Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not after the creators. The contributors. People who were submitting code changes to an absolutely legal piece of software.
...that enabled nefarious people to go about their deeds unpunished.
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GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
291–300 of 526 posts
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#292This is about how private companies work now that the project has been officially declared a “toxic entity”.
But really did anyone really expect working on a money laundering project would be a good idea? Sure it was a new method of money laundering but it’s pretty obviously money laundering
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
When they fail to take steps to prevent it, they are often punished. Here’s a few big ones from 2021 alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/03/24/le... Why aren’t these banks put on the sanction list where it’s a crime to do business with them? Because the vast majority of what they do is not money laundering and when they are discovered money laundering, they generally stop. And when they don’t,…
> and nothing was done to stop it. What could be done to stop it? It's just a contract run on the blockchain. I suppose they could limit throughput, but not much else?! Similarly, what could the Monero or ZCash developers do to stop money laundering on their blockchains? Here, not even throughput can be limited since amounts of transactions are completely hidden.
> What could be done to stop it?
Dunno. If you learn your product is being used to commit crimes and can’t figure out how to counter it, you should stop building it. (Or at least pause and call a lawyer.)
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#294HN post title is misleading. GitHub suspended (and not deleted) the 3 accounts of the org owners of the tornadocash org on GitHub. Going through the commit history, I have not found a single contributor (i.e. other than the 3 owners) which got suspended or deleted.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the crux of the issue in my opinion. It seems ridiculous that the sanctions should apply retroactively to anyone who has dealt with a sanctioned entity at any time in the past - if the people contributed before the sanctions, they were not contributing to a “blocked person”, as the project was not blocked at the time. Imagine if, say, A foreign electronics company is sanctioned by the government - does this m…
> seems ridiculous that the sanctions should apply retroactively Anyone contributing to Tornado after it became public knowledge that it was used to launder money put themselves at risk. The sanctions are the enforcement action. A wanted poster. The crime, laundering money, was committed a while ago. > does this mean that anyone who has previously worked with them or bought their electronics has done so illegally? If…
What is not used to launder money? What separates pre-sanctions Tornado from any other tech that can feasibly be used for something evil (e.g. cash money, PayPal, any cryptocurrency, e2ee messengers)?
Should we ask the government to publish a registry of approved technologies to ensure own safety?
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do however have an issue with the incredibly high rate of money laundering etc that flows through crypto. Incredibly high relative to what exactly? The total exchange volume of the cryptocurrency industry? Can you show some figures to back that assertion? OR are you talking relative to the global economy? In that case, it's not even a drop in the bucket. Clearly the Tornado Cash team should have simply started a…
Incredibly high rate of money laundering in relation to the entire flow of cyrpto. You should know comparing traditional fiat against crypto doesn't make sense.. But I guess I'm the one who's ignorant. There is a good paper overviewing a lot here : https://www.unive.it/pag/fileadmin/user_upload/dipartimenti/... It's more of an essay but all all stats are referenced. Also another good read : https://ciphertrace.com/q3…
> You simply can't argue that money laundering isn't rampant on cypto currencies.
Actually, I can quite easily argue that. Neither of your sources give evidence or numbers that justify your assertion.
In fact, less than 1% of transactions are shown to be illicit activity, and the majority of that is scams, not money laundering. Here's a report from your 2018 source, CipherTrace, only using more recent data: https://ciphertrace.com/2020-year-end-cryptocurrency-crime-a...
I quote:
> Cryptocurrency, with its similar characteristics, may likewise struggle to ever completely shake its bad reputation, despite illicit transactions making up less than 0.5% of Bitcoin’s yearly volume in 2020.
A more important clarification, which is precisely the reason I used blockchain instead:
Crypto != cryptocurrency.
You conflate the two several times across this thread, they are not the same.
With that aside, I'll ask again. Can you show some figures that back your assertion that there is a "high rate of money laundering flowing through crypto[currency]"? I would assume not, given that the very firms actively working with regulators and monitoring this activity disagree with that assertion.
Here's a nice, sourced writeup for you so that you can spread accurate information and not assumption construed as fact in the future: https://blog.coinbase.com/fact-check-crypto-is-increasingly-...
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still use the Tornado protocol for handling double-blind experiments in a lab without fear of being sanctioned. You cannot launder money, though. This is forbidden regardless of which method you use (crypto, art, car washes, etc). These sanctions are saying "we consider this specific use of this specific algorithm to be illegal, so if you interact with it via these wallets you will be sanctioned too". But the…
Maybe, but you will need to prove to the courts that labs actually use that algorithm that way. I don't think any are doing that, though I'll admit to not knowing much about how double blind studies are run in the real world. Even then, the algorithm and Tornado are not the same thing. It seems unlikely you can use Tornado itself for this purpose, even if the algorithm itself is useful.
I think if the algorithm were deployed alongside a processes for combating money laundering.
The press release specifically calls out a lack of efforts to block known bad actors and illegal funds from using their system:
> Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks.
So you probably can provide a mixing service if you can find ways to reasonably limit money laundering on it. This would probably be antithetical to the decentralization principles built into Tornado, but might allow continued legal operations.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. I disagree. Github should not be able to block anyone they want. We went through this about a century ago with railways, antitrust, and Standard Oil. I won't step through the details, but can provide more background if anyone cares. We landed with the concept of a "common carrier." Railways, as well as telecommunications companies, ISPs, public airlines, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, cruise ships…
> As an individual or a small business, ones does not have an alternative to - Microsoft Word — Google Docs? Apple Pages? Zoho Docs? OpenOffice? - GitHub — GitLab? sourcehut? Bitbucket? Gitea? - Facebook — Twitter? Instagram? TikTok? SnapChat? The thing about Git is that it's free software. Anyone can run their own server for very little money. If you get banned from the railroad, you can't just get your own train.
So what if the company you work for requires github?
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree - GitHub can block whoever they want. But doing so despite not being required to by law is a valid reason to criticize them.
No. I disagree. Github should not be able to block anyone they want. We went through this about a century ago with railways, antitrust, and Standard Oil. I won't step through the details, but can provide more background if anyone cares. We landed with the concept of a "common carrier." Railways, as well as telecommunications companies, ISPs, public airlines, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, cruise ships…
If what you say is true then Hacker News cannot remove any submission or any comment.
Unless some content is more “freedomtastic” than others but then that leads to determining what is acceptable speech and what is not. That is more dangerous than allowing private entities complete control because the central tenet of freedom of expression is that all expression is equally free.
In actuality no speech is more or less valid— you just have no obligation to propagate it no matter how important or unimportant it is.
And the scale argument, what most people fall back to when they realize that their initial position is indefensible, is irrelevant.
A single word written on a scrap piece of paper read by one person is just as important as a mass-messaging appeal that is vital to the billions.
An organization, vital to the very existence of all human beings on earth has the same rights to control their property as a single homeless person whose only possessions are the things he carries on his person.
Or at least, they should. Perfection is unattainable but we should strive for it so that systems where a homeless person doesn’t have the same protections as a multibillion-dollar corporation should not see calls for the large entity to have its rights curtailed but instead should see calls for the small entity to have its rights enhanced.
As far as I’m aware the only exceptions to this, broadly speaking, have been those made for health and safety purposes or when entities have been granted a license or permission to own finite public resources like the radio spectrum, or if criminal law has been violated.
Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, that sounds like a good idea. White phosphorous munitions are generally illegal under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
It's illegal (1) against civilians, (2) against military targets in concentrations of civilians if delivered by air attack, (3) against military targets in concentrations of civilians by non-air attack unless the military targets are separated from the civilians and you take all reasonable precautions to limit incidental damage to the civilians, and (4) to use it on forests or plant cover unless they are being used t…
Given the US military’s demonstrated lack of precision over the past few decades I’m sticking with generally illegal.