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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

#311

Post by lawn »

tmpz22 wrote: post #213

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…

Do you know that crypto is normally completely traceable?

So if I for instance withdraw 100 million from an exchange, in a completely legal manner, and then visit a store or webshop to buy something with the same funds, then the store now knows that I have 100 million dollars?

Mixing can be used for self protection.

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

#312

Post by notch656a »

the_snooze wrote: post #262
capableweb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>No, Tornado Cash is code, not a service operated by any entity. 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!"

OFAC's attacks on privacy are sociopathically irresponsible, and unlike Tornado Cash the federal government has actual monsters with weapons terrorizing the countryside.

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

#313

Post by everfree »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #305
joyfylbanana wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that on ethereum it's not possible to censor a deployed contract. It is possible, via a hard work. Similarly as it was possible to transition from PoW to PoS. The question is, if there is political will for that. Clearly changing the protocol rules is possible has it has been done with ethereum in the past, including for censorship reasons (in the earlier hard fork the reason was to cancel a hack).

It is delightfully ironic to see code as law slowly chipped away by Law until law is code and you’re back to finance business logic on a slow distributed computer fabric.

It's too early to say that definitively, imo.

As a counterexample to the DAO hack, the parity multi-sig hack of 2017 resulted in over $160M worth of ether being frozen on-chain. There were calls to hard fork Ethereum to return it, but the hard fork was never tenable. That was barely a year after the DAO hack and fork.

Personally, I believe there is a zero chance that a hard fork based on Tornado Cash becomes viable. It's not nearly a big enough issue for enough users to care (and exchanges, and wallet software companies, and stakers). Why would the 90% of users who don't use Tornado Cash risk helping the other 10% perform some fork, knowing that the fork would add fuel to the mutability argument and set more precedent for mutability?

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

#314

Post by max_ »

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?

The internet never fails to astonish me. Its explicitly a product to facilitate child porn.

It should be shut down.

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

#315

Post by Fnoord »

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…

It can be proven they're not agnostic by doing the bad data test (malware, supposed (not real) child porn). If it gets removed, that's a sign of moderation. And all big, previously known torrent or DHT hosters remove such. Combine it with the fact an %x is illegal content (e.g. copyright infringement) which does not get removed and you have a case.

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

#316

Post by notch656a »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #190
realce wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But - here ya go - crypto is not money, it's real property. Tornado cash is not a bank, it allows you to swap random Pokemon cards between its' users.

Great news, helping people get rid of their stolen goods, aka "fencing" is also illegal. [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Prosecute the road crews building the interstate. They know building the road helps people sell and transport stolen goods, yet the road crew does nothing to stop them.

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

#317

Post by woodruffw »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #298
eropple wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My poor, so-very-put-upon friend: you can choose to leave . 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.

Tell it to Rosa Parks.

At which point did Rosa Parks transfer her money using an immutable public ledger?

Comparing your financial scheme to Jim Crow isn't the most distasteful thing I've seen on HN, but it's up there!

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

#318

Post by efdee »

jbverschoor wrote: post #293
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?

Would you like it if you pay for a burger somewhere and this person can see EVERYTHING you’ve ever did financially? Or if your employer pays you, and decides to kick you out because he doesn’t agree with some transactions you made?

Then maybe don't pay using a payment system that was designed in a way that makes this one of its most prominent features?

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

#319

Post by Sir_Liigmaz »

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…

The USA PATRIOT Act requires every financial institution and money service business have an AML department. There are thousands of people in the US that are paid to look at your bank account and decide if you've been naughty or not and narc to the feds if you have. This is happening everyday. We are already living the surveillance state.

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

#320

Post by chizhik-pyzhik »

wollsmoth wrote: post #292

I think my crypto info is behind the times. Can someone explain to me why people don't just exchange crypto for monero and then back if they want to "wash" it?

Tornado is nice because you can stay entirely within the Ethereum blockchain- no need to involve a centralized entity like an exchange to facilitate this.

It's also arguably more private than monero. Tornado uses zk math instead of coinjoin; tornado also sticks to only a few values (1 eth, 10 eth, 100 eth...) which minimizes traceability

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