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> The code for Tornado Cash is a series of cryptographic and mathematical functions that can be repurposed for a variety of applications unrelated to privatizin

> 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. You can deconstruct anything like this: "a gun is merely a set of mechanical parts that can be repurposed for a variety of applications unrelated to shooting things". Besides, the code or math isn't banned or illegal, the organisation is. Quite different things. > 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 That is not what happened so it's not a comparison at all.

lukeramsden 4y ago
> Besides, the code or math isn't banned or illegal, the organisation is. Quite different things. Which shows the US government still don't understand cryptography, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, or Open Source. The Tornado Cash "organisation" is just a bunch of researchers and open source developers, now being sanctioned for having the gaul to write code that is privacy-preserving. The Tornado Cash smart contracts live on on every chain they are deployed to, and the IPFS-hosted UI is untouched. Amusingly, you can also prove transaction history with Tornado Cash if you want to, for example, to prove to law enforcement or a bank that your funds are legitimate. So these sanctions are only actually going to affect legitimate users who simply wanted on-chain privacy, such as "famous" people with `.ens` domains attached to their addressses.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  The Tornado Cash project was explicitly advertising itself as an organization and officially looking to pay developers, as well as having a copy that screamed "you can launder your money through us". Hell, the only reason half the crypto people I know mention using tornado is to obscure your money after you've stolen coins or scammed some NFTs. It was not "researchers" "banding together" for a higher privacy preserving purpose. From the very beginning it was made to launder cryptocurrency. Absolutely hilarious that cryptobros were the first ones to scream that blockchains allowed for a fully open history and that anyone could see where the funds of their banks were coming from, but the moment they can't hide that they have $200k in cryptocurrencies and that they bought $2000 worth of stuff on analbeadsandcocaine.eth, they cry foul. It's working exactly as designed.
  - whatisweb3 4y ago
    The goal of Tornado Cash has always been privacy. I would tell you to look at the GitHub repo yourself, and you’d see a range of developers contributing to this open source project, and lots of side projects that are influenced by it. The code is one of the most popular and earliest production grade zk-SNARK circuits built with Circom that targets the EVM - the cryptography employed was very high quality and helping to push privacy forward in the blockchain space. But alas, the code and any research knowledge it provided has been removed to comply with this deeply unethical move by the US.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      Yes, privacy to help hide your coins acquired through dubious means, we know that. That some researchers got suckered into it thinking that it serves a higher purpose is regrettable, but tornado has always been about laundering money. Despite what you're attempting to lie about, the tornadocash code is not illegal. Feel free to repost it on any host that does not work with the US (or that isn't as trigger happy as github). The Tornado Cash organization has been blacklisted. The cryptography that runs it hasn't been made illegal.
      - whatisweb3 4y ago
        > Feel free to repost it on any host that does not work with the US An obvious place to post this code and protocol would be on Ethereum, which is censorship resistant. This is what the original developers of TC have done, and the result is a contract that becomes immutable and accessible, and is now the target of the sanction. But I will not do that, as that would put me at risk of 30 years of jail time. I will also not post the code on Gitlab or another service, as the repercussions can be severe. Whether it is just my Gitlab account being deleted, or whether it is more significant like the US government investigating me, I do not want to put myself in that situation. However since you are the one saying there is no problem at all with it, I wonder if you would like to do that for us? > Yes, privacy to help hide your coins acquired through dubious means, we know that. It is sad that you default to assuming criminal behavior. The same argument is being made today by politicians and governments to try to add back doors to E2EE chat protocols and cryptographic signature schemes.
whatisweb3 4y ago
The government is not sanctioning the mechanics of a gun. You can read in books and online about how they work in full detail, the “code” and designs for them is usually open. A lot of hobbyists use this to build their own airsoft, potato guns, and other nonlethal mechanisms. Violence and privacy are also different categories. A weapon that can quickly kill dozens or hundreds of people should arguably be regulated differently than a blockchain protocol that enables user privacy. > the code or math isn't banned or illegal, the organisation is There is no organization. The protocol is sanctioned - meaning if you fork the code, or build your own implementation, you risk the same fate as the tornado cash developers. > That is not what happened so it's not a comparison at all. It is very similar. The US sanctioned the Tornado Cash protocol and anybody who is using or contributing to it.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > The government is not sanctioning the mechanics of a gun. You can read in books and online about how they work in full detail, the “code” and designs for them is usually open. A lot of hobbyists use this to build their own airsoft, potato guns, and other nonlethal mechanisms. The government hasn't sanctioned the code of Tornado Cash, only the concrete instance present on a couple wallet addresses. When I use the public knowledge of a library book on how to create a gun to actually create a gun, I create an instance of a gun - and in all developed countries, I will run into weapons laws and regulations at that point. As for spud guns, these are questionably legal or outright banned in many large nations outside of the US [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_gun_legality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_gun_legality
  - whatisweb3 4y ago
    > The government hasn't sanctioned the code The government has explicitly said that all property and interests in property of Tornado Cash, and anybody found to be supporting it it any way, is blocked. This is why GitHub and all hosting services will refuse to allow it on their platforms. The code is implicitly sanctioned. Any person who posts the code will probably have their repo removed, and maybe their account flagged or deleted. If you continue to try posting the code to many different hosting services you might be seen as supporting Tornado Cash, and could be facing jail time. The protocol - the math and rules - is also implicitly sanctioned. If you build a new protocol using similar cryptographic tools, you will probably face similar risks. > only the concrete instance present on a couple wallet addresses. If you feel this US will stop at only these addresses, you are very naive. Any individual can fork the protocol, and it will be on a new address. Any individual can also build a competitor to Tornado Cash using similar cryptography, and they will probably also be putting themselves and their project at risk of US sanctions. > When I use the public knowledge of a library book However, the information is free - you can find it in a public library, and nobody is attempting to censor it. There are two separate problems here. One is that the US sanctions are leading to censorship of knowledge and cryptographic research, which is concerning. The other is that the US sanctions are targeting an open source protocol enabling E2EE privacy on the blockchain, not that different than if they were to sanction Matrix protocol.
yieldcrv 4y ago
I disagree with everything you wrote: The Tornado Cash organization was not sanctioned, the contract addresses were. The Europeans were not sanctioned, a registered entity was not sanctioned. The code was sanctioned and this is new. The code and all the pooled funds were sanctioned simply because there is no way to distinguish withdrawals from licit or illicit funds and playing on the popular and incorrect perception of deposits being illicit, and this is new. There are many more similarities to the analogy presented. Analogies compare dissimilar things for the ways they are similar, not the ways they are different. In this case, the private sector - Github - responded to the sanctions by deleting the accounts of contributors to Tornado Cash github repository.

lukeramsden 4y ago

> Besides, the code or math isn't banned or illegal, the organisation is. Quite different things. Which shows the US government still don't understand cryptography, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, or Open Source. The Tornado Cash "organisation" is just a bunch of researchers and open source developers, now being sanctioned for having the gaul to write code that is privacy-preserving. The Tornado Cash smart contracts live on on every chain they are deployed to, and the IPFS-hosted UI is untouched. Amusingly, you can also prove transaction history with Tornado Cash if you want to, for example, to prove to law enforcement or a bank that your funds are legitimate. So these sanctions are only actually going to affect legitimate users who simply wanted on-chain privacy, such as "famous" people with `.ens` domains attached to their addressses.

ohgodplsno 4y ago
The Tornado Cash project was explicitly advertising itself as an organization and officially looking to pay developers, as well as having a copy that screamed "you can launder your money through us". Hell, the only reason half the crypto people I know mention using tornado is to obscure your money after you've stolen coins or scammed some NFTs. It was not "researchers" "banding together" for a higher privacy preserving purpose. From the very beginning it was made to launder cryptocurrency. Absolutely hilarious that cryptobros were the first ones to scream that blockchains allowed for a fully open history and that anyone could see where the funds of their banks were coming from, but the moment they can't hide that they have $200k in cryptocurrencies and that they bought $2000 worth of stuff on analbeadsandcocaine.eth, they cry foul. It's working exactly as designed.
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  The goal of Tornado Cash has always been privacy. I would tell you to look at the GitHub repo yourself, and you’d see a range of developers contributing to this open source project, and lots of side projects that are influenced by it. The code is one of the most popular and earliest production grade zk-SNARK circuits built with Circom that targets the EVM - the cryptography employed was very high quality and helping to push privacy forward in the blockchain space. But alas, the code and any research knowledge it provided has been removed to comply with this deeply unethical move by the US.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Yes, privacy to help hide your coins acquired through dubious means, we know that. That some researchers got suckered into it thinking that it serves a higher purpose is regrettable, but tornado has always been about laundering money. Despite what you're attempting to lie about, the tornadocash code is not illegal. Feel free to repost it on any host that does not work with the US (or that isn't as trigger happy as github). The Tornado Cash organization has been blacklisted. The cryptography that runs it hasn't been made illegal.
    - whatisweb3 4y ago
      > Feel free to repost it on any host that does not work with the US An obvious place to post this code and protocol would be on Ethereum, which is censorship resistant. This is what the original developers of TC have done, and the result is a contract that becomes immutable and accessible, and is now the target of the sanction. But I will not do that, as that would put me at risk of 30 years of jail time. I will also not post the code on Gitlab or another service, as the repercussions can be severe. Whether it is just my Gitlab account being deleted, or whether it is more significant like the US government investigating me, I do not want to put myself in that situation. However since you are the one saying there is no problem at all with it, I wonder if you would like to do that for us? > Yes, privacy to help hide your coins acquired through dubious means, we know that. It is sad that you default to assuming criminal behavior. The same argument is being made today by politicians and governments to try to add back doors to E2EE chat protocols and cryptographic signature schemes.

whatisweb3 4y ago

The government is not sanctioning the mechanics of a gun. You can read in books and online about how they work in full detail, the “code” and designs for them is usually open. A lot of hobbyists use this to build their own airsoft, potato guns, and other nonlethal mechanisms. Violence and privacy are also different categories. A weapon that can quickly kill dozens or hundreds of people should arguably be regulated differently than a blockchain protocol that enables user privacy. > the code or math isn't banned or illegal, the organisation is There is no organization. The protocol is sanctioned - meaning if you fork the code, or build your own implementation, you risk the same fate as the tornado cash developers. > That is not what happened so it's not a comparison at all. It is very similar. The US sanctioned the Tornado Cash protocol and anybody who is using or contributing to it.

mschuster91 4y ago
> The government is not sanctioning the mechanics of a gun. You can read in books and online about how they work in full detail, the “code” and designs for them is usually open. A lot of hobbyists use this to build their own airsoft, potato guns, and other nonlethal mechanisms. The government hasn't sanctioned the code of Tornado Cash, only the concrete instance present on a couple wallet addresses. When I use the public knowledge of a library book on how to create a gun to actually create a gun, I create an instance of a gun - and in all developed countries, I will run into weapons laws and regulations at that point. As for spud guns, these are questionably legal or outright banned in many large nations outside of the US [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_gun_legality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_gun_legality
- whatisweb3 4y ago
  > The government hasn't sanctioned the code The government has explicitly said that all property and interests in property of Tornado Cash, and anybody found to be supporting it it any way, is blocked. This is why GitHub and all hosting services will refuse to allow it on their platforms. The code is implicitly sanctioned. Any person who posts the code will probably have their repo removed, and maybe their account flagged or deleted. If you continue to try posting the code to many different hosting services you might be seen as supporting Tornado Cash, and could be facing jail time. The protocol - the math and rules - is also implicitly sanctioned. If you build a new protocol using similar cryptographic tools, you will probably face similar risks. > only the concrete instance present on a couple wallet addresses. If you feel this US will stop at only these addresses, you are very naive. Any individual can fork the protocol, and it will be on a new address. Any individual can also build a competitor to Tornado Cash using similar cryptography, and they will probably also be putting themselves and their project at risk of US sanctions. > When I use the public knowledge of a library book However, the information is free - you can find it in a public library, and nobody is attempting to censor it. There are two separate problems here. One is that the US sanctions are leading to censorship of knowledge and cryptographic research, which is concerning. The other is that the US sanctions are targeting an open source protocol enabling E2EE privacy on the blockchain, not that different than if they were to sanction Matrix protocol.

yieldcrv 4y ago

I disagree with everything you wrote: The Tornado Cash organization was not sanctioned, the contract addresses were. The Europeans were not sanctioned, a registered entity was not sanctioned. The code was sanctioned and this is new. The code and all the pooled funds were sanctioned simply because there is no way to distinguish withdrawals from licit or illicit funds and playing on the popular and incorrect perception of deposits being illicit, and this is new. There are many more similarities to the analogy presented. Analogies compare dissimilar things for the ways they are similar, not the ways they are different. In this case, the private sector - Github - responded to the sanctions by deleting the accounts of contributors to Tornado Cash github repository.