GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#401

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

dingleberry420 wrote: post #388

shkkmo wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> before the supposed crime was made illegal The laws against money laundering aren't new.

Writing software isn't illegal. Timeline goes like this: 1. Developers write open source software 2. Open source software is deployed for money laundering purposes by other people 3. Developers who wrote software at point (1) are now being punished for something they did before the US deemed it to be illegal. Let's say the speed limit is being decreased. Would it be fair to jail everyone who went over the speed limit…

The 3 owning accounts of the github tornado cash org were banned or suspended. This is not a legal punishment for a crime, but github covering their own ass legally.

Github banning someone is categorically different from the US government jailing someone. You are conflating two entirely different things.

You seem to have taken the outrage bait that this tweet presented and ran with it without verifying the situation.

There are interesting things to discuss around both the precedent of the sanctions and the ability of large corporations to terminate accounts at will. However the "github is banning people who just contributed to open source and this is wrong because what they did wasn't illegal when they did it" outrage meme is misinformed, confused about how law works, and is generally distracting from all the actually important topics.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#402

Post by aaronchall » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

uranusjr wrote: post #10

Freak_NL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. The confusing title could do with some editing then (capitalize 'Tornado' for one).

I thought they were contributing to the Python web framework called Tornado (quite popular especially before asyncio caught on, but still well-known nowadays).

Just reading the comments, I also was thinking this was about Python's tornado library until I recognized it wasn't that. The title needs improvement.

CC @dang

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#403

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

andrewjmyers wrote: post #377

dogman144 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

So I'm actually interested in these figures. Bitcoin alone is estimated to use 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. The US Department of Energy estimates that there are 80 million households with dishwashers in the US (although they believe 16m never use them, but we will ignore that). It appears that the average dishwasher uses 251kWh annually (at the avg of 215 cycles per year). So this would put the US annu…

Will have to find the dishwasher one but this is a good start/reputable source. Btc comes in under fridges.

https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#404

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #349

dogman144 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

The whole point of the energy critique is that it's being wasted on something either useless or deleterious. You can argue with that take, but all you're doing with the "but what about dishwashers?!" response is asking them to pass a moral judgment on dishwashers, which isn't relevant to this discussion. Also, Ethereum has been "soon to be env-friendly PoS" for years now. Let's revisit that if and when it actually ha…

Well the merge has hit test chains so it’s coming for eth main chain.

Yes, you’re correct, the judgement is about what the energy is used for.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#405

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

xmonkee wrote: post #393

dogman144 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

Are you seriously claiming crypto is more useful than dishwashers ?

How often do angry articles hit HN ranting about Visa/MC cutting of spending to XYZ source based on moral judgments or investor pressure. Yes, free access to digital payments as an anchor of civil society beats clean dishes I don’t have to do by hand.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#406

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #396

dogman144 wrote: post #312

The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.” - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The cas…

Has it ever been the case that the majority of the developer community stand behind this kind of resistance to government power? It seems like it's always been a tiny minority of idealists who put their own lives on the line to do what they believe is right in the face of the beast bearing down on them. The majority has always been (and probably will always be) weak minded corporate yes men. What is distasteful is th…

Yes this is usually it, and then the whole ecosystem benefits from it down the line. Very distasteful.

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#407

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #398

dogman144 wrote: post #312

The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.” - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The cas…

Counterpoint: The automatic opposing of govt sanctions is pretty shameful for a nuanced technical audience.

Automatic, or nuanced view as a result of on understanding the tech pretty deeply?

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#408

Post by abriosi » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

xmonkee wrote: post #393

dogman144 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.

Are you seriously claiming crypto is more useful than dishwashers ?

It depends on what you consider "useful". I live in the west and I don't take our financial freedom as granted. There are many places in the world where decentralized consensus for financial transactions is valued.

I'm grateful to live in a society where this is not a "problem", but I don't take it for granted

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#409

Post by IG_Semmelweiss » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #276

blagie wrote: post #209

Earlier 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…

An organization doesn't become a monopoly just because they are large. Otherwise you might as well claim McDonalds has a monopoly on food and Nike has a monopoly on shoes. There are tons of competitors to GitHub out there.

What matters is notthe list of competitors, but instead the market share.

I don't think anyone can say Nike has 20% of all US customers of shoes.

But its almost certain that Github has > 20% of all US customers in software development.

Here lies the point. In order to enforce antitrust, there should be a clear line that once crossed, you are deemed a common carrier or something to that effect.

I think even as low as 10% of the US market for a given good or service sounds like a reasonable threshold where you automatically lose rights as a US company to determine who you associate with arbitrarily (because your lobbying power and market power are so great at 10% of market, you need to be neutered in some fashion once you reach that size)

Re: GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos

#410

Post by dogman144 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #353

dogman144 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be on the “be reasonable” side of this I suppose. Plenty of organizations in the past have chosen what side of this conceptual line to stand on. One can end up looking like the EFF with a long term, very strong reputation of standing up for clear boundaries of what’s right in the legal code context and go to court over it, or you can end up looking like GitHub.

EFF doesn't have >$100Bn of profits per year. When you're a donation based non-profit, it's easy to "stand up for clear boundaries". In fact, it's literally your purpose. When you've got >$100Bn of profits on the line, it's a little harder - and you have a different purpose (i.e. to make money).

I don’t think it was particularly easy for Phil Zimmerman, random computer programmer who built something but could also go work for MSFT instead, to standup to big time jail Arms Export laws over his something he built.