381–390 of 544 posts
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?
Generally you need to use a custodial exchange to do this, which creates a point of failure/censorship. Doing this onchain / trustlessly on protocols such as thor have significant liquidity limits afaik.
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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.
Granted, that's assuming you're a valuable enough contributor to society that you'll find another country interested in taking you, one that won't similarly have expectations around "people in a society should pay taxes", but that's a you problem.
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"The chief selling point of Tornado Cash is money laundering, which is in and of itself a crime in both the US and Netherlands." You have a fundamental misunderstanding of US law with regard to money laundering. Obfuscating the source of funds, by itself, is not money laundering. Money laundering requires a "predicate offense" - the money that is being laundered must be proven to have had an illicit source. Further,…
Money laundering requires a "predicate offense" Structuring is one of the most common methods of facilitating money laundering. No predicate offense required. It’s illegal all on its own. https://bsaaml.ffiec.gov/manual/Appendices/08
It's another crazy concept of overreaching states and IRSes enjoying way too much power. They can arbitrarily decided what's structuring and what is not. Arbitrary decisions aren't how a democracy should work.
You want to prevent people doing these kind of transfers? Make it clear what the limits are. Don't come after people doing precisely what the limit allows several times: precise it can only be done once or x times over a certain time period.
That's by the way, how some laws do work. For example in France you're allowed to give your kids up to 150 K EUR of real estate (or something), tax and inheritance tax free, once every 15 years. After 15 years you're free to do it once again.
But putting limits and then attacking people respecting the limits? To me it's the sign of something deeply rotten in the state and that such laws exists isn't something that should be cheered.
The president has much discretion here. That was the whole idea of IEEPA. I think the best case outcome of this lawsuit to crypto is that courts just toss it. Worse case is that IEEPA is effectively amended to say that a DAO is a person.
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> it enabled you to buy something deemed illegal by the authorities (drugs) in a safe manner and the products bought were higher quality than what you could buy on the street. Why was it a problem to begin with and why where significant resources used to shut it down? (Again, not defending it, and the founder was probably a scumbag, I am just asking the question) Because there was all sorts of white washing like this…
> All those people in Mexican and Colombian villages subject Just go into the frigging villages and arrest the cartel leaders oh wait they are in cohort with the governments of those countries...
But let's not pretend that Silk Road is some panacea saying "Hey, violence-free drugs!"
I tend to be on the legalization side of the spectrum but the notion of Silk Road as some humanity-improving place, versus a method of making Ross rich is definitely in need of citation.
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> You're almost clever... Tornado is accused of being designed to facilitate money laundering and, realistically, has very little other purpose. It does have other purposes, hiding transactions from the public, which I have used Tornado Cash for many times in the past. > I used Tornado Cash (non-US citizen here) for hiding transactions from the public (not hiding from the government), and when I filed my taxes, I sti…
> somehow I shouldn't be allowed to hide my transactions from randoms on the internet You can do this. But it doesn’t come without risk. If you kept using Tornado even after it was found Pyongyang used it to launder money, yes, you lose your money. It’s analogous to local law enforcement announcing a laundromat has been laundering money for the mafia, and then—months later–someone getting upset the clothes they dropp…
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...
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> it enabled you to buy something deemed illegal by the authorities (drugs) in a safe manner and the products bought were higher quality than what you could buy on the street. Why was it a problem to begin with and why where significant resources used to shut it down? (Again, not defending it, and the founder was probably a scumbag, I am just asking the question) Because there was all sorts of white washing like this…
my claim was that buying the drugs was safer (my words: in a safe manner). Everything else in the "pipeline" being equal if one part of it becomes safer the whole thing is safer. Want to eliminate production that happens in places with poverty/corruption/violence? Just make them legal. Seriously. Offer rehabilitation instead of jail. Other countries have done this and it work. People talk a big game when it comes to…
I just don't think Silk Road (and its brethren) were a means to that end. It just hides a lot of the issue.
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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 c…
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I think danaris's point stands - if you design an iron maiden style murder chamber but simply alter the name to "one time use changing room", you're not fooling anyone, the purpose is still clear, and illegal.
Its purpose is clear because there is no plausible alternative reason for designing a murder chamber. Are you suggesting that there is no plausible reason to want financial privacy, outside money laundering?
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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 c…
This is false. The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash contracts were either deployed to Ethereum as immutable contracts, or updated in 2020 to revoke mutability (once the final zkSNARK parameters were included) [0], meaning that they could not later be updated by the user(s) that deployed them. Arguing that Tornado Cash is run by an individual means arguing that the entire Ethereum network is run by an individual. There was no way for a warned individual to comply with that warning.
[0] https://www.coincenter.org/education/advanced-topics/how-doe... - Section titled "Can Tornado Cash be removed or updated? If so, by whom?"