451–460 of 544 posts
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…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tornado Cash is a service, _run by an individual_ who was warned to cease serving sanctioned entities, and failed to do so. 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 the…
>The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash contracts Thousands of little contracts doesn't absolve a financial institution from a few many-billion dollar illegal transfers, especially after they've been warned repeatedly.
Usually a smart contract protocol is a set of contracts working together, deployed to the blockchain, which provide application logic that executes regardless of who is interacting with it (via "transactions")
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…
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.
The "we are not a person or organization" argument sort of breaks down once you file a lawsuit.
The argument made by the plantiffs is that they were harmed by the Treasury Dept's action. One of the plantiffs deposited funds into Tornado for personal privacy, and now cannot legally access these funds. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.11...
I don't know if this is the sort of thing a court can do but it seems like the obvious solution to eliminate the damages to the plaintiffs while keeping the sanction in place.
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…
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…
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 can the NYT still use the term 'blacklist', when it has been purged from Software?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enlighten us with how washing differs from laundering then; because I haven't had the crypto koolaid yet.
-- as it was explained to me (I don't crypto) - because everything is public - you might want to disassociate (wash) transactions from yourself for perfectly legitimate reasons - not really needed in traditional finance as people typically don't have access to your bank account - however - this is not necessarily the same as wanting to take money you gained illegitimately and make it legitimate (launder) --
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least under US law, intent is still required. Meaning that while some users of TC may have violated this law, the devs did not, nor did they knowingly aid in it or have any provable intent to do so. I don't know what Dutch law says with regard to intent/knowing participation, but I suspect that any system of laws in a civilized country would generally require it for criminal convictions.
(B)(ii) does not require specific intent. It requires knowledge that the transaction fails to meet reporting requirements. The intent in question is manifested in Tornado Cash's design, which doesn't pass the malfeasance smell test: you can't absolve yourself of illegality by automating the illegality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It is always the same charade in which a government tells you that by banning x they will solve y. Or that by removing any form of privacy to everyone (but themselves) they will solve y.
In the end they never solve it, even worse the people in charge of the surveillance (banks in this instance for money laundering) are repeatedly caught actively taking part in the laundering and they occasionally get punished by "fines" that are rarely enough to discourage them from continuing.
So people want to take their privacy back now and tear down means ridiculous theatricals we call AML/KYC/KYB procedures. Obviously governments aren't happy, they are welcome to try to stop us.