261–270 of 544 posts
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Close down until you figured out a way to react. Money laundering is serious crime, helping North Korea is as well. Tornado cash did apparently both, and authorities gave them a heads up. If it was me, I would close my shop down.
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> 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... .
No, Tornado Cash is code, not a service operated by any entity. 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.
This is the kind of sociopathic irresponsibility that's too common in tech. "Oh, it's not my fault my lab-grown monster decided to terrorize the countryside!"
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…
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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.
But there is a collectively hashed-out social contract you accept by staying, and it should be of no surprise that the law takes that contract as table stakes and acts according to it.
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What part of "trustless peer-to-peer electronic CASH", in Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper, did you not understand? There is no banking going on.
Wait, what? The inventor of Bitcoin said that it was cash? Well, that settles it then: nobody is allowed to disagree with an inventor about what their invention is or does. Sarcasm aside, I think Bitcoin functionally bears much more resemblance to a distributed bank than to distributed cash. It's not perfect resemblance, and there are people who disagree with me. Just saying that it's cash isn't sufficient evidence t…
This is likely because you don't understand what a bank is, or that you don't understand what bitcoin is, or a combination.
If you're interested in bank-like things that use bitcoin, you could learn more about fedimint.
If you're interested in what bitcoin is, you could just read the white paper[0].
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...Because money laundering is illegal . No one's going to advertise openly to the public "Assassination services here! Just call 1-800-KIL-THEM!" And no one's going to put in public documents "we set up this company in order to facilitate money laundering."
I think danaris's point stands - if you design an iron maiden style murder chamber but simply alter the name to "one time use changing room", you're not fooling anyone, the purpose is still clear, and illegal.
Are you suggesting that there is no plausible reason to want financial privacy, outside 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…
Note that "money-laundering" is only a thing you have committed if you are dealing in funds that are the proceeds of another crime. If you are not committing another crime, you are more than welcome to conceal the source and destination of your financial transactions. The chief selling point of Tornado Cash was addressing the significant privacy problems inherent in a currency based on a public ledger. The idea that…
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> 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/…
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…
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This isn't about the fraction of illicit use. A large fraction of Americans with numbered/anonymous Swiss bank accounts did nothing wrong with them - a much larger fraction than tornado cash users. However, they were still banned for US citizens due to US KYC rules. The land of free speech is obsessed with being able to trace money as it travels. No surprise they would go after a service whose explicit purpose is to…
Sure. Then it is irrelevant how much money was funding whom, only that a non-zero amount of value was not strictly traceable through typical financial surveillance systems, and so the US automatically deems this activity illegal regardless of how the funds were used. This is where the “privacy on the blockchain should be a basic right” argument comes in, and what the plaintiff appears to be arguing.
The facts about Tornado cash are terrible: pretty much everyone using it is either doing something provably illegal or trying to avoid being found, you have to go out of your way to use it (and pay an extra fee), and it's been part of a large number of bad news stories about crypto theft. A minimum of 10% of its throughput is provably due to frauds and thefts, and probably a lot more. It is not an exaggeration to say that many people's life savings have been funneled through Tornado cash into the wallets of criminals. In comparison, numbered Swiss bank accounts likely had more legitimate use than Tornado cash.
In comparison, the facts about Monero, Zcash, and the Wasabi BTC wallet (another mixer, but attached to a wallet) are a lot better. Privacy is free and/or the default option with those services, and they are a little more like cash: lots of victimless crimes (darknet sales, etc.), some use by ransomware attacks, but also a lot of legitimate use.
This lawsuit has a nonzero chance of throwing out the baby (privacy on blockchains) with the bathwater (tornado cash).