281–290 of 544 posts
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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.
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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.
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.
Mixers are designed to facilitate money laundering. You can claim it’s for legitimate privacy, etc but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s money laundering.
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> 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
Well, it's not banned, but over $10k USD in cash you need to fill out an IRS form 8300 [1] precisely to curb criminal use of cash. (Although I'd argue it should be upped and pegged to inflation as 10k isn't what 10k used to be.)
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
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…
The SEC is well-funded, has a strongly supported mandate, and has a long arm. They are playing a long war of attrition.
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If the Treasury or Dutch authorities are to be believed, the chief purpose of this mixer was to facilitate money laundering. That is key to this entire discussion: they have reason to believe that Pertsev knowingly ran a money laundering service, rather than running a service that criminals can abuse to launder money.
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Tornado Cash ignored the warnings. Enabling money laundering and providing a means to avoid economic sanctions will get you in serious trouble.
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What's the difference between money launderying features and privacy features? Tornado Cash in itself does is not launderying money because you still have to prove to the IRS how you got the money or the asset(i.e bills, invoice etc) and you still have to obey KYC rules. You can't just say the money is from Tornado Cash and be done with it. Is the U.S Mint a money launderying service because it provides an untraceabl…
-- if I move $10k - my institution automatically tells the government I moved $10k - if in the US - the receiving institution also tells the government - I don't have an expectation of privacy - is this also true with Tornado Cash? --
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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…
Code has been, can be, and will be sanctioned. Will they be successful is a different question. The SEC is well-funded, has a strongly supported mandate, and has a long arm. They are playing a long war of attrition.
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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.
If Tornado Cash could be banned, couldn't the same logic be used to ban Tor? The former obscures financial transactions, and the latter obscures communications, but there's a similar principle in play.
No. Despite attempts to conflate code on a blockchain with code as a concept, the code comprising Tornado Cash hasn’t been banned. You can publish it. Hell, you can re-deploy it, though that would be stupid.