741–750 of 827 posts
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Yeah, you can't make postfacto laws. Sure, the government might make it illegal to donate to Planned Parenthood in the future but per the constitution they can't make prior donations illegal.
You sound like a white person from a middle class or better upbringing.
Does that somehow invalidate your point?
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Manufacturers carry liabilities for the products the make all the time. That's true for consumer products and even more significant for things like guns. In most places you're a not even allowed to manufacture guns not to speak of Marketing and selling them. Offering a service like tornado cash (e.g. getting financial benefits from transaction fees) would be just as illegal if they used potatoes instead of cryptocurr…
Should we arrest the author of Nmap?
a) he doesn't operate, market or deploy nmap in most instances. Doesn't consult or gives input at all.
b) He doesn't receive fees from using nmap on an ongoing basis
c) Nmap doesn't fall under financial laws which are stricter and require more to be in compliance with.
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> Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity? Probably. That said, he is arrested under Dutch law. We have no evidence this is tied to U.S. sanctions. As others mention, Dutch law restricts cash transactions in ways U.S. law does not. Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being…
> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. People keep saying this in this thread. Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
When funds from every major hack are going into your protocol maybe you're actually doing something bad.
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Most cash transactions are legitimate, but are you 100% confident that most cash volume is legitimate?
I’m not 100% sure if anything, but I’ll go with 99% sure that most cash transaction is not money laundering.
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There is expansion of the ban every time they add new types of "felons." The government has focused the past ~60 years years on greatly expanding who is a felon, and then enshrining that they do not have the same civil rights as others after serving their sentence.
I, for one, believe that felons should lose some rights. Personally I think felons should keep speech and voting rights, but anything related to violence should be prohibited.
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> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. People keep saying this in this thread. Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
As usual, it's an argument for harming people that produce legitimately useful things that criminals pervert. It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
Why do you think this guy should be exempt from the rules that everyone else has to follow?
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As usual, it's an argument for harming people that produce legitimately useful things that criminals pervert. It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
KYC is a mandatory requirement for financial service providers everywhere in North America and Europe. Why do you think this guy should be exempt from the rules that everyone else has to follow?
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> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. People keep saying this in this thread. Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
That's now how our society approaches financial transactions. When funds from every major hack are going into your protocol maybe you're actually doing something bad.
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Given how arbitrary the Tornado enforcement seems, fully private ledger cryptocurrencies will probably be declared criminal too. While this won't deter criminals from using them, it will deter normal people, as publicly offering goods or services in that currency would be illegal. It's not hard to imagine that the end goal is CBDCs having a monopoly on legal privacy. (Privacy from your neighbor, not your government.)
It doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described. It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned. The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.
It remains to be seen what they mean by this. Tornado doesn't extract fees, so the profiting couldn't be exactly direct.
> It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned.
I specifically said "fully private", not "private from your neighbor", to differentiate with credit cards or PayPal where users have no transparency or control over who sees their data.
> The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.
It's not possible for a decentralized system to "comply with KYC laws". That's like asking that paper dollars require an ID to transfer. They can't do that, they are bits of paper existing in physical reality.
Similarly, autonomous consensus-based systems like cryptocurrencies and trustless smart contracts can't just say to users "sorry, I'm not able to serve you until I see your valid government-approved ID", they are "things" not "services with a helpdesk, a street address and a CEO".