Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
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Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#2Previous discussion when he was arrested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436413
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#3[deleted]
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#4Previous discussion when he was arrested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32436413
Top comment aged like milk:
> Wow, just wow. 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? There must be more. Perhaps he also deployed it? That would be a different story. The article is quite murky in that regard. Perhaps they don't know yet
Code isn’t law. The law is the law. If you enable the crime willfully, you are a party to it.
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#5This story is framed oddly. Imagine if you blamed, say, cash, for being used by North Korea. Also compare this treatment to the employees at Wells Fargo/Wachovia who laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels,
>The settlement reached between Wachovia and U.S. authorities, known as a "deferred prosecution," raises questions. It's a probationary agreement, effectively allowing the bank to evade prosecution if it abides by the law for a year. While the fine imposed was substantial, it amounted to less than 2% of Wachovia's 2009 profit.
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#6This story is framed oddly. Imagine if you blamed, say, cash, for being used by North Korea. Also compare this treatment to the employees at Wells Fargo/Wachovia who laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels, >The settlement reached between Wachovia and U.S. authorities, known as a "deferred prosecution," raises questions. It's a probationary agreement, effectively allowing the bank to evade prosecution if it abide…
> Imagine if you blamed, say, cash, for being used by North Korea.
This is odd framing. If you launder cash for the North Koreans, you will similarly find the weight of various criminal justice systems descending upon you. Ethereum is widely in legal usage.
I'm all for harsher penalties for Wells Fargo.
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#7I don't agree with the ruling, but I wonder how many people out there are living the good life because of dodgy funds they laundered through Tornado Cash. Flying in private jets, driving lambos, drinking the finest whisky. While many of those that do honest work like teaching the next generation live in poverty.
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#8This story is framed oddly. Imagine if you blamed, say, cash, for being used by North Korea. Also compare this treatment to the employees at Wells Fargo/Wachovia who laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels, >The settlement reached between Wachovia and U.S. authorities, known as a "deferred prosecution," raises questions. It's a probationary agreement, effectively allowing the bank to evade prosecution if it abide…
People's default assumption seems to be that the prosecutors are corrupt, or dumb, or both.
Wasn't the Wells Fargo amount much smaller, in the millions? And someone is going to jail for that, too?
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#9Key quote:
> While Pertsev added functionality to the web interface that allowed legitimate users to separate their funds from those arriving from known criminal addresses, they characterized the effort as “too little and too late.”
I admit it sounds pretty damning to have a UI affordance for “keep my funds separate from the known criminals this service knowingly serves”.
I have little sympathy for those who intentionally increase crime as some kind of political statement, but it seems like maintaining plausible deniability would be very important to those who do so.
Re: Tornado Cash Developer Found Guilty of Laundering $1.2B of Crypto
#10This story is framed oddly. Imagine if you blamed, say, cash, for being used by North Korea. Also compare this treatment to the employees at Wells Fargo/Wachovia who laundered billions for Mexican drug cartels, >The settlement reached between Wachovia and U.S. authorities, known as a "deferred prosecution," raises questions. It's a probationary agreement, effectively allowing the bank to evade prosecution if it abide…
The quote from prosecutors in the article is actually really good: it is about human behavior, not the tools.
Abstracting the question to whether tumblers or cash or guns or whatever should be 100% legal or 100% illegal is too reductive to be useful for anything but rhetoric.
It’s when people take actions with intent and outcomes that the law gets interested. Those are what we should talk about.
Cash has lots of legitimate uses and some uses which I’m fine saying are illegal. Ditto with guns, even speech.
In this case the summaries at least sound like there was tons of evidence he was specifically designing and building features to make the service better for criminals, with the intent and outcome of facilitating criminal activity. Behaviors, as the prosecutor said.