking the law.

which law are they breaking? in which jurisdiction?

> which law are they breaking? in which jurisdiction?

North Korean sanctions [1]. As well as virtually every jurisdiction’s AML laws. (Specifically, American and Dutch.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Kore...

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#255

Post by zionic »

woodruffw wrote: post #38
mikece wrote: post #3

Banning a service because it "might be used for illegal purposes" is insufficient. This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work. This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more. I would rather money-launderers ge…

"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…

>The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering

Privacy =/= laundering.

Tornado is/should be perfectly legal to use to pay IRL vendors without revealing the entire contents of your hot/cold wallets.

It’s also useful to move money between hot/cold wallets safely.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#256

Post by mr_spothawk »

eropple wrote: post #101
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between laundering and washing doesn’t exist in current financial regulation. It does to those who believe in financial privacy.

There's no such thing as financial privacy when you, by virtue of being a citizen of a country, consent to be taxed on income and investment. Your financial actions may not be necessarily public to your fellow citizens but they absolutely and without possible argument must be to your tax assessor, and this exists to hide transactions from them. Of course it's illegal. You can revoke that consent, as it is possible to…

There's no such thing as consent when you're coerced.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#257

Post by zionic »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #24
mikece wrote: post #3

Banning a service because it "might be used for illegal purposes" is insufficient. This is a problem with law enforcement in general: they are lazy and seek to have automated solutions to so much of what used to be called police work. This applies to warrant-less wiretaps, pulling information on people from 3rd party data brokers to side-step warrant and FOIA requirements, and more. I would rather money-launderers ge…

It's a service specifically designed to facilitate money laundering. It's a bit like running a business that produces paperwork to make stolen cars indistinguishable from legal ones - there's no reason such a service should be allowed to exist.

>It's a service specifically designed to facilitate money laundering.

That’s like saying TLS was designed to protect CP.

Privacy =/= laundering

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#258

Post by JumpCrisscross »

seibelj wrote: post #211
NelsonMinar wrote: post #132

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?

VPNs are "data mixers" - by combining all your traffic with others, it becomes harder to determine who sent which packets. Honestly, why can't we just have the government know every single website we visit immediately? We all have nothing to hide

> VPNs are "data mixers" - by combining all your traffic with others

If a VPN is used to help North Korea, and the developers won’t or can’t shut it down, yes, it will be sanctioned. More broadly, speech is generally protected under U.S. law in a way financial transactions are not.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#259

Post by barnabee »

sofixa wrote: post #170
logicalmonster wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why don't you use the traditional banking system, which doesn't result in publicly listed transactions? I struggle to find a legitimate use case for hiding transactions from your bank and thus tax authority (assuming a developed country).

And I struggle to find a legitimate use case for being required to share anything whatsoever with any authority without a court order.

There is a huge difference between sharing the details of your finances with a tax or other authority by default and them being able to compel you to provide such information if they have good cause to believe (and convince a court) that you are evading taxes.

The fact the government required six illegitimate things of me before breakfast does not make them legitimate, it just means the abuse has become normalised to the point that people start believing this shit is reasonable.

Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

#260

Post by intrasight »

bornfreddy wrote: post #229
josh2600 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going to point out that Tornado cash did invoke chainalysis oracles for all of their interface tools. The problem is that on ethereum it's not possible to censor a deployed contract. 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 l…

Also, with PoS coming in a few days, the game changes. IIUC, stakers will be obligated to validate all (valid) transactions unless they are willing to forfeit their staked ETH... No preferential treatment anymore. (This is still new to me, please correct me if I'm wrong)

If the vast majority of stakers agree to OFAC regulations (which appears to be the case) then the end result is censorship.
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