It requires users to pay gas fees when making deposits, as well as for the services that "obfuscate" the withdrawals. Thats the payment. You trust that the node

It requires users to pay gas fees when making deposits, as well as for the services that "obfuscate" the withdrawals. Thats the payment. You trust that the nodes will obfuscate the transactions to receive the fees. The rest is basic smart contracts execution. The compliance topic is tricky and deceptive. Only the user with a "Note" is able to link deposit and withdrawal. With this note the user can generate a proof of origin. This makes tornado cash compliant enough. E.G. If the withdrawal address is under Money laundry suspicion, it may be urged to provide the origin of the transaction. That is possible [1] but there is no way of a 3rd party to Tag an account as "suspicious" based on the Tornado chain information (due to the obfuscation done by the Nodes that are getting the fees). As far as I understand there is no accountability. The regulators would have to persecute all the nodes for helping out with the laundry. But there is no way for the nodes to know they're participating in laundry. So they cant be persecuted. Regulations needs to be invented for this kind of schema. Please someone correct me if I said anything wrong. Im not an expert is just my conclusion based on some reading. [1]: https://tornadocash.eth.link/compliance/ https://tornadocash.eth.link/compliance/