Does TornadoCash still need people to run it? Or is it just contracts in the Etherium blockchain?
It is autonomous but relies on people to create liquidity
Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
371–380 of 544 posts
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#372Mixers 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?
Who do you believe launders more money: all crypto mixers combined or the US intelligence community?
Has anyone done research on whether more financial crime happens in crypto or traditional finance? I'd be interested to see the result, adjusted for market cap or daily transaction volume or whatever makes the most sense.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 arbitra…
> There's no way to deposit money *into* bitcoin.
I have not deposited money into my bank account in many years. I have, instead, had money transferred to my account from other accounts. This is not only possible in Bitcoin; without it, Bitcoin would be useless. It's quite possible to open an account at a traditional bank with a transfer from another account; for online and investment banks, this is usually the only way to do it.
> Yes, and you suggested addresses are the equivalent of accounts. They are not.
Still waiting for you to tell me how they are not. It seems obvious to me that they are functionally equivalent, and I have made a case for why. An address is an identifier associated with a transaction history and access control. An account number is an identifier associated with a transaction history and access control.
You have made no corresponding case for why they are not, apart from citing your belief and citing PR from bitcoin.org. The former is convincing of what you believe, but it is not convincing with respect to the functioning of Bitcoin or banks. The latter is convincing of what bitcoin.org wants me to believe, but it is not convincing with respect to the functioning of Bitcoin or banks.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the umpteenth time in this thread: intent matters. Regardless of what the NSA said 30 years ago, it is manifestly apparent to every single person in this conversation that neither HTTPS nor PGP nor any other cryptographic scheme designed for individual privacy was designed with money laundering in mind. At the absolute worst , they were agnostic to the presence of criminal activity. This is in contrast to Tornado…
So if the developers of PGP were told that ISIL was using their service to facilitate terrorism should they shut down the project?
What project? PGP was bundled up and thrown onto the Internet; there was no development or services community established around it. The US Government threw a hissy fit over that and they ended up distributing it as a "book" instead, converting it into a question of free expression.
There is no meaningful sense in which PGP could ever be said to "facilitate" terrorism in the same way that Tornado Cash is rightfully characterized as facilitating money laundering. PGP is a program that runs on your host, encrypting your email. Tornado Cash is a service, run by an individual who was warned to cease serving sanctioned entities, and failed to do so.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
> your financial scheme
It's not my financial scheme, it's the social contract.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#376Banning 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…
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.
Why do you use a pseudonym on here instead of your real name? Oh right because you care about privacy. Same reason tornado cash exists. Playing the ML card is like saying Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet to facilitate digital crime.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#377I 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?
Changenow and Morphtoken have very high slippage when you get in the millions of dollars also these are (temporarily) custodial exchanges who could basically take your money and say GFY. Coins from these exchanges are tainted anyways so it doesn’t really make a difference from a laundering perspective along with the fact that the fees are higher.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I assume you mean the overturning of and the lengths to which certain states appear to be going in order to determine whether women have attempted to have now-illegal abortions?
I'd agree that's a pretty reasonable example of why we still need the ability to pay for things in an untraceable manner and why to object to any attempt to phase out cash as a legitimate method of payment.
But I'd also much rather have constitutional protections that don't allow governments to declare consensual surgical procedures on your own body to be illegal.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#379Can 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…
From the article: > One plaintiff in the lawsuit is a crypto investor who used Tornado Cash to send funds to support the Ukrainian war effort, hoping to preserve his anonymity and avoid retaliation from the Russian government.
Although I agree that this is a morally good usage of TC, I think that given the intent of using TC is to avoid retaliation from the Russian government it would probably be considered illegal in the users jurisdiction.
A better example might be to pay for a legal service without revealing your entire wallet balance to that service.
Re: Investors sue Treasury Department for blacklisting crypto platform Tornado Cash
#380Banning 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…
The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering