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.
In there is an interesting paragraph explaining what Tornado Cash is:
… The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services. Users of a mixing service mostly do this to increase their anonymity.
Note how they sneaked "criminal" in there. There are of course legitimate reasons to desire anonymity for financial transactions! It's one of the reasons people like to pay cash.
> 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 used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. Again, I think that wouldn’t per se lead to criminal charges in the U.S. But we’re sticklers about speech and privacy in ways most of the world is not.
> 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.
"Iranian authorities arrested Malekpour during his visit, accusing him of designing and moderating pornographic websites. Malekpour had designed photo uploading software, and according to his supporters, that software was being used without his knowledge for the creation of an adult website."
> It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
To be fair, I think most are arguing to restrict guns rather than ban. I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith.
Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.
Would that really be a bad thing? Most other developed nations seem to get by fine with very strict rules on gun ownership, and coincidentally they have far lower rates for gun violence.
When something has far more capacity for harm than practical utility, it makes sense to regulate the crap out of it. Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
> Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
Now, explain why you think an AR-15 is so dangerous? Tell me why you’re so focused on that gun when it’s both not the major gun used in mass shootings[1], and when more homicides are committed with pistols[2].
I know quite a lot about guns, and I can explain the obsession. AR-15’s are hopped up 22’s. Literally. They take a 55-ish grain bullet and stack a lot of powder behind it. For reference the “not at all dangerous” 22 rimfire the government wants everybody to move to has a 40-ish grain bullet. What this means is low recoil, with good power. Coupled with relatively cheap ammo, you can sport shoot, compete and defend your farm with a single gun. Further, the AR platform is highly modifiable. I can swap uppers and change the caliber entirely. I can have an upper used for sport shooting, and a different one for hunting.
Not the GP but I read that sentence as an anecdote using the AR-15 as a well-known example of a common firearm that is seen by most non-gun-owners to be on the upper end of the scale between .22cal and RPG/50-cal machine gun in terms of power and/or risk of abuse. That is to say that I do not believe that the GP was actively making a point against the AR-15, just that they were using it as an example anecdotally to lace their statement with a touch of irony or euphemism.
I’ve just explained why, using your spectrum, it’s on the lower end.
I completely understand that guns are difficult to understand for non gun owners, they simply don't do any research. Couple that with the amount of research required to be knowledgeable takes weeks or even months for even the most competent of us. But imagine what you sound like to someone who is knowledgeable. It’s like someone challenging a PhD on knowledge. You should know what you’re talking about and if you don’t keep your mouth shut.
If you want actual visual proof that the AR-15 is on the lower end of the spectrum then watch this video, timestamped at multiple different locations:
FWIW the AR is fundamentally a platform, although in its pure form it does refer to the "underpowered" variant. Hunters might chamber 6.5 grendel, which is a nice intermediate cartridge commonly used to take down larger deer and elk. People who own firearms love the AR in part because it is so easy to change configuration and even caliber like legos. There are even AR chambered in .50 cal (but not that .50 cal).
If reincarnation exists, I hope that such people who are busy restricting others freedoms get all assembled together on a big island where they all get to live a very long life restricting each other to the ground, and when their nation makes Orwell blush, they get to live another 1500 years, enjoying each others company in a zero-freedom society, until they finally learn that it's not their f-ing business messing with others freedoms.
Edit. In this type of society, your freedoms are being gutted constantly for arbitrary reasons: one of your neighbors complains he's feeling unsafe around firearms so police comes and takes them all; another neighbor complains about cars making him feel uneasy, so you have to ride a bicycle; then a random passer-by complains about you using harsh words, so a court puts a non-removable collar on your neck monitoring your speech; then some worried activist complains about food and from now on you can get only approved food from the food-police. But you aren't wasting time: you complain about your neighbor's green lawn, then force him to live in a tent, restrict his water consumption for climate-concerns, make him reduce the size of his pets and so on. I'd argue the downward path of restrictions has no bottom.
At best, gun ownership should be viewed as a regulated privilege not unlike driving on public roads.
Everyone who drives has to be licensed to do so. There are different licenses controlling the use of larger vehicles on public roads. There are safety requirements vehicles must meet in order to be street legal. Every vehicle has a unique registration number tied to the owner.
All of these regulations have made driving considerably safer today than it was 80 years ago.
Czech Republic has had a gun tradition for ~500 years.
Homicide rates are lower than in over-regulated nearby Germany and quite a few other European countries. It’s even lower than some famously entirely gunless Asian countries.
The Czech Republic is a welfare state with universal healthcare, free university tuition, and other incredibly strong social safety nets in place. As a result, they rank #12 on the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index. More people living happy lives without fear of economic destitution is a good way to keep crime rates low. Desperation breeds antisocial behavior.
I'll never argue that the presence of guns directly cause gun violence. There are many factors at play. Strong gun regulations are one proven means to reduce gun violence, even if they are merely treating a symptom rather than the real disease. Unfortunately, making the necessary changes to truly solve the problem is even more of an uphill battle. I could see meaningful gun legislation passing within the next 10-15 years. But it will probably be decades before we solve our problems with inequality, healthcare, and education, assuming our entire democracy does not disintegrate first.
I never seen this "inequality-adjusted Human Development Index", but I'm certain Germany ranks higher on it than CZ, it is quite bit more developed than CZ in many areas. Many
Yet, they don't have shall issue laws, no constitutional rights like in CZ and USA, and their homicides (firearms or not) are somewhat higher. They border each other and have a long shared history going back a thousand years.
Seems regulations actually matter very little, except maybe appeasing the anxious that something is being done?
> Even foreigners from friendly nations can obtain a permit and carry, not even the USA doesn’t do it.
People admitted under ESTA can legally possess a firearm (state law still applies). The 2nd amendment rights are the same for Green Card holders as they are for U.S. citizens, and for everyone else there’s the hunting permit loophole.
What do you mean, even the USA doesn’t do it?
In Czech Republic you need to take an exam on weapons law, which you must take in Czech.
You are definitely right about this (many of my green-card friends have multiple weapons), and of course you're right about state law.
I think what parent post was saying is that in Czech Republic (national not state level), foreigners can not only obtain firearms, but also carry (presumably concealed), which as I'm guessing you also know varies widely from state to state, and here in California from county to county.
Of course I'm mind-reading here, I could be totally wrong.
When my brother-in-law and his son come visit from Switzerland they love to go shooting. In fact they get bored with my stuff and rent things with more punch (e.g. .338 Lapua). We visited a friend of mine in TX, and the things you can rent there (e.g. .50 BMG), we've only heard myths of those in CA, no one's actually ever seen one.
What a country where you can buy as many guns as you could possibly afford but when you try and put up a clothesline or solar panels the HOA will come and foreclose on you.
Yes it would be. I've come to understand that if you are well-versed on history, you'll come to the conclusion that taking civilian access to arms is a slippery slope that absolutely should not be tried again. I'd rather history not repeat itself once more.
Here's a comedic piece by Awaken with JP, where he points out many historical events where within ~2-10 years of a government taking the guns away from the population then genocide occurred: "Why Guns Must Be Banned Now!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY
This is the same guy who didn't know the difference between Infection Fatality Rate and Infection Fatality Ratio, then compared the The IF Ratio of Covid to the IF Rate of the Flu and proclaimed the Flu was deadlier because math, and straight faced didn't realize he had two orders of magnitude error.
Then he post a video making fun of his video getting removed due to misinformation that he never retracted or corrected.
I am claiming this guy puts huge amounts of one sided misinformation out there including this video.
1. Mass shootings are committed by those brainwashed by government psy-ops programs to motivate the masses to outlaw guns so they can become tyrannical.
2. Only tyrannical governments enact gun control
3. Gun control leads to extermination of a population.
4. The USA is following this pattern and I guess the left is essentially compared to Hitler or Stalin rising to power to perform genocide after they successfully disarm the right.
He never mentions once all the countries with successful strict gun control and free societies such as most of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. As though by enacting more strict gun control will lead to genocide always with complete surety.
His whole channel is an exercise in Brandolini's law and he's is most definitely a huge part of the problem.
The funny thing I am a gun owner and support the second amendment, but everyone seems to forget the "well regulated" part of that amendment and the fact that currently there are many "arms" we are not allowed to own, the same ones the military uses. Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher? What about a nuke? We already draw a line at certain arms moving that line or adjusting the regulations around it would not be without precedent.
Would it shock you to learn that mass shootings aren't the results of guns, but actually the result of mind-altering medications by pharmaceutical industry that are legal - but 1) in the clinical trials showed an actual increase in suicide [e.g. you're less likely to kill yourself if you didn't take the medication], and 2) that homicide (and homicidal ideation) are also increased due to these medications?
But we don't hear about that? Why? Because pharma, at least in the US, is something like 80% of the advertising revenues of all mainstream-mass media channels - so it's one of the big elephants in the room that they prevent from society being alerted to; health and education institutions have also been corrupted by pharma and their profits.
Otherwise, your arguments are still only at the shallow level - and don't address or even acknowledge that gun control, or gun rights being enacted, may in fact be an authoritarian effort - and most always implemented through the guise of "doing what's good for society."
So is it possible that in Canada, where the Trudeau government is planning to implement a mandatory gun buyback program [for certain guns to begin, but illogically, and that does practically nothing to reduce crime] - using fear mongering and opportunities of US atrocities or Canadian atrocities that the vast majority of weapons used were illegally obtained firearms] is aiming for tyrannical control - or you can't even open your mind to that possibility? If not, it makes me wonder what relatively shallow and skewed information/propaganda/perspective you've been exposed to?
The “well regulated” means “proficient, properly equipped, well trained, functioning as expected” or similar. You have to assess that phrase in the context of 18th century English.
It has no relation whatsoever to what “regulation” means nowadays.
> Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher?
But almost everyone can own a machine gun or a rocket launcher, where not forbidden by state law. Just pay a $200 transfer tax and wait 3-12 months for the ATF to process your transfer form.
>It has no relation whatsoever to what “regulation” means nowadays.
So it doesn't mean background checks or proper record keeping? The meaning of the word has not changed since the 18th century and certainly doesn't mean no rules whatsoever.
>But almost everyone can own a machine gun or a rocket launcher, where not forbidden by state law. Just pay a $200 transfer tax and wait 3-12 months for the ATF to process your transfer form.
So no nuclear arms or chemical / biological arms correct? The right to bear one is infringed.
Machine guns only if made before 1986, no new machine guns due to FOPA. So extremely limited supply and high cost along with the 3-12 month wait is due to more extensive background checks along with a high tax. The right to bear one is infringed.
Missile launchers are approved and taxed not only for the launcher but each round and you also must get a federal explosives permit for the rounds. The right to bear one is infringed.
State are also allowed to regulate them even more so, kind of like state level assault weapons bans and handgun laws? The right to bear one is infringed.
If you are ok with that kind of heavy regulation then doing that for semi-auto assault rifles or hand guns should not be an issue correct? That was my point, the second amendment does not mean you can own any arm you want and the heavy regulation on title 2 weapons, explosives and WMD's seems to work well in preventing their use in crimes without leading to tyranny and genocide.
>That was my point, the second amendment does not mean you can own any arm you want and the heavy regulation on title 2 weapons, explosives and WMD's seems to work well in preventing their use in crimes without leading to tyranny and genocide.
my argument would be that it does mean you can own that things.
Bans on nukes, etc should be added as amendment to constitution if they're not allowed. They are arms. Should be easy to pass the amendment if the overwhelming majority agree.
The fact you can't buy a nuke isn't some gotcha on legitimacy of restrictions. Clearly nukes should be legal until the constitution is amended to exclude classes of arms and the hughes amendment for post-86 machine guns is blatantly unconstitutional.
No right is unlimited and this has been upheld many times. From the decision Columbia v. Heller [1] which was delivered by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito all conservative and and actually struct down some restrictions:
(2) Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller's holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
I mean if we're just deferring to whatever the supreme court interpretation is today (which by the way, changes all the time), why even have a debate? Just spend your time reading court proceedings. We're both aware the supreme court has upheld infringements.
I am simply pointing to extensive case law affirmed by the Supreme Court that the right to bears arms in almost universally held to not be unlimited, which I agree with as do most even staunch conservatives.
There may be a disagreement on how limited the right is but your extreme viewpoint the even nuclear arms should not be regulated due to them not being called out explicitly in an amendment is obviously held by a very small extremist minority.
In my experience the nuclear arms argument is almost exclusively used to try and get the counterparty to admit somehow infringements are legitimate. It's an attempt to paint the counterparty as extremist, when perhaps you mean more directly to accuse the writers of the 2nd amendment as extremists (and they were).
> your extreme viewpoint the even nuclear arms should not be regulated due to them not being called out explicitly in an amendment is obviously held by a very small extremist minority.
I'm not asserting nuclear arms shouldn't be "regulated." I'm asserting the method by which their regulation is legitimate, in my opinion, would be a constitutional amendment. You're attempt to paint me as an "extremist" is predicated on the false assumption that I've argued nuclear arms should not be regulated at all, when in fact my only assertion is that any regulation should be done in a way that makes it evident to the reader of the amendment that they are not protected.
The reason the nuclear arms argument is used is because its a logical argument and breaks through the ridiculous assumption that the second amendment in an unlimited right.
Do you or do you not believe the right to bear a nuclear arm should be infringed?
Its sounds like (I think) yes you do believe it should be infringed but disagree with the current laws technical implementation. You are an extremist in that most people agree with the current law and do not think a new constitutional amendment is needed to regulate nuclear arms.
2) IF it is to be done, how can it be done legally.
I think we can answer (2) without the prejudice of opinion of (1). My opinion on (2) would be the right to bear arms should not be infringed until the constitution is amended to state the right to bear <whatever words have the effect of excluding nuclear arms> shall not be infringed. I believe there would be little political difficulty in passing an amendment excluding nuclear arms, and if it helps us depend much less on implicit interpretation then it's good for everyone. Hopefully it would shut down some of these gotchas that try to drive a wedge in towards legitimizing other infringements by trying to get the counterparty to relent banning of nukes is constitutional under the currently written constitution (not saying that's your argument precisely, but I've seen it a lot).
You did not answer #1, do you believe the right to bear nuclear arms should be infringed? Can you answer?
Yes this is a gotcha question, which is the point, the strict reading of the second amendment says "Arms" the whole point is a logical exercise in whether that literally means all arms or if it is in fact not an unlimited right to all arms.
Making an amendment for every new form of arm would be a colossal waste of time if we can just agree that the second amendment is not an unlimited right as almost everyone understands it to be including conservative Supreme Court justices. This is actually settled case law and is "legal" your assertion that it is not legal is a farce so #2 is a non-issue except in an extremists mind.
Enjoy the hocus pocus hand waving below of your counterparty trying to explain the why the framers' writing of the 2nd amendment implicitly meant to to allow the kind of logic that machine guns from 1985 are ok but not ones from 1987.
And that the founders had zero foresight to assume weapons technology would advance significantly beyond muskets. I mean really, do people think they were actual idiots?
To be fair, I doubt that they expected that nuclear weapons would be developed, and I'm sure they wouldn't be okay with chemical weapons either. But that's the strawman argument.
After all, the 2nd amendment was written at a time when civilian ownership of warships was okay, so I don't see how it shouldn't extend to all arms—past, present, and future.
I'll bite: Turkey — true (Armenian genocide). USSR — false (genocide against who? there were famines (btw in US too). all people suffered).
Though I know that the opposite is claimed by propaganda (at least, Obama failed to recognize Armenian genocide, and anything bad is easily believed without questions about USSR).
"Taking some leads to all" logic doesn't really follow.
If that idea applied then the US would already not have guns as many types of firearms (ex. fully automatic) and weapons (explosive munitions) are heavily restricted (and have been for a very long time).
Is anyone proposing without access to an AR-15, or any firearm for the matter, this mentally-troubled yet ignored by all the appropriate authorities youth would not have lashed out violently?
It's not too long ago homemade explosives were a seriously real threat in this nation (and others with much more strict regulations, such as the UK). Mass knife stabbings aren't that uncommon around the world, and driving a vehicle through a crowd remains one of the most effective means of violence readily available.
The point is... the tool isn't the problem it's the person. It's a figurative band-aid to think we can solve mental health issues by taking away objects and ignoring the actual core problem... which is mental health.
Stable, mentally healthy people do not commit these mass violent acts. Full stop.
Gun ownership has a long-term downward trend. Part of this is non-government factors like change in population from rural to urban, changing demographics, occupations, etc. But we can't rule out that part of this drop may be contributed by the additional barriers placed, such as great expansion of who is a felon, expansion of domestic violence firearm restrictions including some local agencies charging someone every single time a policeman is called out for DV no matter what actually happened, NICS (which can wrongly deny people who then have to appeal), increasingly difficult to navigate carry laws such as the gun-free-school-zone act that can incriminate someone for merely being within 1000 feet of a school with a gun. The no-fault divorce era has also seen the weaponization of spousal restraining orders during divorce, which have the effect to disarm while also being a bargaining chip and ace during divorce proceedings and a way to beat down your spouse with the court by leaving them helpless and disarmed even in many cases where the spouse has done nothing criminal. And then there is the attack on anyone who happens to have guns and gasp pot at the same time, as is seen in the federal charges against "FPS russia" who was disarmed because the feds didn't like he smoked a vape pen with his girlfriend.
There seems to be a somewhat slow boil in the United States, starting with the NFA, then the GCA, the hughes amendment, and a myriad of state and local laws.
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.
But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law, as well often a lack of empathy for others. The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I think the hardest one to talk about is the non-violent sex offender -- CSAM and the like. They have a high re-offending rate, and rehabilitation efforts aren't very effective in this area. On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender, but on the other we don't want to lock them up for life.
>The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
This is called recidivism and it’s a product of fuckwads like yourself who write people off for life the first time they run afoul of the law. It’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy that people return to crime when society deems them as subhuman when they return from prison.
> On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender
You’re only a handgun away from being a violent offender by that simple logic. You’re literally talking about non-violent people suddenly becoming violent for no reason.
1) The deterrent effect of gun-laws on felons are questionable when obtaining arms is trivial for anyone. Although I won't argue the punitive aspect of "justice" still remains. Note that just because laws don't always work doesn't mean we shouldn't have them, but see below.
2) If the punishment does actually have a deterrent effect (which is questionable, but lets presume it is true), then it should have a deterrent effect on the underlying violent crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon. Assuming the punishments for murder and assault with deadly weapon are worse than felon-in-possession (and I would hope they would be), one would conclude the marginal deterrent effect against violent crime is minimal for felon-in-possession laws. On the other hand defending genuine threat to life with a weapon is generally legal, so the deterrent effect for felon-in-possession is nearly all constituted of felon-in-possession laws. That is the felon-in-possession laws likely have little to no marginal effect on preventing violent crime while they may have significant marginal effect on the ability of felons to legitimately defend themselves. Put simply, it moves armed self defense from "legal" to "super illegal" while moving violent crimes from "super illegal" to "more super illegaler" -- which just seems like an extremely poor tradeoff.
3) In a world where arms are trivial to obtain (felon or no), if people can't be trusted in public not to kill others they should not be released from jail. The idea people would be ok with killing others (or other armed violence) but too scared to break the law to 3d print a gun just seems ridiculous. Releasing people who legitimately are believed to be a threat to the public in the event they obtain weapons just seems bat-shit insane to me. If you want a half-step of probation under which no weapons are allowed while they are closely monitored by a PO, to me that makes more sense. But a free man off probation can be assumed to be able to get weapons whenever they like, so we can't be releasing people to be free if we expect them to kill others with weapons.
4) >The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I mean that's probably true. If someone owns a pot plant today, it's not unreasonable to guess they will own one tomorrow. Which if they own guns at the same time, is federally a felony. Of course many of those people were never a particularly worrisome threat, that is until you made that illegal which in your own words turns them into people likely to commit crime again. It's the government taking peaceful people committing a victimless crime and damning them into situation where by your own admission makes them more likely to be trapped into a world of crime in the future (perhaps because felony record hurts their job prospects).
> CSAM and the like.
And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society. Otherwise, they need their rights restored when they are returned. I'd really prefer not to have a conversation revolving around these kind of offenders, because I find it is often just a clever trap to try and make someone out to be a supporter/defender specifically of people involved with materials involving disgusting acts to children. And of course even these people have civil rights, but defending them is so incredibly unpopular (I admit I don't enjoy advocating for their rights), so it's a cheap and easy win to introduce in a debate system with upvote/downvote to grey out comments.
I'm of the personal opinion that crimes against children should require some nexus to the physical abuse (i.e. the person that did the filming, abused the child, etc) because digitally planting evidence for this kind of crime is so incredibly trivial for police and so rapidly turns the opinion of jurors and everyone against the subject that in effect it's almost like a blank check for police to put anyone they like in jail for a long time without finding an immediate nexus to the abuse of a child or even any witnesses / claims by the child or their family. People merely found with a photo and the cop says "I promise I did not put it there, I am a good honest person" always sat very poorly with me, and I can't help wondering how many innocent people have been convicted of these offenses.
5) If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well. You may argue crimes such as even those make one more predisposed to violence, but even if that were true I would argue there must be _some_ amount of time (10 years? 20 years?) without committing further crime when there is a regression back towards, within the noise of error, of the general public.
6) >But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law
When it comes to matters of armed violence I'm far more interested in whether the person respects human life against unjust violence than I am generically about all laws such as whether they used a stock instead of a brace on a "pistol" (felony) or stood in front of a mining truck during a protest (felony in Arkansas I believe, if not one of the adjoining states). One could argue by your (and my) standard the US government should be disarmed.
I don't think you did a great job of arguing your point, because you conflated me with whoever you argued with in the past, and then are dumping your angst from them upon me.
I do think my post triggered you though. You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
> And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals.
It's not bad faith. There are roughly 750,000 sexual offenders in the US. In 2020, the US held around 1.2M prisoners, and has about 5.1M felons in the population at large.
> If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children...
I don't just believe it. There are studies to back it up. Note that the recidivism rates for sexual offenders below are vastly underreported as sexual offenses are not as likely to be reported as other offenses.
The question you didn't answer, is how to fix it -- but instead, blasting me for providing one, when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
> If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well.
At any point in time, any passed law might be considered unjust in the future. The founding fathers said they wanted to make a "more perfect union" as a response to the punitive laws made by the Crown. MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice." as a response to the human injustices to slavery and Jim Crow.
But as a whole, we -- that is society -- believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well. Real CSAM (not any artistic rendering) means some child in real life is being abused in real life.
Yeah you focused your whole post here again on CP / child abuse, apparently your favor topic, rather than other points. It's just a cheap shot designed to try and make this about defending (or not defending) the civil rights of the most hated segment of society rather than generically non-violent felons, and you know it. If you bothered reading what I said, I did propose that if they were unfixable and a threat to children they shouldn't be released from jail, which fixes your concern about them getting firearms. I get the fact that laws are ineffective aren't an argument against them, but it is worth noting making handguns illegal does fuck all to stop those people from getting one after released. Anyone can 3d print the frame in a few hours and have the slide shipped off the internet. If they can't be trusted in public not to hurt innocents they really shouldn't be released.
> when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
Hilarious because you clipped off the second half of my sentence in my quote where I provided the answer. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society.
Your obsession with CSAM is bizarre, I might add. And the fact you glossed over pretty much all my non-CSAM related points pretty much goes to show your intent here.
>believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well
My argument revolves around civil rights after full release from jail+probation/parole/community control, not whether crimes against children should be legal.
>You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
I really don't appreciate what I've seen you and many others do which is try to make someone who defends the civil rights of people who are free and released as someone who somehow doesn't want justice for children. These kinds of accusations made under the veil of academic debate are just an intelligent version of slinging shit at the schoolyard.
No ban, just increasingly restrictive laws on ownership and use that end up resulting in something tantamount to a ban. Look at gun ownership in most countries in Europe if you want an idea of what the future could look like.
Then give some thought to what Europe was like in the early 20th century!
> Most guys I know here in the Austria boonies have a hunting rifle.
First of all, Austria is the only country in the European Union where firearms are only partially licensed.
Second of all... Sorry, what I really meant was to say was that European gun ownership (broadly speaking) is very different from USian gun ownership. Europeans generally need permits, reasons for ownership, training, et cetera just to own a firearm. Carrying is heavily discouraged, and often illegal without a permit... which the state is under no obligation to give you. Magazine size restrictions are rampant.
In the United States, in many territories, we don't have equivalent policies. Many states allow for entirely permit-less ownership and carrying of firearms. We don't need to ask permission – that's the difference I'm trying to indicate here.
As always, correlation doesn't imply causation. It's not clear that gun laws themselves even enabled the rise of fascism or that they had any negative impact on quality of life. With widespread gun ownership early 20th century Europe could have been even worse.
> "The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on."
Events such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising showed some Jews really were willing to defend themselves with arms. The Jews were not cowards and the characterization as people who won't "mount resistance" is woefully wrong. It may be true they may have not been able to successfully overthrow the Nazis, but it is possible some of the oppressed may have survived another 10 or 15 minutes (in the Warsaw Ghetto, days) after initiating self defense and even if them being armed would have made things worse for them, that should have been their choice to make and not yours.
There is some sort of fundamental honor as well to allow to allow someone the tools to at least maybe shoot a Nazi on their way out, as one last act of resistance before certain death. Arms are a right even when desperate circumstance make it almost only symbolic.
Glad to know you're distancing yourself from the absurd opinion of this wikipedia article, which totally is a quote you never meant to support even though you intentionally framed it as part of your counterargument to the "tired" nazi gun control argument. I changed it to "the" rather than "your."
That argument is a bit of a straw-man though. Nobody is realistically claiming the Jews, or East Germans, or Soviet citizens, or Syrian citizens, could defeat their government with personal weapons.
The more reasonable version of the argument is that the unofficial purges, before the evil becomes fully embraced by the government (the Nazis), or where hidden and unofficial (the KGB), can be deterred by armed civilians. If you know the Stasi are coming to take you away in the night to certain death you'll be willing to fight, and if armed you have a real chance at inflicting casualties. And if every raid leads to dead troops and PR disasters the state is less likely going to get to the point where the terrorists adopt the mantle of government (Nazi Germany) and can then bring the sum total of state forces to bear.
tl;dr the argument is more about resisting unsanctioned or non-governmental terrorism so it doesn't become governmental.
No it doesn't. Here in Austria, only cops have pistols and semiautomatic arms virtually don't exist. However most of the guys I know have at least one hunting rifle.
Ever growing restrictions start creeping in. In many US states where handguns are hard to acquire it is now difficult to buy small caliber rifle ammunition that can be used in some handguns.
Take for example California's "safe handgun roster". They added a new rule that for every one pistol that is added three are removed. It's hard to construe that regulation as anything other than a backdoor attempt at banning pistols.
Discussions on the internet are tons of fun and extremely useful when we just ascribe whatever secret end goal on to organizations that we want. May I try? Actually, the majority of activist organizations are fronts for gun manufacturers to create a fear of them being regulated away to help push a buy-now mentality. claiming otherwise is bad faith distortion of reality!
To be Fair, based on the History of " restrict guns " it is clear no amount of restrictions is enough to satisfy those that want to restrict guns, confiscation and total ban is the clear end goal
it is NOT "bad faith" to say that, when there is clear evidence that no matter how many times compromise is reached they return the very next day asking for more and more restrictions
Factually false, if you believe this you are in an echo chamber. Yes, there are a few who want to ban guns, but I know many people, some of whom are gun owners, who support reasonable restrictions.
Trying to paint the entire movement with the views of it's most extreme members is absolutely bad faith communication.
There are some that over lap, but I am not a sport shooter, i own guns exclusively for self defense, most gun owners that "support reasonable restrictions" do so because they only care about maintaining shooting sports, and are fine with restrictions because normally they are targeted to self defense uses of fire arms.
There is also a small subset of gun owners that are ignorant of the current state of law and believe rhetoric like "closing the gun show loop hole" or other such non-sense.
None of this however changes the fact that the MAJOR organizations that support gun control, and big name politicians pushing for gun control have their implicit stated goal of total ban of the most common weapons in use today, (Semi-Auto rifles and pistols with capacities greater than 8)
So sure maybe they will allow people to have a black power musket, or some other such non-sense and you believe that classifies as "not a total ban" but to me that is a total ban
Again, not true. You need to get out of your filter bubble and meet more kinds of people. People own guns for many reasons and those different reasons do drive different gun usage.
A ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity pistols is not even remotely the same thing as banning all guns or even banning all non muskets. I don't think such a ban has popular support even among those who do support greater restrictions.
Are there countries where guns have been banned, and mass shootings increase?
Are there countries where banned guns have been allowed, and mass shootings increased?
Other countries have their own version of mass shootings. They often involve knives, explosives, or vehicles instead.
You trade one for the other. Mentally unstable/unhealthy people commit mass violent acts regardless of the tools available.
In practically zero cases of mass shootings was the assailant completely mentally healthy. Taking away one particular violent tool is not going to solve the mental health problem in this country.
Or, you get a bloodbath, like what happened in Kenosha, where everyone (except the first person who was killed) involved was convinced they were the good guy with a gun.
In the fog of war of an active shooting, nobody has any idea of who is the threat, and who is responding to the threat, and nobody has time to sit around and wait for 8 months for a jury to determine whether the shooting was justified or not.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on what happened in Kenosha.... Because your rendition of events as no match for what was reveled in trial, and other sources
When you're in an active situation you don't have time to wait 8 months for a trial to clear things up. Rittenhouse believed he acted in self-defense... And at the time, so did Huber, and Grosskreutz.
This seems to be a complete re-writing of the facts revealed from eye witness and video accounts of the events of that evening. The jury also seems to disagree with this alternate narrative.
It may be what some folks want to believe happened, but it is absolutely not the facts.
People absolutely have and occasionally do rush active shooters, which is what happened in the second part of the situation.
And if you don't ever believe that confronting an active shooter is ever the correct thing to do, why do you think having a gun will help you? Take your own advice and run away, you don't need a gun to do that.
When your in an event the person running TOWARDS the police being chased by a mob is generally not the criminal, just saying...
I do not believe that the people who attacked Rittenhouse believed that he was an active shooter they needed to stop, not for a moment do I believe that, nor did the jury, nor did anyone else that has a rational mind
Active shooters do not run toward police with their hands up
I think this sort of question is being argued with youtube-dl and we can see where it goes. The entertainment industry argues the purpose of youtube-dl is to pirate content. Youtube-dl argues that there are in fact many legitimate uses for it and this argument has so far prevailed.
In the case of WhatsApp, the app has many legitimate uses, notably speech, which is often protected as a right. In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy.
> In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy.
There are legitimate using an open ledger as Ethereum, privacy is a right.
Privacy should be a right, with limits (like all rights). I'm not sure where in the world privacy is a constitutional right beyond unreasonable-search-and-seizure.
Yeah, this line of reasoning is exceedingly silly. Stethoscopes can be used to help crack safes, should the people who make them be in legal jeopardy as a result? Good luck convincing anyone to invest in innovation in that kind of legal environment, my friends.
Demonstrating that there's one legitimate use should probably be sufficient in most cases. If you want to be uptight you can think about adding a requirement that the best fit use case must always be legitimate
If the law required communication providers to obtain licenses, and as a condition of those licenses to have credible controls against use by terrorists, and Whatsapp just scoffed at all that & went on being trivially used by terrorists, then why not?
>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?
If the law is written by authoritarians they very well could be. What is legal has absolutely no relation to what is right, wrong, ethical or unethical. It depends entirely on the people passing the law.
Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent. So before they knew the Taliban uses it, not a crime. Now that they know? Well, kind of a grey area. I bet you could construct an argument that they commited a crime if any NEW feature/code commit somehow benefits the Taliban after they knew the Taliban uses it. It's legal for me to sell someone a car. It's no longer legal for me to sell someone a car if I know they are paying in drug money or they need it to have a new 'anonymous' car while on the run from the police.
Funny story. Drug dealers try to do this with analogs. They will go to a lawyer and get the lawyer's opinion that whatever benzo/fentanyl derivative they are ordering from Alibaba does not fall under the Analogs rules. They then try to argue if arrested that this shows that they didn't have criminal intent and went to great lengths to make sure that what they imported was not illegal drugs and hence no Mens Rea. Don't try this. It doesn't work. You have not found that 'one secret the Feds hate'.
>Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent.
That's what Ross Ulbricht was arguing; the creator and the operator of the biggest Dark Web drug marketplace called Silk Road but it didn't work out for him. Because you as an operator of a platform have liability of what your users do or in another words you need to take action in order to prevent illicit activities. Ross argued that he created neoliberal free for all marketplace but that the bad guys invaded it and ruined it. Ofc that was BS argument just like not regulating who is mixing funds and what kind of funds at your crypto mixer is also BS.
And just like Ulbricht set a great example for future darknet market operators to take OPSEC far, far more seriously, so too will this overreach of authorities drive authors and operators of tumbler/mixer software/services to do the same.
The authorities are stepping on their own dicks, here, in a manner of speaking. Most of the biggest darknet markets operate far better, and far more clandestinely, precisely because Judge Forrest threw the book at Ross.
And they're doing the same thing here. This really sucks for Pertsev, but going hard on him like this will set the standard for a brighter future in the fight against State-enforced financial tyranny.
That makes no sense and I don't think that lines up with liability.
Every hammer maker knows some people use hammers as murder weapons. Their continued manufacturing of hammers obviously does not constitute a criminal act.
This argument makes no sense, and while I'm not a lawyer, I doubt it actually has legal basis (at least in the US).
Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.
The developers of Tornado Cash don't directly profit from its use (the article claims that erroneously), it's a fully permissionless immutable smart contract without a fee component.
So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.
I feel like this can only be true because you must have defined "launder money" to be any private usage of money (which isn't a sufficient definition of money laundering, to be clear). If you claim otherwise, then you need to be more specific with your reasoning.
To start: why would anyone need privacy--of communication or of shared resources (payment)--but for something illegal? If you have an answer for that for communication (which you claim to and of course should), then it also is the same answer for money.
Do you believe someone should be able to keep secret that they have some medical condition, and that that knowledge should only exist between them and their doctor? Well, fat lot of good that does when the doctor specializes in some specific issue and there is a record of you paying them.
Think it is sufficient to trust the bank, because you think their security and privacy are awesome? Well, that's the same argument for WhatsApp vs. something like Facebook Messenger: no need for end-to-end communication if you are willing to trust people.
FWIW, I didn't just say that and then drop the issue: I provided the step-by-step explanation as to why. I also certainly understand people disagree: that's why I felt the need to leave the comment at all ;P.
Providing infrastructure that money launders could use, or actually do use, is not categorically illegal. But the law establishes certain obligations to try to mitigate money laundering. There are controls you need to implement, expertise you need to have on staff, a level of sophistication that your AML program needs to demonstrate. And there are enforcement regimes with audits and licensing to backstop all that. It is not a free for all.
I am not sure how you expect to implement any of those without undermining the end-to-end nature of the private communication. Can you maybe explain how this would work in the context of the messaging application?
False. Here is the definition of money laundering:
1. The act of engaging in transactions designed to obscure the origin of money that has been obtained illegally.
2. concealing the source of illegally gotten money
Anyone can use a cryptocurrency mixer with legally obtained cryptocurrency.
Tornado Cash has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.
Anyone can, but realistically, it has probably been used almost exclusively for either laundering money or concealing the source of money used to purchase illegal goods. I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal.
I'm not advocating for the developer to be prosecuted, I'm just saying in the eyes of the law, they probably won't see it in the way you are describing.
I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal.
Why would you need a mixer? If you want to hide it from your friends just send it to a new address and then buy with that address. Who can prove that new address is yours?
Also if your friends then regularly snoop and trace every single one of your transactions so they can laugh at you for your purchases, I wouldn't consider those to be your friends.
I mean fair enough, you have contrived a legal example. Yes, I admit it does have valid use cases, I just don't think they're very common at all.
Why would you need a mixer? If you want to hide it from your friends just send it to a new address and then buy with that address.
Let’s continue the example. Imagine you use your shiny new NFT as your twitter avatar. Now anyone can see the wallet holding that NFT received funds from wallet x. Wallet x is your main wallet.
I disagree with that, as there are things you may wanna buy without making public you bought, that is still legal. For example, some specialist hobby you'd rather not want others to know about.
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to buy an NFT with legally purchased Ethereum from an exchange like Kraken or Coinbase, but you don’t want your friends to know you spent $2,000 on a jpeg. So instead of buying the NFT with your Coinbase wallet that is linked to your [ENS] name, you create a brand new, single-use wallet and use it to buy the jpeg. And instead of funding the single-use wallet from your recognizable wallet, you obfuscate the source with a mixing service.
1. Russian citizens or political figures wanting to donate to friends and family in Ukraine without being prosecuted / jailed / killed.
2. Not wanting to give your entire financial history to every single person you interact with.
Do you like such a privileged life that you can't imagine a government or adversary using knowledge about your finances against you? Do you think Russians trying to help friends and family should be restricted from doing so because Putin says so?
Let's arrest Satya Nadella, Tim Cook and Linus Torvalds for they are responsible of the three major OSes that are used for the computer related crimes.
> 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?
Of course not, because intent matters.
The team at WhatsApp works super hard to keep people who shouldn't be using it off the platform, so that everyone else can derive use and enjoyment. If WhatsApp was built as a platform to facilitate terrorist communication you're damn right you'd be held liable for working there.
Tornado was built, and is operated, specifically to facilitate money laundering. It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters if the funds were acquired illicitly. They do not now, and have not ever, attempted to stop the service from being used for this purpose - after all that's why it was created.
Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.
The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.
Privacy is about much more than whether your transactions can be trade back to you - it's about who can trace them back to you. There's a huge difference between "VPN who already has all my IP addresses knows that I did business with it" and "Everybody on the Internet knows that I did business with this VPN provider". If you disagree, let's see you post your credit card history and tax returns on Hacker News - after all, your bank and the IRS respectively already have this information, so you're not gaining any OpSec by keeping it private.
For a lot of mixer transactions, your adversary is probably not the government - it's any hacker that you may want to prevent from knowing your Ethereum balance and the services you transact with.
If you don't mix your coins I can see you have signed up. If you do mix your coins I cannot. When I say I, I literally mean I could check the chain and see you were a vpn user. After mixing I (me) can no longer see if you are paying for a vpn. Hope that clears it up lol.
What if I don’t want my employer knowing I spent my BTC/ETH/etc on a porn website — so I want a way to disassociate the payment address they know from my spending account?
…or guns, alcohol, abortions, etc.
People have a need for privacy and disassociating spending from receiving for perfectly normal and legal reasons.
This seems like a better argument for using a system which is correctly designed. A public ledger is a bad fit for currency and layering kludges on top isn’t as good as a better design, especially when that exposes you to being an accessory to criminal activity.
There are cryptocurrencies that are private-by-default, eg. Monero and ZCash. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and whether governments go after them as well, particularly since (I suspect) Monero is used for a lot more illegal activity than Tornado.cash.
The thing about Ethereum's public ledger approach is that it enables a lot of features - broadly advertised smart contracts, for example. Tornado.cash is literally an attempt to replicate the privacy benefits of ZCash inside of Ethereum's generalized blockchain. From a computing perspective that's quite interesting - you start with a public system and find a way to emulate a privacy within it.
Yeah, I’ve been surprised to see so many people prosecuted after using Bitcoin for serious things long after the privacy concerns were well-publicized. I guess it shows how many people fall for marketing.
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 doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described.
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".
That's some seriously circular reasoning: It only exposes you as an accessory to criminal activity because they've labeled it a criminal activity despite legitimate uses...
No, it makes you an accessory because you are mixing your traffic with criminals’ to help hide all of your activity. Everyone trying to hide criminal activity needs to use a mixer but only a small percentage of other users are going to pay for an optional service so the odds are worse that you’re more likely to attract attention to your transactions, too, just like you would if you were known to take home large quantities of cash from a mob-owned casino, too. Maybe you’re just a really good poker player but it’s more likely to make law enforcement curious than if you don’t.
"We have no evidence this is tied to U.S. sanctions."
Hmm, I suppose you are correct technically ( no direct evidence of connection ), however:
1. Sanctions are issued on 08/08/22 for Tornado Cash by OFAC
2. Guy writing software for Tornado Cash is arrested
It does not take a large leap of faith. I will go a step further, given how much companies like to avoid OFAC issues ( and that does include non-US companies ), I am all but certain the two are connected.
Source: I used to work with sanctions in banking environment.
I hear criminals keep using cash to launder money, but the central banks keep printing cash! Outrageous! Unbelievable behaviour! To jail with the lot, straight away!
> Then, by assuming that any cash that the surveyed consumers do not fess up to holding must be held for nefarious purposes, he concludes that 34 to 39 percent of all currency in circulation is used by criminals.[1]
By contrast only 14% of Tornado Cash activity has been traced to illegal activity.
I’m sure that far more cash transactions by volume are not money laundering compared to tornado cash. Tornado cash’s only real purpose is money laundering.
Ballistic table calculators can be used by insurgents/guerilla fighters and even by regimes you or me personally oppose to.
Do we need to hold ballistic table calculators' developers accountable?
What if these calculators' developers submitted a PR to SQLite source code or just a feature request and SQLIte devs got it done, are SQLite developers also culpable by proxy?
Where do you stop your "they knew what they were doing"?
Satoshi has demonstrated inhuman levels of restraint. The only explanation is that he is dead.
The others are that he is not human, or that it's a committee defying Hanlon's razor: i.e. not governed by stupidity like most human affairs, but malice. Both are equally improbable.
My pet theory is that he's just one of the myriad of early developers who made hundreds of millions from crypto and keep relatively private. At that point he'd have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by revealing himself.
Basically contribution laundering, by blending in with the first 10 or so contributors and killing off his old persona he would get most of the benefits but still not get targeted as the inventor of bitcoin.
Exactly. It's consistent with the personalities of the early contributors that I've met. Private individuals who enjoy their wealth but don't seem like they really need any more.
Assuming he had some later money (in the Blockchain) that's maybe "just" a few dozen / hundred million worth.
That's plenty money for one person without the liability and the publicity. You can live a life in pure luxury and fulfill all your material wishes.
Maybe he lost the keys or threw away the machine after a year or two. There's nothing to be gained from going public in this case but a massive threat to your life.
Selling this may ruin the story and crash the price. It would probably go against his values and mission. He could easily have other early wallets and have $B's. Most likely explanation though is that it was Hal Finney who passed shortly after Satoshi disappeared.
If any of the BTC founder's blocks suddenly became active it would crash the price because most people would suspect someone found an exploit in the contract/hash or the keys were stolen.
That’s fine when you’ve already locked the price into something else that’s not-btc.
While you could sign a message with your key, you would still need something that accepts the proof but isn’t public, which might be possible with a properly structured/constructed smart contract, maybe?
That doesn't really answer my question. If you're a modest private person, what can you buy with 20 billion that you actually want, that you can't buy with 300 million?
That message was sent about 6 months before Hal Finney died. (Who, incidentally, lived a couple blocks away from Dorian Nakamoto.) Personally my money is that Satoshi Nakamoto = Hal Finney, and he's cryopreserved and likely to come back in a couple centuries to sit on top of a few quadrillion-dollar Bitcoin hoard.
Some people have alleged that Paul Leroux, who is sitting in prison right now, is Satoshi.
That would explain why Satoshi hasn't moved any coins or sought fame.
I invested a lot of time on his identity, not for anything just because I was bored and curious. I highly suspect it’s Adam Back and he currently sits in a tax haven, Malta.
Very unlikely. Hal Finney is the more likely candidate.
Adam is/was not a good programmer like Satoshi was.
Satoshi was in favor of alt coins in Adam is notoriously against them.
"Adam put enough effort into proclaiming that Bitcoin was based on the concept of HashCash that, if he was Satoshi, Satoshi would have given HashCash more credit." - Another HN User.
Satoshi had a positive attitude and Adam is notoriously unpleasant.
Hal is a great programmer, worked for Phil Zimmerman on PGP.
Hal is the first person Satoshi contacted, first person to mine outside Satoshi (op sec).
Hal was aware of all the prior works that failed, b-money, bit gold, hashcash, etc.
Linguistic analysis of the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi's forum posts most closely match Hal's writings.
Hal lived in the same town for 10 years as did Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal died of ALS shortly after Satoshi disappeared (he knew it was coming and that he couldn't continue).
I also think living somewhere he could have seen Dorian Nakamoto's name is a very, very strong pointer towards Finney.
It may seem like a dumb opsec mistake to pick a name from your town, but lets remember, at that point we're talking about launching a cool experiment about digital money worth $0, not about picking a pseudonym as the figurehead of a project worth a trillion dollars.
After reading an article about it, I do wonder about Len Sassaman, who apparently fits Satoshi's timezone and "accent" better. It could even have been both of them collaborating...
However, there are some valid counter arguments in this thread, such as Satoshi coming out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi.
The Len Sassaman theory really does it for me. It's been a while since I read up on it, but the similarity of Bitcoin and his remailer tech was the main thing that I found pretty convincing. Plus of course the timeline of his death.
That would be highly interesting. Not like you can get easy access to the internet inside a prison so he would have to either convince a guard to bring him a phone to access it or possible use his lawyer. Anyone who visits they would likely record his conversation with the exception of his lawyer. But what good will the money do him, he isn't set to be out until he is like 72 years old and looking at him he is not in prime shape and may not even last that long. Maybe he could wait until enough is at stake like other countries adopting bitcoin as a currency and when the time is right find a way to put all his coins on the table causing a crash in price. I can't imagine what end game he would choose if he truly is the creator and how he has had so much will power he has had up until now to not move any of his coins. One thing is for sure I really do hope I come to HN one day and see the top story with 2000 plus points saying Satoshi's coins have just been moved.
Although Bitcoin is resistant to the "charismatic leader" problem, his second coming would give him incredible fame, following but also personal danger.
Yet I do not think any human would resist a moment in the spotlight, if not to renounce its child and its current direction.
Of course. Various people have claimed to be Satoshi over the years, but failed to provide any sort of proof. Satoshi could either actually be one of those people, or realize that without proof he would be subject to the same fate.
I think someone who believes that it will bring certain death could resist.
It wouldn't surprise me if he destroyed his private keys to prevent himself from ever succumbing to the temptation.
Those coins are of little value when using any of them would kick off a race to track you down and kidnap you with the intention of rubber-hosing the key out of you before going short on bitcoin. Having a secret in your head that can be converted into billions of dollars is not a good position to be in if you are not already a highly powerful individual with tons of people looking out for you.
You are overestimating the odds of that happening.
Vitalik Buterin is widely known, travels all the time to many countries, and although he might not be as rich as satoshi, still owns like a billion in crypto.
He must have lost the keys very early, when Bitcoin was just a fun experiment, and that would still be dubious: how did he imagine his creation would be so big as to prompt destroying his keys right there and then? The common human response at that idealistic stage would be greed.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
I think it's likely when they started Bitcoin they used a "genesis" account which they never intended to keep the keys of
They probably also had other keys that they mined early coins on that they did keep, this would be consistent with Satoshi being Hal Finney or Nick Szabo
> I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
1. They probably made enough off BTC to retire rich already, why go through any trouble to make even more money (not everyone has the drive to accumulate billions when they already have millions)
2. If they've destroyed/lost the original keys there is no way to prove they are Satoshi and nobody would believe them, like Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi and started a BTC fork which picked up very little traction
You don't need 15yr of foresight. I can see someone keeping their mouth shut for the first X years on the basis of "things are going well, my project is being adopted, I had better not F with it by increasing the number of coins in play lest there be unintended consequences" and then at some point deciding that things have gotten out of hand, the stakes are too high, pulling the hard drive off the shelf, drilling it and tossing it in the bay.
I can't see anybody having that self-control is my point. I can't think of any person in history that has shown this level of restraint, especially about a very valuable and very controversial invention.
Occam's razor says it's easier to assume he's dead than trying to imagine him as the most patient Buddhist monk, with deep economic and cryptographic knowledge, the world has ever seen.
But we could go on with this discussion for years, so let's just agree to disagree and wait and see if his name surfaces again or not. There's bound to be more and more hucksters trying to claim they're Satoshi the longer this legend lives.
I think most people in the space have a pretty good idea who it is, quite likely the guy who made the predecessor. The important thing is it's ambiguous and unproven which stops this kind of legal stuff.
Yes! Plus Faketoshi most likely waited until the person/people he knew (or strongly suspected) were Satoshi were dead to launch his scams. Less chance of a forum post saying "I'm not Craig Wright".
Committee? Like as in Satoshi was a team of people? That’s one possibility.
As a side note the Nakamoto Institute website archived all of Satoshi’s emails and ‘his’ IP is Californian. Make of that what you will. For all we know it could’ve been one of Musk’s side projects that caught on and went viral.
We're talking about someone with inhuman self-control, and GP is talking about someone that just can't keep his mouth shut and loves being in the spotlight.
If the genesis block did contain the image of a trollface (or any other 2008-era meme) instead of "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks", I could entertain this theory.
Anonymous cash transactions in the Netherlands over €10,000 are already illegal (https://www.amlc.eu/cash-limit/). The government intends to ban cash transactions over €3,000.
The way I read that, large anonymous cash transactions in a non-professional capacity are still fine? Could I not gift somebody a million cash euros or buy a home with cash?
IIRC you can't buy a house anonymously in Netherlands, no matter if you pay with cash or not, you'd be required to register the transfer of ownership in the cadastral system, and any real estate deals must be with a written contract that identifies both parties.
And I believe the NL tax reporting for large gifts also requires you to identify the donor.
In essence, the limitation is not on the method of payment but on the core activity, that any significant income from contracts, deals, trades, barters, transfers, gifts, settlements etc need to be non-anonymous in order to be legitimate, so if the method of payment does not identify the payer (i.e. cash) then simply it's your duty to identify who you're dealing with, from whom you are earning money.
I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west. Typically all large transactions get auto reported to the financial intelligence unit, with the tax man getting access to the data set as well. If paid via crypto they'd find out when the recipient cashes out, forcing him/her to do source of funds.
> I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west.
In New York, properties are commonly held by LLCs. Transferring ownership of the LLC can be done without any public or auditable record of the transaction.
Current EU AML laws are full of requirements for explicit registration of the true beneficiaries for all these companies (including chains of companies); anonymous ownership of companies is becoming illegal in the last couple years.
At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names.
Last time I sold a house, the only reason I met with the buyer directly was because I didn't use an agent for the sale.
Are you staying that the state/county doesn't know that you are the person owning that house, or doesn't know who the previous owner was?
This thread is not about privacy from other private citizens/companies, but privacy from the state authorities. For example, my bank account is private in the first sense (even my parents couldn't find out how much money I have unless I tell them), but it's not private in the second sense (financial authorities have the right to ask my bank how much money I have).
> At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names.
But most homeowners don't have the house in a trust. That's mostly a rich-people thing. The default is that it's your personal name(s) on the documents, including in e.g. county tax records.
Property taxes are between the owner and the county where I live. They are paid in advance, so you can't sell a house without paying the property tax first. It'd be liened by the tax authority to prevent the sale.
But if the owner is anonymous, how does the country know who to ask for paying the taxes? How would the county even find out that the house changed ownership?
In the grandparent example, it seems the new owner is a trust, which is also liable for paying the taxes (or there can be action taken against its property i.e. the house), but the person owning/controlling that trust is obscured.
Perhaps a relevant different example I've seen sometimes is that in some markets for tax reasons developers who build larger buildings (offices, apartments) will make a separate LLC for each building, so when they want to sell it, the title to the real estate doesn't change hands (it still belongs to the same company) but rather they sell the whole "company" instead with the building as its main/only asset.
They don't need to know. If the property tax isn't paid a local judge just writes up a new deed to whomever pays off the delinquent property taxes. It is literally property in their jurisdiction. They can take possession any time.
Home sales do not universally count as income. Also, it is important to realize that 1099-S reporting applies to individuals like a licensed realtor. Which I am not.
I doubt any company wil accept that, and suddenly owning a new house with no data on where that money might have come from will raise so many red flags, you'll be able too start a new flag company.
The law also applies to barter with equivalent Euro thresholds, so cryptocurrencies aren't excluded. Anyway, the point stands, financial privacy (from the State, at least) is not a feature of life in the Netherlands (or anywhere in the EU, with AML3/4/5/6).
It's perfectly fine to pay off your 900k€ house with cash in Germany which is why it is considered a financial haven for all kinds of organized crime.
> Germany
No limit on cash payments for the purchase of goods.
Consumers who want to pay amounts which are higher than 10. 000 Euro in cash, have to show their ID card. And the trader has to document the surname, first name, place of birth, date of birth, the home address and the nationality.
This is perfectly going to fly if they find one small chat where he admits he merely knows that his code was used for money laundering.
If memory serves me correctly, the ground for convicting Phantom Secure was the fact that one of the founders admitted that he knew that his service caters to criminals, although the service itself is not illegal.
I think the only real case the gov would have is if he ‘knowingly’ supported laundering for sanctioned nations, like if he noticed it, and commented on Twitter or discord to a friend like “Ha! Look, DPRK used my tool”.
However, if that did happen, the gov also just gave him threee days lead time to delete any evidence of that, which is extraordinary. I’m surprised the arrest and sanction did not happen on the same day
I don't think there's any causation from the USA sanctions to the arrest, possibly even vice versa, with some investigation before this arrest leading to some part of the sanctions.
The specific USA sanctions are not retroactive, it's not a crime to have violated them before an entity was sanctioned; and I doubt if it's a Netherlands crime to violate USA sanctions.
In any case, the article seems quite clear that he was arrested for facilitating money laundering, not for a sanctions-related offense, the sentence about sanctions was just extra information for context. And for this part, the big issue is intent - if it turns out that he developed this mixer with the intent to facilitate hiding illegal transactions, that would be facilitating money laundering. And looking at some comments here I wouldn't be that surprised that he might have explicitly admitted it in writing.
They were waiting for the reactions from the community. There's a low chance there could have been extreme and unified non-compliance, e.g. everyone depositing funds to Tornado Cash (which is still up and operating at https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/tornadocash.eth/ )
Financial anonymity is _actually bad_. KYC and anti-money-laundering regulations and etc. are _actually good_. These positions are the result of thousands of years of human history and economic activity. Ignore them at your peril (shrug)
"He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash."
This does not read as "all he did was write some software."
Yes, he might have written software, but if it was with the purpose of money laundering, for example, and that can be proven, that's not just writing some software.
We do not have enough information to decide either way, but what information we do have now (which has yet to be verified, of course) is that he did not just "write some software."
> this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software
Stephen Watt had his life destroyed because he wrote some software. He didn't use it, he didn't directly victimize anyone; he just wrote the software that other people used[1].
Case law already exists that simply writing software can be a crime, so let's not fool ourselves that prosecutors/judges/juries will even remotely consider this line of defense valid.
How often are cryptocurrency projects developed with no interest in personal gain? This isn't the DeCSS days of hackers just wanting to stick it to the RIAA and MPAA. Chances are that the developer was involved in running a for profit service based on their software.
US sanctions on mixers in the past have been associated with an individual, not a piece of code. This is the first sanction to target an open source and non-custodial mixer.
Maintaining code is, in the US, likely a 1st Amendment-protected activity. Operating live services like a mixer (including any RPCs needed for Tornado) is not. (And yes I know this arrest was not made in the US, so that might be the distinction.)
You can take a look at the Wikipedia site for Defense Distributed, which filed suit against the state department for blocking the distribution of CAD files under export control rules. It hasn't been smooth sailing, but many of the legal cases seem to be breaking in the direction of DD. Of course that case is more complicated given that there is both a 1A and a 2A argument.
It doesn't have to "fly" if you can waste 10 years of his life in court and ruin his finances, relationships and employability. The effect on him and the deterrent to others is basically the same...
An American could be excused for thinking it is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity. Unfortunately much of the world does not operate under American law.
> The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.
Even omitting the "criminal" implication, that sentence has a big problems.
> The origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.
Let me rephrase that:
> The origin of cryptocurrencies is not checked by cryptocurrencies services.
The idea is ridiculous at face value.
However, it does illustrate the best & worst part of blockchains -- everything goes on the blockchain. The government loves that audit trail. But how is an ordinary person to know some wallet addr is a pedophile, or terrorist, or druglord, or whatever? I mean that as an honest question. Is there some public crypto-wallet watch-list everyone is supposed to be referencing prior to doing p2p transactions?
Like you, I wonder how this person could be prosecuted? In the free-world, writing software is considered free-speech, at least in the USA, but I'm not sure in the Netherlands or wherever this person was apprehended? There are of course exceptions... like writing malware or viruses, etc.. So like you, the situation seems to entail something more.. like perhaps running an operation with clearly articulate facts indicating criminal activity. You know, the old saying goes "it's what you know, and when you knew it". So like, if the person was aware of criminal activity, taking part in criminal activity, etc.. I suppose an argument could be made.
I think the question of "deployment" is an interesting one when it comes to smart contracts. When you deploy a contract, you're publishing the code to the network to run, not deploying it to a server you operate. I think we are going to need to have a much better legal framework around what exactly a person is doing, legally, when they deploy a smart contract to the blockchain.
Everyone keeps mentioning how "it's why criminals use cash, so there's no point in banning this, as they'll just resort to using cash." But they must fail to notice that various governments of the world are trying to implement a trackable digital currency to replace cash. They don't even like cash either.
> 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.
Does that really make a difference? I’d not worry about writing anything and putting it online saying “this can be used for evil so don’t do that”. But if I was approached by a criminal who asked me to write code for their criminal activity and I did so knowingly, then I’d expect legal consequences, possibly even if my code was never deployed at all.
The difference must be in whether or not there was a conspiracy to commit crimes or if there wasn’t?
In this case I don’t know whether this was purely open and no such contact between user and developer existed. But in principle I’d expect writing (almost) anything in the open to be safe.
This is not a criminal hiring a contractor to work on Tornado Cash. It is an open source project on GitHub that many developers and researchers contributed to, in the interest of privacy.
To use an analogy, see the open Matrix protocol, a tool for privacy that can facilitate encrypted communication between criminals.
Well, we're not seeing arrests of all the many developers and researchers who contributed to Tornado Cash simply in the interest of privacy as such (because that is not a crime), however, I presume that for this particular person there is some extra evidence establishing probable cause for the arrest.
For example, if it can be shown in court that he contributed to it with a knowing intent to facilitate privacy of illegal deals, that might be considered aiding and abetting "the concealment or disguise of the true nature, source, location, disposition, movement, rights with respect to, or ownership of, property, knowing that such property is derived from criminal activity", which is a crime under EU/Dutch AML law.
Yeah, in that case unless there are specific laws violated by the code (earlier DMCA violations come to mind) then it should be safe as I said.
But as usual things are only legal until it’s tried.
A machine that prints counterfeit bills might be illegal to make or sell even without ever being used in some jurisdictions while not in others. And whether the machine has other, legal purposes, may or may not matter.
The “dual use” thing is a common argument for most technical things when there is talk of bans and regulation. I think it’s mostly a hollow argument in cases where the primary actual users are criminal users. That some technology can be used for illegal purposes should not be enough to ban it, but nor should whether there exists a legal use for a technology be enough argument that it shouldn’t be outlawed.
You seem to believe that if a tool is illegal, as long as it's open source and the people making it don't have a criminal background, and as long as you call it something like "privacy software," somehow it's suddenly not illegal
But this is a tool whose specific purpose it is to make it difficult to track illegal transactions. Of course this is happening.
Programmers get way too wrapped up in "but I called it open source! I called it privacy software!"
What you label it has no actual power here. It was used in illegal behavior and that appears to be its goal.
Matrix protocol’s sole purpose is to obscure usernames and messages and enable privacy. Tornado Cash’s sole purpose is to obscure blockchain addresses and enable privacy. Privacy is not a crime. Using Matrix to hire a hit-man would be a crime, but we don’t sanction the Matrix protocol or it’s developers just because it can be used by criminals to obscure their crimes.
What's the practical difference between the kind of privacy Tornado Cash provides and the kind of privacy offered by a local money laundering operation? If there is none, why should the latter be illegal while the former remains legal?
One exists to facilitate privacy, the other exists to facilitate money laundering.
Compare with E2EE Matrix protocol: it does not exist to facilitate criminal communication, but it does facilitate criminal communication.
TC is also different because it is an open source protocol, not a legal entity or group. You deposit funds into the protocol, and anybody in the network can help you withdraw them by relaying your transaction. It is a set of rules that any group of people can follow to allow for private transactions, and the same protocol can run on many blockchains.
Reminds me of the arrest of Isamu Kaneko, the developer P2P file sharing software, Winny, in Japan.
He was prosecuted for aiding copyright infringement for writing a software that can share any files including copyright protected files.
He won the case at supreme court but it costs a lot. Many Japanese free software developers lost their interest for publishing the software may lead to the arrest from police who don't understand any of the technology behind it.
If you are told repeatedly that your work is facilitating money laundering and you keep doing that work, don’t be surprised if you get arrested for facilitating money laundering.
Jurisdiction is something of a problem, as we can see with the Panamanians being non-extraditable. That's why it was the Panama papers in the first place! But if you're going to facilitate money laundering, at least have the common sense to not do it under your own name in a jurisdiction where that is illegal or that will extradite you to the US.
So far about 1200, including 400 celebrities, three heads of state, nine former heads of state, and 150 sitting politicians worldwide.
It's the third largest successful corruption sting in history.
Also, edgelords online who don't know what's happening in the real world like to pretend there was no fallout, so that they can feel wise about corruption, and like to demand that other people look things up for them so they can feel like they made a point.
In reality, it was about half of the names in the document base so far, and that's despite it being international prosecution with an unwilling nation.
Things in the Panama Papers are going quite well for law and order, albeit slowly.
Would you be kind enough to tell us what result you were expecting, and what point you were trying to make?
In the future, would you please consider knowing the answers to your sarcastic questions before asking them, please?
Knowledge and intent seem important here. If the developer had specific knowledge of a someone using their service to commit a crime and did nothing to stop it, then they could be an accessory to that crime.
If you sell a weapon to someone knowing ahead of time that they are going to use it to rob a convenience store, you are not innocent.
A lot of the apologists for this are making arguments along the lines of "being decentralized doesn't make you exempt from the rules" or "imagine if a bank laundered this much money".
The problem is it doesn't make sense to treat protocols like companies. And it definitely doesn't make sense to treat protocol devs as if they were the executives of those companies. The CEO of a bank and the lead dev of a protocol have very very different powers and responsibilities, and we can't just throw our hands up in the air and say "the law's the law, and you gotta follow it" (even when it's literally impossible given the decentralized and autonomous nature of the protocol).
Analogously when joint-stock corporations first entered the scene it required the development of whole new branches of Western law. That law had to be tailored to reflect the realities and nature of joint-stock corporations. What would have been very dumb is simply to pretend like nothing changed and say "same rules apply" and make individual shareholders liable for the action of the corporate entity the same way we're trying to make software devs liable for the action of the decentralized protocol.
Starting a money laundrymat and expecting not to get charged with a crime is a bit absurd. Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "privacy" not money laundering because crypto is special... is likewise absurd.
It’s more like you gave away a DIY laundromat kit for free, which some people used to make laundromats, and other people used to launder money.
Example of a “legitimate” use case for tumbling: your employer pays you in Bitcoin and you don’t want them to know where you spend the money they give you.
A public ledger means anyone can read it, not just the government. And so anonymizing your transactions means hiding them from everyone, not just the government.
It’s fine if you believe the government and your bank should be able to read your transactions. But what about your crazy ex girlfriend or the guy you fired last week?
If you don't want your transactions to be public, don't use a public ledger. You don't get to launder your money because you chose to use a ridiculous tool that made your transactions public and readable by anybody who has ever transacted with you or who can convince someone who did to tell them who you are.
Tornado Cash wasn't free, there was a fee which as I understand it was sent back to various developers.
Money laundering doesn't get to be something else and totally fine just because it's covering for a weakness of cryptocurrencies.
> If you don't want your transactions to be public, don't use a public ledger.
That's exactly what people were attempting to do, with Tornado.
> You don't get to launder your money
There is no money laundering available with Tornado, it doesn't turn an illigitimate source of funds into a legitimate one. And it also has a compliance tool to allow proof of transfer between accounts.
> Tornado Cash wasn't free, there was a fee which as I understand it was sent back to various developers.
This wasn't sent to developers. It was a fee you would pay relayers to propagate transactions on the network and was optional. You could choose to fund withdrawals with a relayer or to use funds in your own wallet.
>Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "privacy" not money laundering because crypto is special... is likewise absurd.
Privacy is definitely a legitimate use for something like Tornado Cash, what are you talking about? Hell, if someone found out what my address is and it's not in my best interest that this person knew about it, I would definitely use it just to move my funds to another address.
If you sell me a screwdriver and then I go and kill someone with it, should you be prosecuted for it?
I agree, it's like saying the developer of ransomware shouldn't get in trouble for making it if they just made it public instead of using it themselves. The fact that ransomware could be used for legal purposes(pen testing maybe?) isn't really a defense when you make it easily accessible to criminals by making it public.
I think there is a difference between identifying an exploit exists and making a tool that makes it easy for anyone to exploit. I think if you are releasing a tool to act on security vulnerabilities it should be done so very carefully so that it can't be easily used to commit crime.
Money laundering, especially running a money laundering business which does not follow certain rules, is illegal regardless if some of the usage is legitimate.
Starting a gun manufacturing company and expecting not to get charged with a crime is a bit absurd. Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "for hunting" not "murder" because guns are special... is likewise absurd.
Having a tool to shoot someone is a right written into the US constitution. There are a variety of circumstances where you are within your rights to use this deadly force.
Tools to hide the source or destination of funds, i.e. to launder money, are not legal anywhere and explicitly illegal in various ways. Providing them as a service to others is explicitly illegal.
Building, selling, owning, and using a gun are all legal in general, only specific ways of doing those things are not.
"legal" != "legitimate". the Iraq war was legal. banks turning a profit off the 08 crash was legal. slavery was legal. The constitution was written in the dark ages by folks that thought slavery was A-OK and it's a dead document. your government (ours,I guess, if you wanted to get pedantic) sucks, dude.
There also seems to be a lot of conjecture all over here.
We know that the person arrested "is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash."
The general interpretation is that they were arrested for development of the protocol and software. It may be that they have them on the hook for other actions, such as assisting particular individuals or directly handling funds. Let's see what comes out of this.
We don't yet know which specific acts they are suspected of.
The problem is it doesn't make sense to treat protocols like companies. And it definitely doesn't make sense to treat protocol devs as if they were the executives of those companies.
If the state can arrest people and cause activity to stop, it makes sense in the way states think.
The approach of bitcoin and crypto process in general hasn't been to ask permission but aim for a protocol that states can't stop. Neither governments nor "society" "signed off" on crypto. People just started doing it with the principle "this is too distributed to stop". Well, if states can stop it, that approach failed, right?
Analogously when joint-stock corporations first entered the scene it required the development of whole new branches of Western law.
Limited-liability enterprises still aren't very popular. But these were legitimized by courts and legislation based on them provide (alleged) benefits. Crypto generally hasn't been legitimized by society, crypto advocates often act like they don't need such legitimization and by that token, the state has no obligation not to treat crypto activities as being within it's existing categories - especially it this work: they don't like money laundering and fraud through crypto and hey, a lot of people going to jail.
States can certainly control the behavior of ordinary businesses that operate in their borders. Maybe they can't directly stop some hacker somewhere from operating a mixer but if coins from a mixer are as illegal as coins from some crime, these businesses won't want to touch.
I mean, the FBI has already shown it can see through mixers and arrest those who try to cash stolen bitcoins.
China has made sale or possession of bitcoin a crime but the West is following different road - with enough state intervention, bitcoin will wind-up a public money, less private money system than regular bank accounts. Every transaction is on the blockchain and that is public. Try putting that in your "anarcho-capitalist" pipe and smoking it.
The difference is lawmakers have regulated money service businesses and have not regulated cryptography. If they had regulated cryptography, then yes making RSA available to the public could be a crime.
Communication providers are not required to obtain licenses and mitigate illegal content in the same way that money service businesses are required to mitigate money laundering. Some people think they should be! I don't agree. But it is a thing governments could do.
In my opinion, this (very popular!) line of reasoning is missing the forest for the trees.
A knife is widely regarded as a tool that's legal to own and that, save a few precautions, you can carry with you. Switchblades, despite being also knives, are widely considered dangerous and their sale and possession is overall restricted (presumably) due to a strong correlation between the presence of a switchblade and stabbings.
Just because SMTP and Tornado are protocols it doesn't mean they are the same - one is a protocol enabling a wide range of activities (some of them criminal, some not) while the other is literally designed to hide the origin of money, an activity that most governments frown upon.
Let's be clear - this isn't money laundering. Money laundering is taking illicit funds and making them look legitimately sourced. Tornado Cash does not do this, it is clear that the source is Tornado Cash, and it does nothing to legitimize funds. To spend crypto you still most likely need to convert it to fiat and that fiat money will still be under scrutiny for its source.
"Placement surreptitiously injects the “dirty money” into the legitimate financial system."
Tornado Cash doesn't move the funds between financial systems at all
"Layering conceals the source of the money through a series of transactions and bookkeeping tricks"
The source of the coins is in plain sight - it's clearly from Tornado Cash, and when converted into fiat currency the source is very likely also obvious (some exchange) unless you do some in-person exchange of cash for coins, in which case this has nothing to do with Tornado Cash
"Integration, the now-laundered money is withdrawn from the legitimate account to be used for whatever purposes the criminals have in mind for it"
Again there's no legitimacy for the coins after going through Tornado Cash and the fiat currency is still under scrutiny.
Tornado is absolutely money laundering. You’re moving the coins from a dirty wallet that is being watched by the government to a clean one that has plausible deniability. It’s not the end of the process though, you still need to sell something to the wallet to make it look like you earned the coins legitimately. That’s where NFTs come in.
If you just go dirty wallet -> clean wallet -> exchange it’s trivial to see that the exchange coins came from the dirty wallet. If you mix the coins from the dirty wallet to the clean one there’s no way for the exchange to say the coins came from the dirty wallet, all they know is the coins came from the mixer.
How many people listed in the Panama papers have been arrested? Their assets seized? Fines? Zero. London's "the city" is pretty much one giant laundering operation for Saudi and Russian dirty money.
Money laundering, monetary privacy, wealth obfuscation is perfectly fine. It only becomes an issue when it becomes accessible to us simple minded folks too. The urgency to stop this tech really tells the tale.
Did you look it up or are you just spouting what ever you can dream up to fit your argument? Lots of people all over the world have been arrested based on the panama papers.
pretty sure the only people who suffered where the execs running the company, losing their yearly bonus,...and only because they embarrassed their overlords.
"In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced that it would cease operations at the end of March due to "irreversible damage" to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers"
"In October 2020, German authorities issued an international arrest warrant for the two founders of the law firm at the core of the tax evasion scandal exposed by the Panama Papers. Cologne prosecutors are seeking German-born Jürgen Mossack and Panamanian Ramón Fonseca on charges of accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organization"
May I ask your nationality, party preference, any controversial political positions you hold and any mental health conditions you have? I'd like to validate my stereotypes.
I've even heard speculation that the leak of the various money-laundering documents involve an effort to monopolize laundering to a even small group.
That's as maybe but no kind of money laundering should have our sympathy. Most money laundering does damage - the kind that isn't for directly illegal activities often involves local corrupt exploiting their control of local resources (Iran, a major oil producer, burning 4% it's oil for bitcoins to escape sanctions, for example).
> The US sanctioning Tornado Cash and the resulting repercussions is deeply concerning. Whether or not you like crypto, you should not be supporting this if you are a researcher, academic, technologist, cryptographer, or privacy advocate. The code for Tornado Cash is a series of cryptographic and mathematical functions that can be repurposed for a variety of applications unrelated to privatizing user wallets. The protocol itself is designed for one reason: to give users privacy through end to end and zero knowledge cryptography.
> Allowing it to remain open source and accessible as a tool for blockchain privacy and codebase for cryptographic research is a net benefit for the entire world.
> A comparison would be that US decides to sanction the open Matrix protocol along with any user, developer, source host, or sponsor that has ever contributed to it in the past - because it can facilitate end-to-end encrypted terrorist communication.
Zero evidence this is connected to U.S. sanctions. Dutch law protects even cash transactions less than American law.
When the investigation started, in June, the U.S. had already released evidence Tornado Cash was used to launder money. If a Dutch person kept working on it, it might be trivial to show they broke Dutch criminal statute.
> org that arrested him specifically mentions the US sanctions in their press release
I'm not arguing it's irrelevant. Just that this doesn't look like a sanctions arrest. Tornado Cash was sanctioned on 8 August. There hasn't been enough time for someone to violate the sanctions and produce enough evidence to get arrested. More likely: the same alleged crimes that got Tornado sanctioned prompted this arrest.
The first time a developer of open source, non-custodial and autonomous smart contract code has been arrested comes days after the US sanctions the same smart contract.
It says in the article that the person has benefited financially from this. It's not about making open source, I don't know why people are raising that red herring. Implementing a mixer is (probably) not illegal in The Netherlands, putting one in production and setting it up in such a way that you benefit from it absolutely is.
I don't believe it's a coincidence that the sanctions and the arrest happened close together, there's likely some coordination there. But it's really unlikely the sanctions somehow are relevant in this case.
> first time a developer of open source, non-custodial and autonomous smart contract code has been arrested comes days after the US sanctions the same smart contract. Probably just a coincidence
Zero chance this is solely on account of U.S. sanctions. It takes time to build an arrest case under domestic law, as well as for sanctions to percolate across legal systems.
There was likely coördination. Maybe the Dutch waited, to bolster their arrest case. Maybe the evidence that Tornado was used to launder money processed under similar time frames at OFAC and the FIOD.
I often wonder if people are aware that the US is basically a one world government. You cannot run. If you believe you are innocent, and you run to any other "somewhat free" country, they will send you right back to get railroaded through the "justice" system. If you do something outside the real jurisdiction of the US, they will find a way to put you in their jurisdiction.
The US has significant control over European countries. They're nearly vassal states to a degree.
This is the second comment of this type I am seeing on HN following this story. I find this line of defense odd. There is no direct evidence, but anyone even somewhat familiar with OFAC sanctions knows how far they can reach.
The effect of all of this nonsense will to drive developers into pseudonymity. It won't solve the "problem" of developers building privacy tools. It won't stop experimentation with shitcoins. But it will eliminate the phenomenon of the Buterin-style project lead and "core developer".
The bullseye has been painted. And now those who have reaped the benefits of fame will come to know why Satoshi concluded that it was a trap to be avoided. The legal pressure that will be brought to bear on the Ethereum foundation to enact various changes will be enormous and never-ending.
It doesn't matter whether or not this case flies. That will take many years to sort out. In the meantime, rational actors will do the rational thing. Everyone else will receive summons and indictments.
So a software developer is held responsible for the software. If the software is largely SaaS, then I can see the sense in that. A software developer of SaaS is also a service developer, arguably even a service operator although that depends on how the service is developed and operated.
I'm sure the judge will be thrilled to have to listen to arguments about the with the nuances of dev, ops, devops and a distributed platform such as that which executes Ethereum's smart contracts.
It seems reasonable to expect that Ethereum operators share responsibility in case of usage of their network for malicious or criminal activity.
They have the technical means to control what goes on there or not.
Otherwise it's like if you run P2P nodes and claim pedo pictures aren't your problem.
I think the people behind those clients were clear targets back in the day, before the advent of services like Netflix and Spotify alleviated some of the financial troubles experienced by the entertainment industry.
After making it repeatedly clear that you think Bittorrent is the next big thing for pedos and that your client is intentionally optimized to keep pedos safe from the government.
Nearly every time someone gets arrested for developing software they where also advertising and in some cases outright advising people on how to get away with illegal shit using their software.
If they did this closed source he probably wouldn't get jailed, and instead the company would have gotten fined. But open source makes things easy to trace so you just jail the person who wrote the code.
Yeah, but then they would imprison the CEO and not the developer. Very different, especially since it is easy for CEO's to say that they weren't aware of any criminal activity. A developer who directly develops the feature is much easier to blame.
> Yeah, but then they would imprison the CEO and not the developer.
While they do get blamed, the Netherlands doesn't seem to care all that much. They seem very selective with how they react to supposed money laundering
> ING’s Chief Executive Ralph Hamers said no individual at the bank was found to be responsible for the failures
Closed source means it is easy to hide whose fault it was, and then all you can do is fine the company since you can't arrest everyone. This is also why companies are so keen on deleting old message logs etc, to avoid leaders going to prison.
I heard on IRC that the person they arrested was the one who generally merged PRs. With closed source the closest equivalent is the leader of the development team. I would be surprised if a law enforcement agency is unable to locate that developer.
> They have the technical means to control what goes on there or not.
They have less control than you may think.
Any ethereum miners (or proof-of-stake validators) who block some class of transactions immediately become vulnerable to denial of service attacks.
This came up back in 2016 with the DAO hack on ethereum[1]. Some ethereum miners considered blocking transactions that moved the stolen funds, but then realized that this was infeasible: if you block such transactions, then the DAO hacker can spam you with them. Such spam on ethereum is usually prevented by requiring the sender to spend money on each transaction (ie pay gas fees). But that fee is only charged when the transaction is included in a block -- if you refuse to include it, then the spammer pays nothing. The kicker is that, by Rice's theorem, there is no way in general to distinguish "malicious" transactions from non-malicious ones (for _any_ definition of "malicious") short of just executing them to see what they do.
So if you as an ethereum miner (or validator) try to block certain transactions, you can be forced to do unbounded amounts of work for free, ie DoS'd.
You mean the miners? Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block.
It’s just a program that runs and guesses a bunch of salts that hopefully result in a hash that meets some particular parameters (e.g. starts with 5 zeros). You want to be the first to guess correctly so you win the reward for that block, so any sort of investigation doesn’t make sense. From what data was stored on-chain in that block and whether it may be problematic (or even what the data represents), to which contracts were involved (and whether they have criminal ties), it’s just not reasonable for any miner to take responsibility for the block chain operating as expected.
I think this is the core issue with the block chain, is that society has always expected there to be some moral agent that you could hold responsible. Except in cases of natural disasters, you can normally blame someone.
But with blockchains, it’s a lot harder to place blame on someone, or link a physical person to the online identity.
Similarly with the 2008 GFC, everything was abstract enough that almost nobody got in trouble for a situation that was most certainly man-made, but hard to place the blame. At least then, though, the government had some amount of control over the banks and also relied on them to return society to normal.
Through the government’s eyes, block chain doesn’t appear necessary for society to operate and is very difficult to regulate, so I’m sure their tolerance is a lot lower for blockchains when financial crimes crop up from it.
> Mining Ethereum doesn’t allow for much inspection of what you’re validating in each block.
Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “validating”.
If your objective is to restrict the types of transactions that end up in the blocks you yourself create, you can recompile geth with a custom mempool implementation, and use that custom mempool to inspect the data of any pending transaction you want. This is how MEV works.
In other words, it is 100% possible for a technically-competent miner to only create new blocks that exclude blacklisted accounts, or that restrict transactions according to any number of criteria.
On the other hand, once a new block has already been mined and propagated to the network, there is nothing that a single miner can do to stop it.
If you start rejecting otherwise-valid blocks because they include blacklisted transactions, you will only fork yourself from the network. The rest of the miners will keep on building on top of the block you wanted to drop.
They are held responsible to a certain point yes, and shipping services actively control high-risk shipments (up to the point they check the box contents, for airplane shipping, for batteries for example).
It's forbidden to send money through mail in many places.
When you go to the post office to send money, the post office verifies your identity, the payment method, the sanctions list, etc and keeps the records for the authorities.
If you decide to violate the rules and send cash in a letter, the postal service allows the authorities to access the raw packages and full information, and full access to it, whether to use cash sniffing dogs (they really exist), etc.
Also, a fundamental difference with crypto exchanges:
Whether you send large amount of cash for criminal activity via the postal service or whether you send a large amount of books the postal service isn't going to benefit more, so they don't have to encourage criminal activity.
I know I will get a hail of downvotes for this, but again you're comparing apples and oranges. The operators are using crypto for a wide range of applications. Using a mixer has probably 99.9% illegal reasons and 0.1% legitimate uses. Making money laundering harder is a good thing, no matter how many people here will try to convince you it isn't.
> Using a mixer has probably 99.9% illegal reasons and 0.1% legitimate uses
Similar to people using paper money or end-to-end encryption really. Nobody needs military-grade encryption or anonymous currency unless they're trying to hide something.
Say I sell software, or SaaS. Then I may need military-grade encryption because I need to sell, a few potential customers (may) need that, and I need to keep my costs down so supplying the latest and greatest cipher to everyone is the right default. It may waste a bit of CPU but it saves the time of the sales and support people, and human time is expensive.
Say I'm going to buy something tomorrow, and I don't like SPoFs. There's a card in my wallet, or maybe two, but if the card reader in the shop is down, that's a SPoF unless I also carry some cash.
That is the fun part, isn't it. Government is now ok with crypto, because it can easily track it. But you try to make it actually not being able to track, booy howdy, it will come down on you like a ton of brick.
Only if you presume that private deeds are illegitimate. That appears to reverse the presumption of innocence, without which the law becomes nothing more than a tool to destroy the enemies of the prosecutors.
unlike 'peer 2 peer' cash usecases of crypto. ethereum added a lot of social elements to it with ens names. All sorts of common folk use tornado cash to keep their private transactions separate from their public address
The most important countries in the world are democracies. Even if the demos is occasionally influenced by poor arguments, the laws made are valid anyway. And the laws say (simplifying) that those who carry out money transfers have to take reasonable precautions against money laundering. Details vary, particularly wrt what's reasonable.
"Doing nothing" isn't reasonable though, and the people has decided. Calling the people's arguments puerile or useless makes no difference.
> They have the technical means to control what goes on there or not.
Imagine the scenario wherein potential "illegal" crypto is mixed through another service. How would you expect Tornado to verify that without straight-up blocking specific services through transaction patterns?
I suspect they have direct evidence that this developer coordinated specifically with criminals to help guide them on how to use the system for money laundering.
This would be similar to the developer of the encrypted phones that everyone defended initially until it became known that he flew to other countries to train drug dealers how to use the phones.
In this crypto business, it is not enough to just build the system and expect people to magically know that it's for them and how to use it - 50% of the work is selling and training people on the system.
This is all speculation based on previous similar cases.
The big difference: Airbus and Boeing do everything to prevent attacks and hijacking and it is against their fundamental interest and the interest of their customers.
Whereas, for a crypto network, the more funds flows in, the better for the operators and eventually for the developers (who gets paid by node operators via increased coin value or donations).
The less compliance or questions asked, or the more anonymity = the more shady flows.
> Airbus and Boeing does everything to prevent attacks and hijacking and it is against their fundamental interest and the interest of their customers.
They do today. Back in 2001, flying was a lot different. For starters, there was no such thing as an armoured door between the flight deck and the passenger compartment, mostly because such a door is heavy and costs extra fuel.
...and when experience showed that the existing system was not adequate they beefed it by adding those doors.
That's one big difference between those whose products can be used for both good and bad who do not get in legal trouble over the bad use and those that do. There's some threshold for a given type of produce of tolerable bad use. When they product is approaching or exceeding that they make changes to lower it, or if it can't be fixed abandon the product.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
The person's core argument was obviously that "airlines do what they can to keep people safe rather than financially benefiting from criminal activity" which distinguishes Tornado from airlines and web browser developers.
As an aside, it was less important to prevent hijacking before 2001 because the end result of most hijackings before then was that nobody got hurt if pilots complied, so there would be no reason to place a cockpit door. That strategy obviously changed after 9/11.
Ironically, I find your interpretation of the parent comment uncharitable, because I never would have framed the core argument the way you did.
I don't think the behavior and results of airplane hijackings pre 9/11 fall into common knowledge, even on hacker news. That's a pretty niche, specific collection of 20+ year old historical facts.
> mostly because such a door is heavy and costs extra fuel.
Those doors are not heavy. It's not a flying tank. Removal of printed in-flight seatback magazines would offset the weight. Until 9/11, flight deck door procedures were lax.
In this case, will the Tornado developer benefit from the smart contracts? I think the service charge about 0.3%, so that money mainly go to the TORN holders?
Being arrested is not that big of a deal- it merely means they suspect that you committed a crime and want to question you. I would also wait and see what they are accused of, maybe there is more to it than simply contributing to an open source project.
In the UK arrest is lawful simply to ensure that your statement or interview can be obtained, entirely without any kind of suspicion. Still will disqualify you for automatic entry in the US however.
If you design software to do a thing and then the software is used to do that thing, it follows that you’re responsible. Whether you believe that the sanctions make sense or not is one thing, but to argue that the developer of tornado cash is not responsible for… the behaviour tornado cash… feels like a hard sell.
By that logic why haven’t the developers of Metasploit also been arrested? It’s hard to argue that the behavior of the software isn’t/couldn’t be used for nefarious purposes and to commit crimes.
Anonymizing spending on it’s own is not a crime. Clearly the line is crossed if the developer is promoting the use of the software for illegal purposes. I’m only vaguely familiar with Tornado cash, was that the case? If not, how do we as a society/community draw the line on determining a developers intentions?
Software doesn’t come to be through immaculate conception: the authors created it, knowing it could be used in this way.
If a company releases software that is used nefariously, there are very common legal actions to hold them accountable. For example, Facebook has extensive legal obligations to meet to do with behaviour on their platform.
I am not arguing that tornado cash should be illegal (or that encryption should be illegal) rather I am arguing that people are responsible for the software they have created.
If I commit a crime, my intent is absolutely a part of the equation when determining legal action. Why should it be any different with software?
If you wish to argue that the right to privacy is so great that it exceeds any risk of criminal activity, and thus the developers of tornado cash were doing something for the greater good, so be it (that’s probably the position I would take) but it doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.
Taken to the extreme, if I build a piece of software that can save the lives of murder victims by killing the murderer: I am responsible for the killing of (intended) murderers. We might decide that the activity is justified, that the software is operating for the greater good and is therefore permissible, but that doesn’t change my responsibility.
>I am arguing that people are responsible for the software they have created.
So, is your answer to the asked question yes, the developers of Metasploit should be arrested and jailed?
How about the developers of Bitlocker? It's used to encrypt illegal content, impeding police discovery efforts. Every person who developed a file-sharing website should probably also be arrested. Lots of illegal/pirated/etc. content out there.
The point being that almost every software on the planet can potentially used for malicious and illegal activities. Seems like if we indefinitely held developers responsible for what other people do with their software, the smart person would never develop any software.
Law isn’t a binary based on responsibility, it’s reductive to suggest that by arguing for responsibility we are also arguing for prison for software developers. I can be responsible for your death and spend no time in prison.
Every other industry deals with this challenge — why should software be any different?
You can take the word "jailed" out of my comment, replace it with "responsible for", and I still think my point stands...
You said:
>If a company releases software that is used nefariously, there are very common legal actions to hold them accountable
If you believe that, it follows that you believe that every developer of encryption algorithms should be "held accountable" (be it jail, or "responsible without prison", etc.) because other people use encryption to hide illegal activity. Developers of internet protocols should be accountable for the actions other people take on the internet, because lots of illegal things happen on the internet.
Metasploit, Kali, 7-zip, FileZilla, Word/Excel, Putty, OpenVPN... Should I go on? All of these are used for nefarious things all the time. Are you really suggesting that the developers of these should be responsible for the nefarious things that their users do? If not jail, what responsibility are you suggesting?
>Every other industry deals with this challenge — why should software be any different?
Most other industries have protections against this type of liability, not responsibilities. See knives, guns, planes, cars, etc. Unless their is gross negligence, which isn't just "it was used nefariously", the maker of X is generally not responsible for what some user of X does with X.
Edit for clarification:
You can argue about purpose-built nefarious software, sure. If I develop ransomware, and advertise it as ransomware, and there's no legitimate use other than ransoming... I should probably be held responsible for the ransomware attacks that occur using that tool (at least, I accept that argument). The problem with applying this to all software is that most everything that is used nefariously was originally designed for and used for legitimate uses. When that's the case, the person who committed the crime with the legitimate tool should be held responsible, not the maker of the legitimate tool.
Most industry protections against liabilities are predicated on compliance with expectations about responsibility: the protection against liability is earned. For example, firearm manufacturers are protected from being held liable for actions taken with their firearms as long as they comply with their legal responsibilities, like not selling firearms to children. If a firearms manufacturer sold firearms to children, they would absolutely be held liable for the outcomes.
If you knowingly build software that can be used for money laundering and make no effort to prevent money laundering then, if software was treated like other industries, you’d absolutely expect to be held liable.
>If you knowingly build software that can be used for money laundering
You've retreated back to money laundering, but that is not what you originally were talking about.
You were pretty clear that you were talking about any software which is used nefariously. Which I pointed out that pretty much any software can be used nefariously (e.g. ssh, browsers, hosting software, etc.), but you keep avoiding that.
I’m not avoiding it. There’s nuance. A piece of software that is specifically designed to enable a behaviour that is core to money laundering is different from a piece of software that can be used to engage in money laundering.
A web browser can be used to access a banking website through which you might engage in money laundering, sure, but that’s very different to a piece of software that can be used to hide the origin of funds.
The difference is like a kitchen utensil manufacturer vs. a gun manufacturer. A kitchen knife can be used to kill, a gun can be used to kill, but we hold gun manufacturers and kitchen utensil manufacturers to different standards because intent is an important aspect.
Your argument is predicated on the idea that intent doesn’t matter, but intent does matter, intent is a significant component of criminal law.
>If a company releases software that is used nefariously, there are very common legal actions to hold them accountable
There is no mention of intent. Just that if a software is used nefariously, the creators of that software should be legally accountable.
You later talk about your intent, when you commit a crime, but that's very different. I agree that if someone commits a crime with X software, their intent should be considered. What I don't agree with is holding Tatu Ylönen accountable for someone else's nefarious use of ssh.
I’m not familiar with the money laundering laws. But do they state that you can’t buy something anonymously and without an audit trail? Because spending legally obtained cash seems anonymous to me. Is anonymizing your digital spend with legally obtained capital that different?
I can't speak for the US, but in Germany, transactions between countries over 10k€ must be reported to the Bundesbank. There are similar limits for inner-country transactions with businesses, especially financial ones. I assume the USA has similar rules. So small cash transaction are fine, but as soon as larger sums are involved it's going to be very problematic.
Since crypto currencies, nearly by definition, don't care about country borders and the mixers don't trace the amount put in by each user, they almost certainly allow you to circumvent money laundering registration requirements. It's even worse if they frame the mixer as financial institution, in which case it directly violates its reporting requirements.
Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone? TC was designed for privacy and bad actors _also_ took advantage of that. Prosecutors basically need to prove that privacy is bad, good luck with that.
>Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone?
Not a valid comparison.
Courts and law have long held the completely reasonable position that if the main intent of a product is not to commit crime, that those using it for a crime are held responsible, not the producer.
Conversely, if a product is designed to facilitate crime, or is used significantly more for crime than not, then the liability starts to shift to the producer (as well as the users).
This is the latter case. If the courts show that the producers knew the product was used for crime and added features to assist that on purpose, then they should be held liable.
According the to article, 14% of money moved through the mixer was of criminal origin. If any bank did that, they'd rightfully get hammered by the law (and they do, for vastly smaller ratios of criminal activity).
There are laws about facilitating criminal money laundering.
> According the to article, 14% of money moved through the mixer was of criminal origin.
I’m pretty sure the majority of duffel bags sold in cartel controlled areas of Mexico are used to transport drugs or drug money, that doesn’t mean selling them should be a crime.
And again , not equivalent. If local duffel bag makers knew duffel bags were used significantly for crime, and added features to facilitate crime, and ignored laws requiring tracking criminals (which is what money processors have to follow), then the duffel bag maker would be criminally liable.
In the cast at hand, the company processes the transactions for criminals. That is vastly different than selling a duffel bag. And it runs afoul of criminal money laundering laws that all processors have to follow, and for good reason.
This is why the courts are the place to hash such stuff out - internet opinions are vastly inferior to people performing investigations using evidence.
Tornado cash could have (for example) implemented AML or KYC policies to achieve the same without coming under the suspicion of assisting criminals.
Given the high data protection requirements warranted by operating a financial service, users could be reasonable sure that their Pepsi purchase remains private.
Of course such measures would run counter the intended use of Tornado cash, including money laundering, but that is their problem and no one's else.
What could "features to facilitate crime" be in this particular case? Tornado is a simple contract with a singular purpose, to provide financial privacy for its users. It simply doesn't have any features that facilitate a more specific use case, be it money laundering, personal safety, or anything else.
I think you're missing the intent part of crime. Someone selling a duffle bag or producing one for production is likely not selling it for the purpose of facilitating crime, they just are selling a bag. The question with guns/knives/Tornado Cash is "what is the motivation behind the producers/service provider once put under scrutiny?"
A textile mill producer who gets an order for 5000 duffle bags likely has no vision in mind for the use of the bag beyond "sell to N stores at X price for profit". The storeowner who buys the duffle bag likely also has no criminal motive and instead just wants to sell inventory at profit.
Tornado Cash devs will be scrutinized to understand their main goals, and their communications/advertising strategies, likely as well as any correspondences will be considered for this determination.
You're stating this as if it's fact when it's really not. Tornado Cash was certainly not designed with the intent of criminal activity, but for privacy - and as for "significantly more for crime than not", I've not seen any actual evidence for this, only evidence to the contrary. People claim it's mostly used for crime, but those are purely conjecture, at least the ones I've seen are.
>Tornado Cash was certainly not designed with the intent of criminal activity, but for privacy
Again, claims of privacy is not enough magic to make them free from legal requirements for money laundering laws. Privacy claims do not make banks immune from money laundering. Privacy claims do not make anyone free from meeting legal requirements.
>those are purely conjecture
The above states ~1/7 of all money flowing through can be tied to criminal behavior. If true, that's an astounding ratio that would rightfully put a bank out of business and key players in prison.
>Should knife makers be held responsible if someone stabs someone?
Only if you made and advertised a "human killing knife", so in this case I have no idea how this software was advertised by the devs and community.
I think the intention is important in this case, what was the purpose and who benefited the most , if 99% of knives are used for bad things then you would probably have some ideas about that issues.
I've seen (but never used) TC before. The site was totally neutral with minimal explanation. I've made the comparison because both are really simple tools.
I would be hesitant to get into the knife/gun comparisons.
The charge isn't the anonymization of the money, it's specifically the concealment of money produced by criminal activity, and whether or not that's something that is allowed based on NL law is really the question, as is the motive of the developer/service providers.
This next part is from a US perspective, but remember that there are multiple aspects to law besides just the actual act. There has to be a motive as well.
The reason as I understand it that knife/gun manufacturers aren't really held responsible is because (arguably) their goal is not for persons to commit illegal acts.† Thus the illegal act is an exception and independent of the intention of why the product is produced, and there is not a motivation to empower illegal activity from the manufacturers.
With Tornado cash, it becomes a bit murkier I think and I suppose this is why it's being sent for examination as opposed to outright finding the person guilty. I would imagine what the judge wants to find out are things like:
1. Who was the primary audience/user for Tornado Cash (TC)? Not generalized, but who was actually using it?
2. Were there communications between the team behind TC and other entities that can be identified or no?
3. Did the TC team have awareness of who their main customers were and where the coins mainly came from?
4. Was there any campaigning by the TC team that can be found which shows they were specifically catering to people doing illegal activities?
5. Likely, a court and FIOD would want to investigate if any regional activity can be tied to Tornado Cash††, and if a known sanction region was utilizing the service, were actions taken to prevent this.
I understand that the goals of cryptocoins and the goals of Governments are opposed by design, and likely there will be constant conflicts like this for a long time with cryptocoins and governments; one wants to circumvent monetary rule, the other imposes the monetary rule. I have no personal judgement on TC or cryptocoins, but the court decisions will be interesting to read.
† - I do realize that this line blurs a lot depending on the type of knife being sold, and even worse with gun manufacturers. Unironically, the Borat movies (I forget which one) show this pretty well when Borat asks which gun is best for "stopping Jews", and the gun owner doesn't blink. Gun manufacturers I would suggest walk a fine line in their advertising, as do proponents of gun rights. I know responsible gun owners so I'm not here to case a wide net on all things gun related, but my take on a lot of weapons advertising is that it sells a violence fantasy.
†† I'm not as familiar with ETH or even how probable it is that they can find who used a service, but it's something that the teams will try to figure out. Whether or not this is a good idea long term is not the point I want to make, it's more that I think this is something governments will be interested in. Very likely, there is a vested from these governments in ensuring specific sanctioned countries cannot use cryptocoins to circumvent sanctions. I don't really agree with this ultimately, but it is important to understand the entire thought process beyond just "governments hate cryptocoins".
Knife/gun is completely unrelated in the grand scheme of things.
In finance, you are required to maintain the chain of provenance in an unobfuscated form. If you can't, or won't, your license to operate is revoked. If you didn't have one in the first place, you're already in hot water. You cannot play in the sandbox anymore. That's the civil side. Just like not being willing to help with airline emergency exit doors probibits you from taking up that row of seats.
Second, if you are connected to willful facilitation of criminal activity, that's when the fangs really come out, because the criminal with the technical expertise to facilitate is a much rarer thing, and the perfect subject for being made an example of ad a warning to others.
This is why I have repeatedly told anyone who'd listen. Peer-2-Peer payment technologies without control/auditing paired with them will never be tolerated once they are widely known about. Hell, things like World of Warcraft Gold or game currencies have been used as money laundering vehicles long before blockchain, and even they got law enforcement scrutiny from time to time.
Do not publish that which you don't want to eventually run the chance of being held responsible for.
I hope they'll find and arrest the developers of web browsers and Google, because both tools were used to find information (about how to murder people and dispose of corpses).
Sad to see the EU bow down to the criminal racket that is the US financial system.
Even if this developer is not extradited, the US has again succeeded in maintaining the culture of fear, where they can get their slimy hands on anyone anywhere for any reason they want.
I'm not sure I follow. Is this not an arrest for violation of laws in place in Netherlands? Their criminal investigation started two months ago, not because of the US sanctions. How is this the EU bowing down to the US financial system?
The timing of the arrest could be a reaction, if they thought it might spook the suspect into fleeing or something along those lines. But that doesn't equate to bowing down either.
> Sad to see the EU bow down to the criminal racket that is the US financial system.
The EU in general is extremely hypocritical when it comes to privacy, its probably an opportunity to crack down on crypto while it's down.
You see all the laws that aim to put a stop to big tech, and rightly so because their government won't do anything.
In the same time, when privacy protections are against the EU itself, it suddenly doesn't work, or it needs monitoring like their horrible attempt using the chat control law, which even faces backlash from inside, like from Germany.
Where did you see that this was connected to the US financial system? They mention in passing that the US has sanctioned Tornado Cash, but I didn't get the impression that this was the reason why this person was arrested.
I don't think it is related. Maybe just the increased publicity quickened the arrest, but I don't see any hope of extradition of a Dutch national to the US for sanction violations announced just a few days prior.
If someone built something that said "Launder your money here" and it took in a bunch of money, and then disbursed it sans fees to hide where it came from... they'd say it was money laundering and arrest the person.
Can anyone explain the difference here? Or why anyone is "shocked" that this is happening cause it's crypto?
Just seems kinda childish to think crypto's somehow special and not just a tool for moving money around. Do people really think cause it's on the block chain it can evade every law in the world? And cause it's open source nobody's going to pay any attention?
> If someone built something that said "Launder your [256 bit integers] here" and it took in a bunch of [256 bit integers], and then [encrypted] it sans fees to hide where it came from... they'd say it was [256 bit integer] laundering and arrest the person.
When you compare this to encrypting 256 bit integers, text, or E2EE chat protocols, the shock is easier to understand. People should not be treated as a criminal for building Matrix E2EE protocol that enables privacy, they should not be treated as criminal for building Tornado Cash protocol that enables privacy.
Except the law isn’t talking about the private key or the encryption or the math, it is talking about what they are using those things for.
You are focusing on the numbers themselves and the math, but that isn’t the important part. This would be like someone getting arrested for check fraud and then trying to argue, “they are just a bunch of lines on a paper in a certain format, how can that be a crime!”
The crime isn’t that arrangement of ink on the paper, the crime is using those lines on the paper to commit fraud. Same thing here, it isn’t the numbers or math that are criminal, it is using those numbers and math to commit crime.
The sanctions apply directly to the protocol and it’s code, and this is the issue. It is not applying to persons, or criminal actions.
It would be like sanctioning the Matrix protocol and it’s code because it has facilitated terrorist communication. Obviously terrorists planning a bombing over Matrix protocol are engaging in criminal behavior, but this doesn’t mean the protocol itself is also a criminal entity.
Okay so you’re saying NFTs are absolutely meaningless, what the holder solely owns is a 256 bit integer and absolutely nothing else?
Anyway, in this case unlike debatably with nfts, there is concrete value tied to possessing knowledge of the integer so acting like it’s just sharing random numbers is deceptive and rather easily detected deception. resorting to deceptive arguments generally makes people turn against the position of the one trying to deceive so if advocating for tornado devs, one should avoid that argument unless one is actually trying to make people against them.
The point is: the protocol encrypts a private key, a private key is an integer, or text hash. Saying that it is OK to build tools that encrypt text, like Matrix protocol, but it is not OK to build tools that encrypt private-keys-as-text is a slippery slope.
Which one is it?
- privacy is a right, and people should be allowed to share knowledge privately
or,
- privacy is not a right, and people should only be allowed to share knowledge if that knowledge is not associated with "value"
Repeating an argument _verbatim_ this many times just comes across as patronizing. We get it. You think numbers can’t be outlawed. You’re wrong and in general, pedantry/technicalities about theoretical computer science is _not_ going to help you when considering human power structures.
Someone else has told you this already, but you seem intent on ignoring it.
You did not answer my simple question. :) Sorry to be a broken record by comparing this to E2EE privacy protocols, but many commenters on HN only seem to think privacy is worthwhile when in the form of a chat app.
This is like framing Signal as a "insert terrorist plan here" app. The tool can be used for that purpose, but it was never designed or marketed for it.
Private keys can be represented in text. Like this: KwTHJw865SLeTAjK7otYb5bL5mwutBb2vDxxF7kGf5XvY7QttnvM
Encrypted messaging apps like Matrix or Signal, can be used to send strings with private keys, anonymously.
It's very difficult to hold a position that financial privacy tools are bad, but encrypted messaging apps are good; because they are really not that different.
You are thinking like a computer programmer and not a lawyer. There is a classic article that demonstrates the difference called “What colour are your bits?” https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
The law isn’t actually talking about math or numbers or encryption, even though it seems like it is to computer programmers. The math doesn’t matter to the law, what you use it for does.
Ppl work hard to make sure they remain different for 99.9% of non-technical people (eg. banning anonimous cryptocurrency)... once this is done, you become and outlier by using different tools than average people, and special means of surveilance can be deployed against you personally at much lower cost...
Ofc this is bad, but the bigger purpose is always "power over the proles".
You can let most people have most of their privacy as long as you don't touch the "power distrubution tools" (money) - eg. if messaging is private, but money is on a blockchain where all wallets are mandatory to have an associated human identity, it doesn't matter that some sketchy transactions happen on the edges. Bitcoin would be targeted too if it were used to eg. pay wages and fund companies on a large scale.
Probably Tornado Cash enabled some activity that was large scale enough to not be considered just "on the fringes" anymore...
A message is circulating in russian crypto groups, that two more developers were arrested: Roman Panchenko in Seattle, and Nikita Dementyev in Tallinn.
(I can't verify the veracity of this report, but if true, this looks like it was a coordinated international police operation)
Roman Panchenko, interesting.. he also lives in Amsterdam according to LinkedIn. Also, both the names you mention, their Instagrams have both been taken offline.
one of the most shameful moments in digital human rights after the arrest of pgp creator in 1993. Code is speech, it is not a weapon. Banning maths is fascist
You can call it money laundering speech if you want, but that doesn't change the fact money laundering is illegal. Selling skimming services is illegal even if you don't skim people yourself.
Nobody is banning technology or math, only specific, usually criminal, uses of technology and math are banned.
What about banning chemistry and physics? If I fire a gun and the bullet hits someone I get arrested (and maybe even if it doesn't hit anyone if I am somewhere were shooting guns is not illegal), yet all I did was use some levers (physics) to add compress a spring adding potential energy to it (physics) which then got converted to kinetic energy (Hooke's law, more physics), which imparted energy to some chemicals starting a reaction (chemistry) that produced expanding gases that caused the bullet to rapidly leave the barrel of the gun, where it followed a ballistic trajectory (physics).
Or what about banning biology? Look closely at other animals sometimes. Things that in humans we'd call rape and murder and robbery are quite common. Millions of years of evolution have selected for animals that do those things. Humans too have the same propensity to do many of those same things, and would do so more often if they were not illegal. Just look at what happens when people find themselves in situations where those laws do not apply or where they have no chance of being punished, such as when a country successfully invades another country.
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 cryptocurrency. There are laws dealing with money laundering specifically and "doing it on the Blockchain" doesn't circumvent them.
The opinions being expressed regarding cryptography, cryptocurrencies, freedom, and privacy has been absolutely depressing. The state and corporations have exerted their influence, particularly in the last fifteen years or so.
People don't seem to realize that there is little fundamental distinction between a crypto privacy service, and encrypted messaging apps like Signal and matrix.
A bitcoin private key is just "KwTHJw865SLeTAjK7otYb5bL5mwutBb2vDxxF7kGf5XvY7QttnvM" after all.
> People don't seem to realize that there is little fundamental distinction between a crypto privacy service, and encrypted messaging apps like Signal and matrix
A dollar in a bank account is similarly abstractable. Anyone equating crypto to speech is undermining actual privacy rights.
There's a distinction, you can't transfer a dollar in a bank account by sending text messages. You could instruct your bank to transfer; but the actual irreversible _movement_ happens out of band.
You _can_ transfer a cryptocurrency by sending its private key on an encrypted messaging app.
What happens if someone makes a mixer that operates over Signal messages? This is not a bad-faith argument: The entire CoinJoin protocol used to operate over IRC; before they developed their own communications system for increased efficiency.
> What happens if someone makes a mixer that operates over Signal messages?
Honestly, if someone just develops a mixer and publishes the code they’re probably fine. That’s speech. GitHub or a journal, it is protected.
Tornado’s developers didn’t do that. They made a token that with monetary value that they get paid; they hired people and had a website promoting the service; et cetera. If this were just a GitHub repo, yes, the comparison to speech would be apt. It’s not. And I’m none too thrilled about folks throwing actual free speech and privacy under the bus to defend crypto.
You make it sound like righteous people rejoicing, to me it feels like those medieval citizen cheering at a public execution or the burning of a witch.
Both thought they were right and the evil people got what they deserved. The fact that you divide the tech world into evil cryptobros vs good citizens is telling.
Kind of unrelated but in a lot of ways I feel like an OFAC designation is a bill of attainder that is only legal because it’s used exclusively against foreigners.
1. Designate a businessman as an SDN
2. Wait for them to conduct some transaction that uses dollars or involves any American company in some way (if you know about correspondent banking you know this will almost inevitably
happen)
3. Wait for them to travel to country friendly with America
4. Extradite for conspiring to violate IEEPA
This has happened before (see US v. Tajideen). It seems like there should be some kind of legal case against this which may happen now given all of the rich Russians that are having their stuff seized on this basis.
Edit: And the interesting thing is that the Treasury Department accused Tajideen of being a Hezbollah financier which they could have charged him with when he was extradited from Morocco but they didn’t which to me makes it seem like there wasn’t much of a basis for his designation to begin with.
There’s a big legal distinction whether the developers are collecting fees from operation of the service, since that’s very different from merely developing open source software. I’m curious how this develops
> It is suspected that persons behind this organisation have made large-scale profits from these transactions.
By this logic every blockchain developer should be arrested. The TC developers are not collecting fees directly, but they probably did give themselves a large supply of tokens to maintain control over the protocol, since the tokens were designed for governance.
You can name any blockchain and see the same pattern. You can name many applications on top of blockchains, like Uniswap, and see similar. All of these protocols are known to facilitate some amount of illegal activity. Does this mean all developers of these protocols should be charged?
No this means that you should talk with a serious law firm before you start one of these projects. OFAC, KYC, securities, AML/CFT, so many laws apply and without expert advice you can end up in a bad spot
"Dax has advised and continues to work with many of the leading companies, industry associations and consortia. Projects include U.S. and international digital currency exchanges, vaulting and custody solutions, bitcoin kiosks, tokenized gold and commodities, decentralized exchanges, autonomous smart contracts, stable coins, and Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Beginning in late 2016, Dax worked with his colleagues to apply a new level of legal counseling to established software projects undertaking token sales related to decentralized applications (DApps) and distributed protocols..."
There is still no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny." If there is another US sanction that targets a non-custodial smart contract and open source project, please do share.
Devastating that it has come to "do not code an E2EE privacy tool because you might find yourself in jail one day."
> no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny."
Have you hired counsel? This isn’t what lawyers do.
Good counsel should provide guard rails. They will say this is novel and that they can’t guarantee anything, but lawyers do that anyway. They’re giving advice, not judgement.
One of those rails would involve responding to credible public allegations around being used to launder money by Pyongyang.
Exactly like original of developers of Bitcoin, it's not because they are not running the nodes themselves that they are not benefiting from facilitating ponzi or money laundering.
Nodes are running the network, and developers earn through increased coin value and both are necessary part of the operations of the service.
Yup exactly, the mistake these guys did here is, instead of creating a token that you have to buy to use the service, then giving yourself 50% of the token supply, and having 50 of your keys control a "DAO" for governance, they decided to flatly price.
This makes so little sense to me. I don't know how much information is made public by the Dutch justice system but I would really like to see an affidavit or something like it to understand what specific charges are levied against that developer.
Once the trial starts, certainly journalists should be able to read all of it, unless the court decides some of it is too sensitive. The verdict will be published at rechtspraak.nl.
If I create a new type of leather wallet and then North Korea uses it for money laundering, can I be charged for "facilitation"? What about if I discovered electricity, which lead to money laundering?
- How core to the illegal money laundering is the use of your product? (For a leather wallet, probably not very).
- did you target illegal money laundering in the design of your product, or market your product so as to specifically attract illegal money launderers? (Almost certain not for your leather wallet).
- is the use by criminals to launder money a significant portion of your sales (or use of your services) (probably not).
- are you actually aware of your product/service being used for money laundering? (Maybe?)
- if you are aware and there is significant use of your product/service for illegal money laundering, have you taken reasonable steps to prevent or discourage such use? (Given you flagged North Korean money laundering as your example, such steps could include: Blocking access to your site from North Korea, refusing to ship to countries that don’t enforce sanctions against North Korea, investigating if small tweaks to the design are possible that would make your product/service less useful to money launderers without significantly reducing its usability for other people).
If you create a new type of leather wallet that just happens to be used for money laundering, that is not a crime.
If you create a new type of leather wallet specifically designed with the goal so that it's easier to smuggle stuff, you can and should be charged for aiding and abetting if they can convince the jury that you did this knowingly with this intent.
If you do the latter and simply want to claim that it just so happened without your intent, well, the courts are there to resolve this dispute, but it can go both ways - especially as soon as there's teamwork and some record of communications, there's often evidence to support or contradict claims of intent.
Like, if you made tests where you run your new wallet through various popular models of airport scanning machines testing whether they succeed at detecting something hidden, and advertise the specific airports which do/don't detect it, that would be some evidence about your likely intent.
If you take part in production, delivery, sales, or distribution of said in North Korea: yes. If you provide North Korea with designs of technology restricted by sanctions: yes. If at least one seventh of all electricity you generate is used for criminals: yes.
The line is defined by governments, law enforcement, and the courts. The judge may dismiss all charges if they see fit, and the government can add or remove legislature to criminalize or decriminalize certain behaviour within the bounds of constitutions and international treaties.
I am not saying that governments automatically get the benefit of defining what "Good" is, but if you're going to make the claim they're wrong, you have a very hard, uphill battle ahead of you. If you believe in it, stick to it. Civil disobedience, comes bundled with accepting that the system will blow back against you.
I think that they are doing this purely to hurt crypto. They keep adding new laws when they see an opportunity where crypto could become more useful... it's like a frog in a warming pot.
This is an interesting case because it's applying financial law to a decentralised cryptocurrency operation. If research shows that Tornado was indeed processing a billion dollars of criminal funds then I'm not surprised arrests have been made even though it may be hard to prove actual involvement by the network operators. These numbers come close to the fund processing capacity of a small financial institution and there are
The points about DAOs are also interesting. DAOs have no central authority or elected leadership. Setting up a DAO should not be enough to get out of legal responsibilities of running a financial institution, but people voting in DAOs also shouldn't be treated like CEOs because they have very little actual power.
Conviction in this case might have a serious impact on decentralized crypto schemes. DAOs are a great technical workaround for not having a direct kind of leadership but the real world doesn't care about fancy technical solutions. Someone sets up a certain system and that someone has the responsibilities that come with setting up such system. If that service a free website, the responsibilities are extremely limited; if that service is a financial institution, your responsibilities become more serious.
Re: "this is just a dev", the dev also presumably ran the software they created, and with a seventh of the processed volume being criminal funds, it's almost sure that they operated on dirty funds at some point. Even if the developer's role in the (suspected criminal) DAO is considered insignificant, this might make the dev a money mule as he temporarily stored stolen funds in their crypto wallet. According to Dutch law, money mules may be prosecuted as complicit with fraud and any other financial crimes that take place.
One might defend the cryptocurrency operators by claiming that they can't verify the identities of their customers to comply with money laundering regulations, but that only underlines the illegality of the system: if your system isn't capable of complying with the law, you shouldn't operate such a system. It's like claiming you don't need seat belts in your cars because you can't figure out how seat belts work: your lack of control or creativity is not society's problem.
With how overloaded the courts are, it'll take months or even years to see the impact of this arrest. Whatever the outcome, it'll have a big impact.
The dev doesn't operate the TornadoCash contract. The code is actually run by people who operate ethereum nodes. After the initial deployment, the dev has zero involvement.
North Korea didn't use them yet to layer stolen funds. Just a matter of time before ZCash and Monero developers are all arrested if this is the precedent.
There are many non criminal use cases for private electronic transactions - just as there are for cash.
So why is it a crime to build a thing that has both legal and illegal applications, like knifes, guns, dollar bills, gold coins, ... ?
And don't get me started with "Most activity on tornado is illegal". It is a privacy service. So unless it is broken we don't know this. Are we going to take the word of the "Authorities" for this?
Governments started the offensive. Now decentralization actually starts to matter.
Ethereum is switching to PoS at the last minute, PoW miners are very easily forced to enforce sanctions because they can't hide due to enormous physical and legal presence. Home stakers can easily hide and break the law.
Decentralization really is starting to matter. It's a wake up call for a lot of developers in this space, that pragmatic shortcuts (e.g. centralized RPCs, centralized stablecoins like USDC) have disadvantages that may no longer outweigh the advantages.
I don't think they are going to ever be mainstream. Even a lightnode that only downloads headers is going to eat up battery fast. If a centralized service works for you, what's the point? What's necessary is to allow actually persecuted people to run nodes on their computers.
Modern light clients don't use that much battery and are optimised for mobile usage. They even have very short start times making use of snapshotting and back filling headers i.e. you ask all nodes on the network that latest snapshot header close to the head and start from there working back towards genesis. This can be even faster than using an RPC and is far more decentralised.
The light clients that the parent envisions could potentially run entirely in javascript within a browser. No app store needed unless the browser engines start blacklisting bits of js.
This isn't just the arrest of a developer expressing his freedom. Its the arrest of a developer who was knowingly part of a group of people who had the intention of deploying code (via smart contracts). The deployment of the code facilitated activities that were claimed to be illegal.
The issue isn't owning or writing viruses or malicious code, the issue is distribution and deployment of such code.
Is distribution of code substantially different from distribution of a book? Does something about uploading code become different when we call it "deployment"? I'm really asking here, because there are some pretty fine lines that need to be drawn.
If this developer only created the mixing service smart contract and wasn't actively operating it or advocating for it, I doubt Dutch judges can rule him guilty for money laundering. The 9/11 reference made by others is very much on par.
> I doubt Dutch judges can rule him guilty for money laundering.
Sensible position given he isn't actually being charged with money laundering.
He is being charged for facilitation and since you're a little sloppy with the facts there will assume that you're not a EU/NL lawyer with expertise in these matters. I know as a layman I will assume that FIOD/Public Prosecutors wouldn't arrest him if they didn't anticipate a successful conviction.
Even if he only created the contract the developer essentially thumbed his nose at the state. That is the kind of "crime" that government takes very seriously. If they want to screw him they will. It's just a question of how thick the veneer of legitimacy on the screwage will be. It's not like this guy has some vocal political minority to back him up so there's not much to stop them.
Building a mixing service that allows people to buy stuff without their employers being able to track it is a legitimate, non-trivial reason.
These mixers are privacy enhancers. Privacy is a general term, and doesn't have to relate to evading the government. If you don't want your employer to know you've bought an NFT from your company's direct competitor, that is a privacy request too.
I just don't understand how this is considered money laundering... this is coin laundering and it isn't regulated, as far as I know. The people will still have to explain where the cash comes from when they convert coins to cash?
I understand why they arrested him but it doesn't seem like he did anything thats illegal so it will be interesting to see what charge they bring or how they intend to differentiate between tornado cash and HSBC laundering money for cartels.
He created and presumably deployed a service that facilitates illegal money laundering. From what I have heard approximately 20% of the volume is of coins are known to come from crime. That far exceeds the threshold for which an organization must take steps to try to prevent these things.
It might not have been possible change the existing deployed contracts, or to shut the service down entirely (I’m not actually sure what governance features if any the core contracts have), but there are things that could have been done nevertheless, like shutting down the website that provided a convenient front end.
Basically, unless he can show that he genuinely did not know that the service was laundering illegal funds on a large scale, or that he did everything in his power to stop this use, he is probably screwed. This is especially true if he profits in any way from the operation of TC, like if he was operating any relay nodes that took a fee for funding anonymous withdrawals.
The frontend started blocking OFAC-sanctioned addresses earlier this year.
Do you think this logic should also apply to encrypted messaging apps? If you're a contributor to Matrix, or another open source FOSS tool, and you hear reports that criminals are using it (because criminals are a subset of the human population), should you be legally required to take all steps to backdoor it?
If you are aware that your app is being very disproportionately used to facilitate criminal transactions, you would generally be required to take steps to try to prevent or discourage such usage. This is especially true if you are profiting from your app (as the governments think the tornado cash developers were). This does not necessarily mean backdooring the app.
Remember how Kim DotCom went down for operating MegaUpload while actively knowing that one of the bigger usages of the site was piracy, and not doing enough to discourage or prevent such use? The concept here is not all that different.
This is why I would never contribute to some open source projects like metasploit that come too close to falling on the wrong side of the line.
Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering rather than going after the people actually committing crimes. Sounds about right.
Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important.
And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers?
This is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.
If the international law enforcement community is really trying to go after "all cryptographers" why do you think we haven't seen more arrests? Why do you think they only arrested this guy?
I get that you really want to defend crypto, but I think a simpler explanation is that they have good reasons to believe that this guy was doing more than just the stuff you're trying to defend (making privacy code).
It would be like... if two dozen people were picketing outside of a big corporation, and the police came and arrested one dude. You would be the guy saying "they're coming for the protesters!" and I'm the guy saying "Well, if they're really after protesters why didn't they arrest all of them? And isn't that the guy they were investigating for a bank robbery?"
Defending literally every crypto guy is short-sighted if you're a true proponent of the tech. It's possible that there are bad people involved in crypto, and you'll be a lot more credible as an advocate if you acknowledge that possibility and wait for the facts.
> If the international law enforcement community is really trying to go after "all cryptographers" why do you think we haven't seen more arrests? Why do you think they only arrested this guy?
Because the standard playbook for "cracking down" is to first win cases against the least sympathetic, most prosecutable targets. Once that's under your belt, you gradually expand outwards to increasingly ordinary people. It's why slippery slope is such a big deal in civil liberties and constitutional law.
When drug prohibition started, they started by arresting kingpin gangstas not students with dime bags. As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there.
Then the community needs to be better about self-policing. If there are people in your group doing shady shit with your group's tech, then get rid of them. Otherwise, you start sounding like the police with "bad apples" but not all are bullshit. If you see someone doing wrong and don't sound the alarm, then you are part of the problem.
> As abortion laws restart, states won't begin by arresting anyone who's ever donated to Planned Parenthood. But if left unchecked, some will eventually get there.
First thing, you can't arrest people for prior donations as postfacto laws are unconstitutional.
Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good reasons.
Do you think it should be legal to donate to criminal organizations?
TLDR: You have no rights in America other than the ones you can afford to pay a lawyer to force to be enforced.
Dude, as someone in the system, ex post facto happens all the time. In my case I can challenge it, but if I get slapped with lets say a completely 'theoretical' $5000 ex post facto "fine" it's going to cost more in lawyers to challenge, plus piss off my judge/PO for wasting time. As someone who can't get a job due to my record and can't afford a lawyer I have 'access' to the court for remedy, but I don't have access to a lawyer for remedy. The Constitution and our government are two different things.
If something gets ruled unconstitutional, that doesn't suddenly free prisoners in the USA. Each prisoner needs to then challenge their conviction in court, and get past the high procedural bar (as a Fed prisoner, do you submit to the circuit in which you are now unconstitutionally imprisoned, or the circuit that convicted you unconstitutionally? Depends on the argument you are making, either could be right or wrong. Pick the wrong one and you waste three months minimum (so much for speeding trial, that only applies to your initial trial according the the supreme court) for the court to come back and say 'they don't have jurisdiction'. Not forward to the correct court, just denied for lack of jurisdiction. For you challenging something already found unconstitutional that should just be immediate release upon Supreme Court ruling. And don't forget, you have a time limit to challenge something found unconstitutional. You took too long? To bad, you're now stuck in prison for something found unconstitutional because you didn't understand your rights and navigate the bar placed in the form of the court system in a timely), nevermind hurdles placed in prison (mailroom only open from this time to this time, mail room not certifying your mail or 'losing' it, law library copyers broken, commissary 'out' of law library typewriter ribbons for sale), etc. If the Constitution was law, those people held unconstitutionally would be released upon Supreme Court findings. The fact they aren't and can be kept in prison for 'taking to long' to challenge their Supreme Court determined unconstitutional conviction shows the Constitution is just a 'guideline' in the USA.
Caveat needed here: This does not apply if you took a plea for lesser time instead of accepting the 'trial tax' (which normally quadrupoles your sentence from say 2-7 years to 20-40) which removes your constitutional right as you agree "not to make any collateral attacks on your sentence" in the plea agreement in addition to your right to trial.
(Yes the higher courts will probably override this but most guys give up when the district rejects them. It's scary as hell challenging the prosecutor/judge on your own from prison, dealing with the harassment from the mailroom cops, one out of maybe every 4 months being able to buy new typewriter ribbons in commissary, copiers down, high copier fees. The entire process is designed to discourage you from pursuing your rights.)
The system shouldn't work like insurance claim submissions that if you fight long enough/hard enough or can pay someone to fight for you ultimately grudgingly your constitutional rights are recognized. Remember, China's constitution includes democracy and free speech too, but just like our rights they enacted 'reasonable rules that happen to be barriers to those rights as an unfortunate side effect'.
I did above. Fees/assessments that were not part of your sentence get added/imposed after the fact. The sentencing guidelines get changed AFTER what you are sentenced for occured, yet you are sentenced to the 'new' sentencing guidelines sentence, not the sentence that was called for at the time of your offense. There is a whole legal class called 'collateral consequences' that are punishments it would be inconvenient to be called punishments. They are instead 'collateral consequences' that don't fall under ex post facto and are then 'legal' to apply after the fact. Imagine that, an entire type of punishment defined as not a punishment to skirt the Constitution. The courts don't see the constitution as their guiding principle, but as bugs to try find workarounds for.
> Second, if abortion is considered murder, why should it be legal to fund illegal abortions? We generally don't allow people to fund criminal activity for good reasons.
Because it's not murder. Legislating that it is does not make it so. Full stop. That's like a government trying to legislate that the sky must always be blue, or that it's illegal to frown, or that 2+2=5. Just because it's a law does not make it just or sensible, and I would hope that in modern society we would not blindly obey unjust/unnecessary/unwelcome laws without questioning.
Murder is a legal category, it can be whatever we define it to be, so if legislation makes abortion murder then it is.
Is it intentionally ending the life of a human being? Well, what life, what is a human being?
It's intentionally terminating a pregnancy? Yes. Is that bad? Well, if the would-be-mother doesn't want it it's definitely bad, and if the would-be-mother wants it then it definitely seems cruel to not do it, but when society tries to impose whatever morals on these people the arguments start to look very silly very soon.
The main argument against abortion is a strange begging the question fallacy mixed with consequentialism: if the abortion would not happen then things would go great and a human would born (the implied assumption is that it's somehow unquestionably good).
“If legislation makes abortion murder then it is.”
I fundamentally disagree. You objectively cannot “kill” something that is not “alive”. That is just a fact of life itself. A government can legislate all they want, but it does not make an unborn fetus any more alive. And thus any law rooted in this idea is fundamentally absurd, preposterous, and so downright stupid that on the principle alone (aside from the many others) any such ban shouldn’t be followed.
To entertain the idea that government can legislate whatever it wants is to imply that a government can dictate the laws of physics. It’s just nonsensical.
I understand your argument, but (IMHO) it just causes confusion if you try to apply common sense to legal statutes and concepts. (Yes, sure politically one can argue that there's a difference between waiting for someone and running them over intentionally with a car and between abortion, but at the same time others are free to disagree. There's no objective framework for this.)
The fetus is alive. It's a bunch of cells. There's a causal interaction to remove it from the host which makes it a bunch of dead cells.
Legislatig physics is stupid, but what if some state said by law which interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one? Stupid, but not much different than building codes. Or say that prions are alive and can run for office... stupid, but there used to be a lot of absurd laws. (If someone works on Saturday they shall be put to death. Sure, what's work? And then there are many many many interpretations of what's work.)
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.
The sentencing guidelines (which direct the sentence a judge will give you) get changed ex post facto all the f'ing time. So yes, you can be given an ex-post facto sentence, it's just that it's been 'lawyered' to be constitutional (we didn't change the criminal law, just the sentencing guideline that dictated the sentence you were given for commiting the crime) even though the rule is 'Every law that makes criminal an act that was innocent when done, or that inflicts a greater punishment than the law annexed to the crime when committed, is an ex post facto law within the prohibition of the Constitution'.
The sentencing range wasn't changed, just the sentence the judge was required to give, but the range isn't a rule so it's ok. And if the judge sentences outside the guideline the prosecutor can challenge for 'sentence outside guideline range'. The constitution has been lawyered into oblivion.
Unless you find that abortion was never legal because the state statute on "murder" is vague. For instance, if the court re-interprets a murder statute then I believe that would apply to prior cases and then prior donations to any establishment assisting in abortion could be pursued as conspiracy.
There's a lot of room to re-interpret laws that were already on the books in ways that make prior "crimes" illegal today when they wouldn't have been interpreted that way when they happened.
There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
That's not how our constitution works. Roe v Wade is binding for any actions a person carries out before it got overturned in Dobbs.
Even if a court ruling or legal interpretation gets overturned later, that doesn't allow you to prosecute people who were relying on that legal interpretation.
Judges aren't mindless machines and they realize the importance of avoiding postfacto prosecutions.
You have more faith in judges than I do. I've seen judges act as mindless machines.
and below still stands:
>There's other things that can be done as well, like searching their residence for every single code violation possible, daily police visits, civil asset forfeiture, fine-comb tax auditing, etc. It's a pretty well oiled machine for finding ways to convict people or make their life hell through the legal system if that's the goal.
If the powers that be want to punish those who contribute to abortion, they will find a way to do it, even ex-post-facto.
You're right, I should have said if the powers that be want to punish those who they find out contributed to abortion. I thought that was obvious, but leave it to HN for me to actually have to explain if privacy and crypto prevents a regime from finding out someone has it, then they won't be able to punish them for it (although of course they could always punish for the mere possibility, just as a totalitarian regime could execute their whole populace).
Personhood is a prerequisite to murder. No jurisdiction has granted this to the unborn, but it's an interesting thought experiment if some chose to: thinking up "unforeseen" second- and third-order effects is a fun exercise (life insurance, HOV lanes, tax deductions, censuses & electoral maps, broken websites which assume all persons have names, birthdates in the future, null birthdays on death certificates)
Various states already prohibit using public money to fund abortions, a prohibition on private funds for an act they consider extremely illegal and equivalent to murder is not a stretch.
"12 states prohibit state family planning funds from going to any entity that provides abortions."
If the state law says so, yes, you could get an out-of-state charge for providing financial aid to an abortion operation after contributing to an organization that funds them. With Roe v Wade gone, I am not sure there is a federal precedent for how to handle crimes relating to committing a murder in one state that is not considered a murder in another state.
If planned parenthood isn't performing any abortions in a state where it is illegal, how could funding them ever be made illegal? None of this makes sense.
People from illegal states already cross state lines to get abortions and then return to their home states. While it's not presently illegal, without Roe v Wade, I think that may quickly change.
> No state has yet enacted a law to ban this travel. But it has been attempted: In Missouri, a bill is pending that would enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits if the abortion is administered outside the state.
> enforce abortion restrictions through civil lawsuits
I wonder how long it will be before SCOTUS kills off these attempts to use civil litigation to end-run the Constitution. The Texas law matched the court's ideology, so they let it stand, but now that Roe is overturned I expect the court to dispense with the law before places like California can use it to render the 2A moot.
If they let this continue, the court will become irrelevant in a hurry. They may have granted themselves sweeping authority a long while back, but that can be changed easily via legislation.
You can prohibit public money for any reason - and we do all the time, eg forcing the state to buy only US made cars.
You can't prohibit private money use in a situation like this - especially not for a political funding thing. That is actually a freedom of speech issue.
Usually when there’s an ongoing investigation the default is for police to not release too much information to avoid jeopardising the investigation, then release all the info when the investigation is complete. It’s frustrating and often a principle that’s applied too broadly, but I do understand the reasoning behind it.
> I agree they usually withhold details of the case. But I don't think they would flat-out lie about the charges being brought.
“With suspected ties to X“ isn't necessarily an element of the charges being brought. And the police can and do lie (or state “suspicion” on a very flimsy basis) when making public announcements related to arrests, and headlines often credulously repeat police spin rather than being grounded in facts.
While this tends to get the most attention (and still then not enough for the press to change) around police spin and media coverage related to police shootings, it is true far beyond that.
> But I don't think they would flat-out lie about the charges being brought.
I dunno, there's a pretty big trend going on right now of producing tv shows / prodcasts about how ineffective (with a strong hint of incompentence) cops can be.
“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash”
So the suspicion is that he didn’t only develop the tool, but was involved in its illegal use, too.
> It would be like... if two dozen people were picketing outside of a big corporation, and the police came and arrested one dude. You would be the guy saying "they're coming for the protesters!" and I'm the guy saying "Well, if they're really after protesters why didn't they arrest all of them? And isn't that the guy they were investigating for a bank robbery?"
Weird take because taking one or a few persons out of a large crowd is a standard LE tactic for attacking protests and similar stuff.
OK, fine, change the example to... imagine there are a hundred restaurants in town, and the police come and arrest one restaurant owner. OP is the guy saying "they're coming for the restaurant owners!" and I'm the guy saying "Well..." etc.
My point is, there are a lot of people on HN who seem to think any arrest or prosecution of anyone who is involved in crypto is due to a shadowy push by the establishment to maintain control of the money supply and thus our lives. I'm trying to point out (1) there are simpler explanations, and (2) if you keep trying to defend everyone involved in crypto without knowing the facts, you're going to get burned and normies are going to be a lot more skeptical about crypto in the future. Just... be careful, guys.
One fact is that it’s Dutch law enforcement, not international law enforcement. A second fact is that Dutch law enforcement have stated “multiple arrests are not ruled out,” so we’re not talking about “just one guy” anymore.
Finally, I’m not optimizing for credibility when stating my opinion, nor am I defending a single person. I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money laundering. It matters not to me who the “bad people” may be.
> I do not think arresting developers is an effective solution for preventing money laundering.
You're essentially reducing his role to "Just a developer" while ignoring that he might be a lot more than just a developer and might be involved with actual money laundering at many different stages of the process other than "Just writing a little bit of code".
Im not defending one side or the other, just pointing out that by ignoring everything else and calling him "Just a developer" you're not being objective.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. This was strictly done because of US pressure and sanction. Netherlands would have done nothing and likely the US did the logging and tracing of this individual.
The 'compare and contrast' case is that of not a single HSBC employee or executive being arrested for helping the Sinaloa drug cartel launder over $2 billion in profits.
> "Across the world, HSBC likes to sell itself as ‘the world’s local bank,’ the friendly face of corporate and personal finance. And yet, a decade ago, the same bank was hit with a record U.S. fine of $1.9 billion for facilitating money laundering for ‘drug kingpins and rogue nations.’"
> think a simpler explanation is that they have good reasons to believe that this guy was doing more than just the stuff you're trying to defend
This isn't a simpler explanation than the even simpler one that goverments have decided that cracking down on crypto is a good idea for a wide variety of reasons, and are executing on this decision. The way governments do this kind of thing is by starting to prosecute people who they think they have the best chance of willing a case against. This doesn't mean the case, ultimately, has merit, just that they've decided it's the most likely success.
Because he was working on something specialized, where he was in effect a supplier to a single customer. Thus, he's turned into a ready scapegoat.
You can't easily scapegoat someone if their pieces of code (or ideas) are also used, say, in every browser for securing connections, or whatever.
If you're closer than arm's length from some people who are engaging in criminal activity, an in particular doing exclusive work for them, you are prosecutable.
It could be the first of many. Up until yesterday we lived in a world (by which I mean the Western World) where no one had ever been arrested just for writing open source code. It appears that this is no longer the case. This is how the Overton window gets moved, one step at a time, not in huge leaps. And clearly there are powerful forces interested in moving it in a direction that would likely be detrimental to many of us here.
How do you know that this guy was arrested "just for writing open source code?"
The whole point of my comment was that he was probably arrested for more than that... Or at least, we should wait to see what the evidence against the guy is.
If you go around saying "the sky is falling! they're coming for the developers!" then it turns out the guy was actually doing bad stuff to help launder money, you're going to make it that much harder to get people's attention when there is an actual abuse of police power.
> How do you know that this guy was arrested "just for writing open source code?"
I don't know that, but that currently appears to be the case and I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
EDIT: The title of the page is "Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash". So they are certainly making it appear that they consider having developed Tornado Cash to itself be worthy of arrest.
The article doesn't actually say he was arrested for being the developer of Tornado Cash. It might be trying to imply that (or offer an explanation of what the connection is between the arrest and the investigation into Tornado Cash). All the article asserts is that he is suspected to be the developer of Tornado Cash, and that he was arrested "[under suspicion] of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering" via Tornado Cash. That could (and likely does) mean that he was involved in far more than just development.
I work in AML/BSA, they want it under their control. Higher ups talk about how banks shouldn't necessarily cut off (derisk) customers they think are breaking the law because then they can't keep tabs on them.
Banks and financial institutions are happily privatizing Big Brother.
> Ah yes, arrest developers of open source privacy code and blame them for North Korea money laundering
I have questions: did money laundering happen on the platform? Did the developer financially benefit from the money laundering? If the answer to both is "yes", then it sounds like the developer could be in a world of trouble, which is not related to crypto.
If I build a picture-sharing board with no moderation, and I profit from illegal pictures being shared, I would be in trouble for facilitating crime, that doesn't go away because I implement the picture-sharing on a blockchain. Using crypto to implement any system doesn't make it kosher: as far as the law is concerned,a system is what it does, not how it does it.
Exactly. I understand the sentiment that people are sharing around, "They're just being arrested for writing code!", but intent matters. And it seems like, in this case, there may have actually been intent to develop this to assist with illegal activities.
And it is always under the guise of anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism or whatever other reason they can find to excuse their inexcusable actions. Take mass government surveillance for example.
So we're all suppose to become techno-anarchists? HN has a great balance of both, it's just mostly the crypto-obsessed that decry government encroachment because they're still struggling to find a useful purpose for the technology before they get regulated.
It's one thing to be a techno-anarchist and it's another thing to be reasonably skeptical about government and what it considers "justice" and the ramifications of that "justice".
The way the government has been approaching cryptography and privacy in general is very much "throw the baby out with the bath water, we don't need it". What is happening in the financial privacy space (i.e. developments in crypto) should be alarming to anyone who believes in democracy, in my opinion.
Financial privacy has little to do with democracy and at the extreme would be its antithesis. Absolute financial privacy would mean that moneyed interests could quietly buy any legislation they want and the public would be none the wiser because the funding/bribe would be untraceable and unknowable. See Citizens United[1] for an example of how extending human rights to money has negative consequences for democratic society.
Edit: I don't get why financial privacy is consistenly presented as a win for the "little guy" against "the man". The "little guy" spends most of his money on necessities and pays moderate to low taxes relative to other parts of society. The parties standing to win the most in a world where any transactions can easily be kept private are those that wield a lot of money, a lot of power, or both. Consider Nancy Pelosi's insider trading and how hard it would be to discover/prove if those transactions could be kept private.
Escaping government encroachment is literally the purpose of the technology. It needs no other purpose.
The thing is, most people here don’t think that escaping government encroachment is a worthwhile endeavor. Which is pretty much the antithesis of the word “hacker”
> Escaping government encroachment is literally the purpose of the technology.
You are assuming that the government is tech-illiterate/tech avoidant. As it stands, several US government agencies are way ahead of civilians on tech, and not for the purposes of escaping the government. Technology is just a tool, it can be used to further any end the wielder chooses
Yeah when I first discovered this site in like 2017, it seemed to be a place of tech-literate counter-culture folks. Now the counter-culture seems to be non-existent, and actually looked down on.
At this point, the majority of the comments I read sound like a CNN anchor script. Ha, maybe it's their web developers.
The greater the threat which a community represents to the vested control hierarchy, the more intensely it becomes infiltrated and coopted. This is an Iron Law.
One thing to recognize is that HN has had an influx of new users that are pretty right wing, at times using veiled far right speech. Years ago, it was filled with people who had stock very left wing (at times ridiculous) views that I wouldn't call "counter-culture" either. I only know this because I've had to report many of them.
My hypothesis is that each of these groups come here after being kicked out or pushed out of wherever they usually hang out. The ones that remain on HN after a period of time are the ones that dang doesn't wear out via moderation or haven't been outright banned. They eventually learn to be good HN members and then stay.
> HN in its current avatar would probably cheer on if the Patriot Act was enacted today.
No.
> Been on this site for a decade. Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.
Probably because you disagree with tech/gov right now. It's really a case of "the leopard ate my face." HN has a long history of supporting "Big Tech." The issue is, you don't like how big tech is using it's power now, but were fine with it using that power years ago.
> Never seen it this filled with Big Gov and Big Tech apologists.
It's always been that way. You just refused to see it because it aligned with your views.
The UN disagrees.
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks". [0]
You can argue what the right to privacy means and the limitations of that freedom in respect of non-arbitrary interference are acceptable, but to claim privacy is not a human right is simply incorrect.
> Although not legally binding, the contents of the UDHR have been elaborated and incorporated into subsequent international treaties, regional human rights instruments, and national constitutions and legal codes.
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1948, Article 12: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 1966, Article 1: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honor or reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Ageism here is unwarranted. I'd assume there are now more 40something years olds keeping the traditional hacker values (before "hacker" became to mean "dude stealing money from gullible strangers over the internet") than there are 20something years olds. Because they actually might have been the part of that old hacker culture (not sure if it even exists now?). Now even in the best tech schools they'd probably teach you the most important thing on the internet (after the adtech of course) is to make AIs to ban "hate speech" and "misinformation". And if the independent hacker culture still exists, it's certainly not easy to find among the noise.
I think you may mistake the individuals for the whole. HN as a social center can be corrupted and coopted without any of the original individuals changing their behaviors, simply by adding more individuals with different behaviors. If by "they" you mean the individuals, your statement would then be incorrect, while if you mean the community gestalt, it would be correct.
Strange how the NSA can just skate through this. Then again, the US Constitution also says "All men are created equal" and that was a bunch of horseshit for centuries.
> Actually they go after the people committing the crime AND those facilitating it.
But only if it is in their interest. We don't see other services and platforms sanctioned for facilitating illegal activity. Furthermore, the Data Protection Directive does give users the (human!) right to privacy, considering that crypto isn't a currency, it's merely your private data which is also protected by GDPR.
You are cherry picking part of my comment and reducing it to absurdity. Obviously any implementation needs to be more nuanced than a single sentence generalization. I mentioned warrants for a reason!
No, that's not what they said. They said if you are using it to break laws, then you can't not expect to be arrested.
A money laundering operation can hardly been seen as fundamentally a way to provide privacy but as a way to change dirty money into clean. It's like claiming that an illegal brothel provides employment services as well as anything dodgy that people might use it for!
It absolutely protects your privacy in a system where the movement of money is public. Donations to politically sensitive organizations can be used against you, this technology limits that possibility, just as the traditional banking system does not make your transactions public. Many places in the world people do not enjoy your privilege of immunity from state violence due to support for activism.
Nobody said it didn't protect privacy. Obviously, that is the technology's function.
Above, we were talking about whether one has a right to that privacy. That right is observed differently by location, but it is commonly accepted to have at least some exceptions.
Nobody has said it is not a privacy tool. It is a privacy tool that has documented use in money laundering. Building tools is generally legal, using them to commit crimes is something different. The developer here is not accused of building privacy tools, they are accused of knowingly being in on the money laundering and profiting from it.
It's not clear from their vague, weasely language whether they're accusing him of any involvement beyond building the privacy tool. If they had any evidence of that, presumably they would have said so.
> suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering
Of course; what I'm suggesting is that they would have simply used less ambiguous language like "working with" or "providing support to". Their weasely language suggests that they need plausible deniability because their insinuations may turn out to be baseless.
The local mob-owned laundromat is also a privacy tool. Both are meant to hide the provenance of money from others. What's the difference besides the implementation details?
The difference is that one provides privacy exclusively to money launderers, while the other is a generic tool which anyone can use to obtain financial privacy.
> The right to privacy ends at the moment that it is used as an excuse to evade the law.
Sufficiently good use of sufficiently good privacy technology would make this judgement impossible. What happens then? Good luck not becoming a police state.
You might be able to encrypt some information associated with a crime, but you can't encrypt the real world manifestation of crime. https://xkcd.com/538/
The comic proves the parent's point. Drugging and hitting people with a wrench (i.e. torturing) to extract information is exactly what police states do.
The comic has a non-literal meaning as well. (i.e. see the alt-text) The wrench can be a warrant, a confidential informant, or it can be a security camera, etc. Obviously, the world consists of more sources of information than encrypted data on your laptop and the information inside of your head.
Crimes happen in the real world, not behind a cipher. Some element of any crime is unencrypted and unencryptable.
I have to disagree with the alt-text. (For me it says, "In actual reality, nobody cares about his secrets.") It's flippant and out of touch. Because somebody does care about his secrets, otherwise mass surveillance wouldn't have reached totalitarian levels along with privacy becoming increasingly criminalized. So the more resource-intensive using the "wrench" is, the more privacy is protected.
Except the Seychelles. There is a reason why dirty money and shell companies make the Seychelles their home as well as the wealthy elites mentioned in the Pandora Papers.
Technically correct, I was just supporting my argument with evidence. The UDHR also doesn't recognize a right to absolute privacy. They only recognize a right to be free from arbitrary interference with privacy. The idea that privacy is absolute and has no exceptions is very extremist, and not really supported by anyone other than absolutist internet commenters.
You've obviously never heard of the Fifth Amendment. It's actually quite the opposite, the Constitution enhances your right to privacy (by refusing to talk about something) when doing so could be used to prosecute you for a crime.
The 5th doesn't give you privacy to anything outside of your thoughts inside your head, which isn't related to anything being discussed here. Everything else in the US is covered by the 4th.
Wrong. For example courts have consistently ruled that you can’t be compelled to unlock your phone or decrypt your hard disk if you’re invoking the 5th
That is a perfect example of how my statement is 100% correct. (many/most) Courts in the US have ruled that you can't be compelled to provide a decryption key only when it is, as I said:
> inside your head
If it is written down, biometric, etc it does not get protection under the 5th. Those realms are not inside your head, and so they are protected by the 4th, and subject to warrant.
Moreover the kind of financial privacy you think of is from other citizens to not know your financial movements, it doesn't apply to nation states for obvious tax reasons and money laundering purposes.
Financial privacy is definitely a right. The question is whether that right is respected by any given institution. Since it is against the interests of existing institutions to do so, they will not unless compelled by a greater force. Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights .
(Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many loopholes in its contract to be proof against a concerted attack in typical practical applications - they usually leak too much partial information.)
Unless you prove it is, it's not. It's not encoded in the UN's human rights charter, nor in pretty much any legal system out there.
Governments should protect you from other individuals accessing your financials except the government itself, but that's it.
> Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights.
I am absolutely against the use of "cryptography" (which by the way any transaction system uses) and cryptocurrencies as there is one and only one purpose for such a thing: tax evasion and money laundering. There's literally no other purpose except far fetched arguments.
I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.
Authors who have given robust analytical treatments of rights include Rawls, Habermas, and Kant.
I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.
This is a baseless, so I think you're making a bad assumption. Finance is opaque at a low level because of arbitrage and physical trade, but it's the belief that the physical world dictates social rights (which are moral at the core, so let me know if you want to jump to morality?) is simply incorrect.
What's more, I think that the default position that finance should be private actively hurts society in innumerable ways. Unfortunately, without it, capitalism immediately breaks down into monopolies. So we live in the happy middle, as with many things, suffering the inevitable (corruption, blackmail, etc).
or the purposes of funding terrorism, narcotics, human trafficking, weapons, uranium, endangered wildlife and/or biohazardous material.
There's a point at which if you undermine law enforcement enough there's no point in continuing to try to enforce laws, which means there's no point in having laws at all. The hype mob either doesn't see this or doesn't care, which is incredibly naive either way.
In my capacity of unofficial spokesperson for the hype mob, I would say that if a tool can be created that has legitimate and nonlegitimate purposes, criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take, because it ensures that all talented people who are interested in developing it for legitimate purposes become disaffected at worst or aligned with your enemies at best. Setting aside the moral argument, the NSA's treatment of Snowden, Manning, et al. makes it much more difficult for the NSA to attract the best talent in its field.
> criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take
Sure. That’s not what’s happening.
Tornado was used illegally. Its leadership kept developing it, kept getting paid, and made no apparent course corrections. This wasn’t simply a GitHub repo; it was a remunerated enterprise.
When I’ve brought up the legal issues around mixers, a common response involves the impossibility of governments to enforce their Will on blockchains. If these guys messaged similarly they’re justifiably boned.
Justifiable by what, exactly? International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on. Is the argument that every government should have an unchecked ability to enforce its will on the medium of exchange?
> International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on
Do we have such a money supply? If not, do we have international trade? Is the world not multipolar?
This claim fails on face value. Most of history was multipolar, international trading and reliant on money states de facto controlled. (You’re not moving tonnes of gold without the state’s permission and not being chased by them.)
An argument could be made that the US stopped being the arbiter of last resort wrt the medium of trade since the Ukraine war, but before that point, it was certainly not multipolar. There was one political entity that, along with its allies, controlled the value of money, and they were disincentivised from cheating too hard by the fact that they could dictate terms to the rest of the world if it was important enough to them.
But I grant you, heavily-guarded ships full of physical gold would still work today. If that's a future you're on board with you may want an answer for how the piracy problem will evolve if trends around the cost of kinetic weaponry continue.
I'm rejecting the premise that we need a neutral money supply. (I reject the notion such a thing can exist. Money--monetary value, even--are social constructs.)
International trade in a multipolar world with sovereign currencies and commodities works. It has since at least the Bronze Age. So yes, if someone wants to cart around gold or use crypto, that's fine. But it doesn't magically exempt them from the law. A Dutchman committed crimes under Dutch law. They were arrested in the Netherlands. This isn't some Kim Dotcom bullshit. It's the law being applied plainly.
Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money.
Since 1971? Yes. That is a very brief experiment in monetary history, and quite Lindy. It can be validly estimated to have 51 years of life left in it (albeit with vast error bars, difficult to calculate).
> Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money
"Neutral money" has no meaning in an era when information travels at the same speed as trade. (It arguably lacks any meaning today.)
Bronze Age civilizations didn't have the surplus labor to haul around gold. (Nor to test it.) Though they didn't have coins, they used token money--from engraved clay and stone markers to shells and beads. Commodity money was traded in representative form locally and physically over long distances. Commodities, not bullion, were used because they preserved value over distance--a Hittite trader couldn't know what a gold bullion would exchange for in Hispania or Egypt when they got there.
> stories based on implausible premises -”didnt have surplus labor" lol- are conspicuously unpersuasive
Versus stories about neutral money?
Insufficient labor is a hypothesis. The archaeological evidence is engraved clay and stone markers. Long-distance trades settled with commodities. Bullion being traded between kings and kingdoms, seldom by merchants, and abandoned stores of value holding jewelry, precious stones and spices.
International trade in multipolar worlds does fine without a "neutral" money.
...and the USD is used for far more illicit transactions than any other exchange medium. This will predictably change as privacy technologies become more widely adopted. For example, transactions on the Monero network have been growing at an exponential rate for several years.
> will predictably change as privacy technologies become more widely adopted. For example, transactions on the Monero network have been growing at an exponential rate for several years
The posts keep shifting for what governments cannot enforce. I suppose this is a natural endgame; crypto enthusiasts setting precedents for, and giving popular cause to, state expansion.
AML has never been even close to perfect. But it's enforced. Hopefully, the Monero community learns from Tornado. Instead of thumbing its nose at the law, it could try to not encourage illicit transfers in the name of some convoluted (if entirely unoriginal) interpretation of financial privacy. Then it could survive and become something novel, like Bitcoin.
IANAL but if your website has indicated that the software is useful for circumventing the law (I don’t know if they did this) then I imagine it could be possible to make the argument that you’ve induced a lot of people to commit felonies while profiting from it directly.
This isn't open source privacy code. Whether or not someone else does something bad with it isn't relevant.
Until you can face what it really is, you aren't going to come to terms with what's happening.
This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations, then complaining "but I'm not the burglar, I didn't kill anyone" when you get shut down.
This is and always has been the obvious explicit purpose of this code. This has nothing to do with "privacy" and you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides.
There are people operating on blockchains in which transaction parameters are a matter of public record who:
1. May not want individual amounts and recipients to be publicly inspectable.
2. And are not criminals.
It may not be a right, but Tornado Cash is absolutely a tool to increase privacy. It is not solely for criminals to liquidate blockchain assets.
Even if there is people who want that, that doesn't justify it. Privacy has limits, and there is some really bad people using crypto to transfer assets. Banks are required to report suspicious transactions, so working around banking laws by using crypto is clearly breaking the spirit of those regulations. If an individual wants privacy, there is a more standing if they do it themselves, but when a third party gets involved, they must follow the same laws all businesses must follow. You can't code yourself out of legal responsibility.
Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
And taxes are kind of proof that the government has a right to see ones personal transactions. You can't have income taxes without verifiable income requirements and reporting.
When I traded crypto I just self-reported on my taxes. It's not that hard. It's already illegal to "evade" taxes, so we don't need to make it "double illegaler" by banning crypto used to evade taxes.
>Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
The issue is due to FATCA as a US citizen I have no exit valve to simply leave and seek residence elsewhere because leaving the country still makes me a US person reportable to IRS by worldwide banks (and in fact also by legal self reporting requirements) and the US charges a oft prohibitive multi-thousand dollar exit tax renounce. If we're going to put these kind of imposition on people we should at least streamline renouncing and make the payment to leave the gang something almost as cheap as the walk to Mexico.
You are assuming that people using Tornado Cash are only seeking privacy from governments.
You could want to use Tornado Cash for other forms of privacy, while still respecting your obligations to governments.
For example, suppose you are a company that pays salaries in tokens on the Ethereum blockchain but you want to do this without disclosing each employee's salary to the rest of their peers. You could fund a bunch of fresh accounts through Tornado Cash and distribute private keys to your employees off chain so they could access their funds.
Everyone involved could be completely respectful of taxes, etc. but they would still benefit from the privacy offered by Tornado Cash.
You don't have the ethical right to force people to disclose their financial transactions, either. Nor use threats of violence against people for designing tools that allow people to keep their transactions private. Doing so is the action of tyrants. Many people in the world do not have the luxury of immunity from state violence for supporting activism, and this technology is meant to shield them from such.
Cash is unwieldy in large amounts, which is why most authorities don't care about cash transactions. When cash is used at scale for anonymous transactions (e.g., when the US airlifted cargo planes full of cash to Iraq in 2004 to pay government workers without an Iraqi paper trail), it is international news.
If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD), I guarantee that no one in authority would give a shit.
> If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD)
A 200 euro banknote's dimensions are about 153x77x0.113 mm, if we consider double that thickness (because unless they're brand new, banknotes tend to crumple) we get that 2,253,400 euros will have a volume of 30 liters, which should fit in a backpack. If you wanted to use the more common 50 euro banknote you could fit 615,650 € in 30 liters.
That amount of cash is heavy and difficult to obtain. It's possible, but it's certainly not ergonomic, and in the US, withdrawing $10K+ in cash from a bank will create a paper trail.
The 500 euro note, which would allow you to carry an even larger sum in the same 30 liters, was discontinued because European authorities were concerned about how much the note was being used to facilitate illegal activity: https://www.bis.org/review/r160211e.htm . In the US, all bills with a face value greater than $100 were recalled in 1969 for similar reasons.
You can transport a greater dollar value in the same volume using diamonds or gold, but again, the amount one person can carry is not unlimited.
Both cash and crypto have their downsides when it comes to money laundering. A non-tech savy person might not trust their crypto transactions to remain anonymous or their funds to be safe, because at the end of the day the only way you can be sure of that is if you read and understood the code. For that kind of person the weight of cash is the lesser issue. I've been told that decades ago my dad's uncle would go on trips to Switzerland with bags full of cash.
If you're exchanging cash, you still theoretically have the legal obligation to declare it. Businesses accepting cash have the obligation of issuing a receipt, and you may have some obligations of keeping that receipt.
Now, it's true that these things are hard to enforce, or even impossible for small enough sums. But people systematically flaunting the rules for large sums of money will get arrested, even with cash.
> If you're exchanging cash, you still theoretically have the legal obligation to declare it. Businesses accepting cash have the obligation of issuing a receipt, and you may have some obligations of keeping that receipt.
I'm pretty sure that's legally required even when buying with crypto
I'm in favor of privacy, but if you're profiting off designing and operating a system that you know is being used to facilitate large amounts of criminal money laundering (some going to known foreign government agents), you're more or less asking to be arrested.
You can pose an argument that your service has some positive impact in certain cases, but you can't flat deny any negative impact or responsibility for consequences of your service. This is true of any and all services, whether they relate to privacy or not.
In my jurisdiction, if I operate a pawn shop, I am required by law to record transactions, collect ID, and make good faith attempts to prevent people from laundering stolen goods through my shop.
Does "privacy is a human right" trump the law in my jurisdiction? Can we say it is improper for the government to require me to collect ID from people selling me goods? Can we say it is improper of the government to require me to keep records of who sold me what?
I take the proceeds from my pawn shop to the bank. They are required by law to collect my ID. If I deposit large amounts of cash, they have additional reporting requirements. Does "privacy is a human right" trump these laws that exist to prevent the laundering of criminal proceeds through banks?
I also have discomfort over how much data the government collects in the name of preventing the laundering of stolen goods and criminal proceeds.
But in the large, I accept that freedom is not an absolute, it is a set of careful tradeoffs between:
1. The freedom for citizens to do as they please without society limiting what we're allowed to do, versus;
2. The freedom for criminal cartels to do as they please, preying upon citizens.
The latter is important, because when criminals prey upon citizens, they reduce our freedom as well. I want the freedom to own nice things. The easier it is for criminals to steal and fence my things, the less freedom I actually have to enjoy them
I also want the freedom to run a business. When criminals can prey upon businesses with ransomware and launder the proceeds through TornadoCash, the less freedom I actually have.
A "Libertarian Paradise" where criminals are free to do as they please because we don't want to impinge upon any citizen's freedom whatsoever, is free in name only. We may not like all of the current set of tradeoffs, but we must accept that if we don't make some tradeoffs, we will not be free in any real sense.
That has no bearing on the basic argument which consists of:
1. Claim: "Privacy is a human right, the government should not be allowed to know anything about financial transactions," and;
2. Counter-claim: "Privacy of financial transactions is not a thing now, and absolute ideological freedom is not actual freedom, it is the law of the jungle where the strong are free to prey upon the weak, and the weak have no freedom from the predatory strong."
Tornado Cash is an anonymizer. Same as every cash drawer in every business. All kinds of money goes in - legitimate as well as illegitimate - and is mixed up together.
Does shuffling a bunch of currency notes together - some of which might be from a drug dealer - make you a criminal?
Being a money mule makes you complicit in fraud or financial crimes. Running cryptocurrency code and using your own cryptocurrency wallet to help launder stolen money is a crime. People are expected to know better than to lend their wallet for "temporary storage" of money for a reward, especially if they don't know who the source or destination of the transaction may be.
No company will advertise themselves as a criminal operation, even the dumbest thieves aren't that stupid.
Google "bitcoin financial oppression", and you'll find that cryptocurrencies are being advertised left and right as a tool to escape "financial oppression", or as someone less cynical would say, to evade financial regulations.
(From Wikipedia) The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ensures that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
(Also) Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
It’s generally understood that without privacy people are effectively disenfranchised politically, because any expression of an contentious opinion or association with subversive or dissident thinkers becomes potentially so harmful that wise people would avoid both and keep almost entirely to themselves or family.
Of-course, but then there are no absolute rights that I can think off - property can be taxed, movement restricted by imprisonment / laws against trespass, labour can be forced by military draft or prison work, speech restricted by laws against defamation / abusive conduct, life can be taken in self-defence or during military service, etc.
>No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
He wasn’t just developing software, he seems to also been involved with operating the Tornado mixer service, thus enabling / facilitating money laundering and evasion of sanctions.
The popular consensus on HN seems to be that the government having absolute monopolistic control and power over personal finance is inarguably good.
"But money laundering!" so?
"But evading taxes!" so?
You can catch people in the act of attempting to commit these crimes if your agents aren't lazy shits. Forcing everyone's transactions to be public and traceable just so it's easy for the government to arrest people is not a good tradeoff.
> Forcing everyone's transactions to be public and traceable
My transactions are not public, but that's because I don't use blockchain. This is a problem created by blockchain technologies. Services like Tornado Cash are a poor solution that introduces new problems (like making laundering much easier).
Traceability is indeed required for large transactions in most jurisdictions. Where the line for this should be drawn is debatable. I think it would be hard for society where all transactions are fully anonymous to function. It's too easy for bad actors to free-ride or otherwise take advantage of the situation. I would prefer a little more freedom/privacy here but it's definitely a situation with trade-offs in both directions.
Also, keep in mind that increasing privacy for financial transactions would disproportionately benefit those with the most money.
The 'service' is a contract on the chain. It exists and operates because thousands of other people are running nodes that run that chain. It still works today if you access the static front end website via ipfs or have a local clone of it or manually build and submit the transactions via your own local node.
So, once deployed, there really isn't anything to 'run' in order for it to continue.
tornado cash doesnt facilitate money laundering, it just obfuscates the source of eth, like converting debit into cash, those funds still need to enter the real system in some "legitimate" manner in order to be considered laundered.
In there is an interesting paragraph explaining what Tornado Cash is:
… The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services. Users of a mixing service mostly do this to increase their anonymity.
Note how they sneaked "criminal" in there. There are of course legitimate reasons to desire anonymity for financial transactions! It's one of the reasons people like to pay cash.
Satoshi Nakamoto is wise to remain anonymous.