Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 544 posts

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

#361

Post by ashwagary »

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…

>>this exists to hide transactions from them (tax assessor)

Not true, this tool exists to provide privacy on an otherwise public ledger. Your tax assessor has no right to know about a transaction as soon as it occurs. A crime is only committed if you don't voluntarily declare it at a certain point in the future.

LE laziness and citizens conceding territory unnecessarily is creating a nanny state.

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

#362

Post by 8note »

dpkirchner wrote: post #21
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.

It's more akin to saying people shouldn't be able to provide banking services if they don't have sufficient KYC practices.

Is that a controversial statement? That tends to be a law on the books

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

#364

Post by mr_spothawk »

amalcon wrote: post #352
mr_spothawk wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does bitcoin store money? still waiting. > How is a bitcoin address meaningfully different from an account? Well, for one, it's only an address. Not a ledger. Bitcoin transactions point money at one or more address. Transactions, you might argue, are one-off ledgers. But then bitcoin is just a collection of those transactions & relevant/necessary data to support them them, compiled & validated using a variety of ma…

> still waiting. My answer is still "no (but many banks don't either)", as I said in my previous reply. Unless you mean digitally, but that's just "having accounts". If you mean digitally, then my answer is "obviously yes". > Well, for one, it's only an address. Not a ledger. What? The entire mechanical basis of Bitcoin (the blockchain) is a ledger (big database of timestamped transactions) with a somewhat unusual ti…

> Unless you mean digitally, but that's just "having accounts".

But you must open an account with a bank, and deposit money before they can process transactions for you.

There's no way to deposit money *into* bitcoin. Bitcoin is money.

> Each transaction has a set of associated addresses.

Yes, and you suggested addresses are the equivalent of accounts. They are not.

> Banks can facilitate transactions between arbitrary whole numbers of accounts also (off the top of my head: 1- paying interest; 2- payment; 3+- escrow)

Accounts, which hold money, are a tool of banks[0]. Bitcoin doesn't have accounts. Bitcoin is not a (limited) bank. It is a distributed digital cash system.

"Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network."[1]

0 - https://www.fdic.gov/about/learn/learning/banks.html 1 - https://bitcoin.org/en/

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

#365

Post by bombcar »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #233
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…

> 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).

At some point the law can say "you must do this" and ethereum can either go underground or comply. The countries can higher blockchain experts as well as anyone else can, and word the laws as needed.

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

#366

Post by notch656a »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #348
notch656a wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually operate and drive a car on private property without a license in Texas. In fact in Texas you can even drive a car drunk if it's on private property not open to the public, like a fenced off private parking lot. Using your analogy, an instance of TC on private property would not be licensed.

Tornado cash would not be sanctioned if it were not public and therefore not used by North Korea, yes. What is your point here?

Then using your analogy it should not be sanctioned. There is nothing illegal about a North Korean coming to your property and driving a car without a license. Your logic that _because North Korean, therefore public property_ is nonsensical.

And as an aside:

>Driving a car requires a license and registration of the vehicle.

Patently false.

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

#367

Post by ls15 »

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).

> I struggle to find a legitimate use case for hiding transactions from your bank and thus tax authority (assuming a developed country).

Roe v. Wade

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

#368

Post by orangepurple »

eropple wrote: post #265
mr_spothawk wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

US Citizens can't leave. They must pay tribute to the United States globally and beyond until they die. Income earned in outer space is taxed as income earned in country.

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

#369

Post by verdverm »

dannyw wrote: post #125
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #99

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…

They sanctioned wallet addresses which are not the same as the code

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

#370

Post by dpkirchner »

8note wrote: post #362
dpkirchner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more akin to saying people shouldn't be able to provide banking services if they don't have sufficient KYC practices.

Is that a controversial statement? That tends to be a law on the books

It's weird that they're calling the feds lazy at the same time as they argue against the feds having data they need to enforce laws.

It's also weird that the Treasury Department has such influence over crypto when it is supposed to be decentralized. The anger is clearly misplaced.

Post reply on HN