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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

#271

Post by mr_spothawk »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #159
sam0x17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is akin to saying people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars because a car was used one time in a heist.

Driving a car requires a license and registration of the vehicle. You can go to jail for driving a car without a registration or license. In very much the same way, if you are running a money transmitting business, you need to register with the government and follow the government laws. Otherwise, you risk going to jail. It's not rocket science. Just because it is on the internet doesn't make it a whole new thing.

> You can go to jail for driving a car without a registration or license.

Since when is driving a car without registration or license a felony?

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

#272

Post by plonk »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #174
woodruffw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your association isn't what regulators are concerned with. They're concerned with the intent of the creator and operator of the service, which is why he's the one who's been arrested.

And you're buying into propaganda suggesting someone pushing the envelope in cryptography is creating tooling specifically for money laundering. 30 years ago, the NSA toed a similar line in their war on PGP, saying it was used in practice for "money laundering, child pornography, and terrorism" - https://reason.com/video/2020/10/21/cryptowars-gilmore-zimme...

Well it probably was, among other things. But we're censoring a network here, not just a tool. Nobody is making the cryptography behind Tornado illegal.

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

#273

Post by PuppyTailWags »

mikece wrote: post #118
adastra22 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chief purpose of a mixer is financial privacy. It’s just that on a public blockchain privacy from snoops and privacy from law enforcement can’t be differentiated.

You hit it on the head: this is a War on Privacy being presented as a war on money-laundering. The biggest money laundering schemes involve commercial banks and real estate (*ahem* TRUMP! *ahem*....) and not online cryptocurrency schemes. It's not like the North Koreans have no other way to mask the trail on what they steal, and I suspect those saying they are certain the North Koreans are bad guys here will insist t…

> I suspect those saying they are certain the North Koreans are bad guys here will insist they cannot divulge how they know this (under the aegis of National Security or some other excuse).

My understanding is that the aegis of National Security isn't unwarranted sometimes. For example, if they know NK are bad guys here because one of their spies literally witnessed the laundering (as a secretary, paper-pusher, programmer, or similar) then there is no way to disclose the source. Even a "we have an eyewitness" will tip NK off to look into the people in the process (NK will be able to definitively rule out their technology being hacked, or a bug planted somewhere).

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

#274

Post by JustLurking2022 »

immigrantheart wrote: post #44
JustLurking2022 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Properties in the USA, laundry, deli, dry cleaners, often use for money laundering.

This is an argument largely championed by the richest of the rich as a way for them to commit financial crimes without getting caught - think old time Swiss bank privacy. When they finally got leveraged by the U.S. government to turn over records, people were cutting deals by the thousand to avoid doing time for tax fraud they knowingly committed.

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

#275

Post by zionic »

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?

>They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering

How is HN so consistently cryptophobic?

Imagine the reaction you’d get here suggesting say, E2EE is “explicitly a product for {crime}”. You’d be rightly mocked, but throw in crypto and it’s like 75% of the people here lose basic reasoning skills. I’d be less frustrated if it wasn’t so common.

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

#276

Post by chrischattin »

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).

Have you ever tried to make a wire transfer on a weekend?

Having access to your money outside of banking hours is just one of many use cases I can think of off the top of my head.

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

#277

Post by twblalock »

rglullis wrote: post #236
hef19898 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Contract law is not going to change just because someone tries to write an immutable contract in a computer program.

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

#278

Post by qeternity »

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote: post #96
ouid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that freedom means a world in which you are allowed to hide your assets from the government. You have never been allowed to do that. You're going to have to change the law, and because you live in more or less a democracy, you're going to have to convince people that its good to change the law.

For the time being the government has yet to decide wether crypto is money, a currency, an asset, or a security. Instead it has been going after people for all of them.

Because crypto claims to be all 3 and has created various forms that behave like all 3.

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

#279

Post by chrischattin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #162
jnovek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP isn’t wrong, though. Even if the primary value of Tornado Cash is dubious, I’m still uncomfortable with the contemporary attitude of “block first, ask questions later (maybe)”.

> the contemporary attitude of “block first, ask questions later (maybe)” The sanctions followed Tornado being fingered as the laundering service used by Norrh Korea [1][2]. [1] https://hub.elliptic.co/analysis/the-100-million-horizon-hac... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/north-korea-likely-behind-10... .

DPRK uses SSL and PGP. Should we sanction those code bases as well?

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

#280

Post by 8note »

capableweb wrote: post #153
danaris wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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."

Alright, so there is no proof that Tornado Cash was setup to facilitate money laundering, yet so many here on HN keeps saying "was designed to launder money". What does "designed to X" mean if not that the tool itself was intentionally, purposefully and explicitly made to do X? And if that's true, why isn't there any public evidence of that being true?

They did not include an automated KYC process for when the transactions are larger than 10k USD.

Therefore, they intended it to be used to hide transactions from the US government. They could have also limited the service to not run on amounts larger than 10k?

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