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The comparisons brought up in the article (cars, baseball bats, even Ethereum) service legitimate purposes, in addition to their potential for crimes. What's t

• poopsmithe 2y ago
  I think you're invoking a liberarian argument where nobody is entitled to the fruits of your labor except for you. That means it's none of government's business to know how much money you have or who you transact with. Tornado Cash made this sort of ideal possible on Bitcoin.
  • mistrial9 2y ago
    probably meant to say "libertarian" .. and to put a finer point on it, the government with jurisdiction over trade does indeed get to know how much money is traded with, and with whom.. on the reporting decided on by regulation.. not a wholesale dragnet monitoring of every transaction and every account balance. Meanwhile, modern finance is such that financial products are unequal, especially over borders, so the right to trade money and the like over time is included in legal definitions of private property. .. something like that.. ?
  • readyman 2y ago
    >a liberarian argument where nobody is entitled to the fruits of your labor except for you There simply is no fruit which is the product of one's labor, whether it be one person or one enterprise. Any honest analysis must start here.
    • stirfish 2y ago
      I don't know what you mean.
      • readyman 2y ago
        We live in a society. All our knowledge and labor is dependent on prior knowledge and labor of our neighbors and those who came before us, also known as our society.
    • refurb 2y ago
      Clearly falsifiable. If I harvest a random apple growing wild, that my labor alone. But I know where you’re going with that argument - everyone’s work is built upon someone else’s so…the government is entitled to all of it.
      • readyman 2y ago
        >If I harvest a random apple growing wild, that my labor alone. Nonsense. It takes a village to raise a child, and the agricultural knowledge to harvest anything stands on the shoulders of approximately all of human history.
        • refurb 2y ago
          An apple growing wild on a tree? Please share the "agricultural knowledge" require to pluck a ripe, wild apple? No. Man can harvest nature with his own labor and profit from it. Alone, with only his own work. I know that fact burns a certain side of the political spectrum, but it's the truth.
          • readyman 2y ago
            Under capitalism, this is called theft.
      • danaris 2y ago
        Who planted that apple tree? Who owns the land it grows on? If you own it, how did you buy it? Who brought apple seeds to the continent where you plucked it? Who raised you to the point that you were able to pluck that apple? Who built the roads that you drove on to get close to the apple tree? The car you drove? Who ensures that the air and water are clean enough for apple trees to grow there? The problem with any manufactured scenario such as this is that it narrows the focus down to a single act, and tries to claim that that is the entire system. It never is. The system has no beginning or end, and must be considered far beyond a single act if you are to meaningfully understand what supports it and just how interdependent it is or isn't.
• petermcneeley 2y ago
  Privacy.
• bidder33 2y ago
  Privacy.
  • petermcneeley 2y ago
    jinx
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    true, which it fails at anyway against a sufficiently determined actor . The FBI and other agencies seem to have no problem finding the original source of funds
  • bboygravity 2y ago
    Safety (from government).
• programjames 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page says Ethereum networks are public by default. This gives you more privacy. People may value privacy because they don't want others to know they have money and target them (kidnappers, surprise sixth cousins, etc.).
• akoboldfrying 2y ago
  Ctrl-F baseball doesn't show any results for me. Has the original article been updated? In any case, to the extent that you're pointing out that it's another tricky case of how to distribute responsibility for bad stuff, I agree. Other examples range from electricity (clearly has good uses, bad results are mostly by accident), through littering (how much is Coca Cola's fault, how much is the end user's) to guns (only have "bad" uses -- but you probably still want your own country's military to have them). I don't know of any way to allocate responsibility in these cases that doesn't ultimately amount to pure subjective opinion. Does anyone know of a more objective approach?
  • gosub100 2y ago
    > to guns (only have "bad" uses -- but you probably still want your own country's military to have them). the greatest benefit from guns is their deterrent qualities, which are very difficult to quantify. We never hear of the thefts or violence or other horrors that don't happen because potential perpetrators cannot manage the risk that their victims may fight back.
    • xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
      I'm confused. How does a home invader know if I am armed? How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence? It seems like it instead paves the road to escalating to violence in less-severe scenarios. I suspect it is very difficult to qualify because there are no such qualities in practice.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • metalcrow 2y ago
        >I'm confused. How does a home invader know if I am armed? They don't, but they if you're _not_ if you live in a gun-hostile nation. And knowing you might be is a deterrence, for the same reason knowing you might get caught by the police is. >How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence? Well, because of the risk of being killed if you try to commit a crime against someone with a gun. The cause-effect there is pretty clear.
• ranger_danger 2y ago
  There's more to the story than what's in this article. US Treasury says they had specific anti-money laundering rules they were supposed to comply with but "repeatedly failed to", and I've also seen allegations of them directly providing instructions for how to launder money using their own service.
  • lesuorac 2y ago
    While it I did just Google translate the judgement [1]; I didn't see anything about the US in it. It's pretty straightforward, a bunch of money was laundered using Tornado Cash, this guy contributed code to Tornado Cash, therefore he should be subject to money laundering penalties. (Translated Dutch, "As a result of the Kidwelly investigation, the suspect is accused of complicity in habitual money laundering.") [1]: https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:2069 https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2...
    • ranger_danger 2y ago
      This is quote from the Dutch court: "Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals," it said. "The defendant and his co-perpetrators developed the tool in such a manner that it automatically performs the concealment acts that are needed for money laundering." I still think there is more info we don't have, and/or maybe they are interpreting the design of the app to be explicitly for laundering, which is probably where the intent/conspiracy ruling(s) come from.
      • lesuorac 2y ago
        That quote also doesn't implicit the US. My point is that it's irrelevant both if the US Treasury told him anything or if he ignored what they said. He's convicted by a Dutch court for violating Dutch (EU?) crimes. The US is a non-sequitor.
• smeej 2y ago
  It hides the total value of your assets from a merchant. Imagine the privacy implication if every time you swiped your credit card, the merchant could see your entire net worth. It'd be a disaster. These blockchains are public ledgers. If people don't make any attempt to obfuscate their transactions by hiding them among transactions of the same size, anyone who wants to can see their entire balance without much effort. It's entirely legitimate not to want to broadcast your entire holdings every time you transact.
  • viraptor 2y ago
    That's a bit of a stretch. You don't need to use a wallet with all your funds (I really hope people aren't doing it). When you transfer something to another wallet you can make some guesses, but it's not clear if someone paid your that money or you transferred it yourself. Any move through a centralised exchange will also effectively erase the trace for that purpose. I mean, you can use it for that purpose, but there are ways to do it in not completely dodgy and KYC-evading ways.
    • dlubarov 2y ago
      Sure, users with some understanding of the tech can get a weak form of privacy (or at least plausible deniability) if they're careful about shuffling funds around different wallets. Why should that be the limit? Are you against stronger forms of privacy? Sounds a bit like laws prohibiting the export of encryption software with >40 bits of security. It does avoid KYC, but so does handing someone cash, and we haven't made that illegal yet.
      • viraptor 2y ago
        > It does avoid KYC, but so does handing someone cash, and we haven't made that illegal yet. Using cash doesn't get you out of the KYC requirements. It's not a law about specific tech, but what you use the funds for.
        • dlubarov 2y ago
• Ferret7446 2y ago
  Do you need a legitimate purpose for privacy?
• kelthuzad 2y ago
  I swear this reminds me of the 1990s in the United States, known as the "Crypto Wars". Many argued that the primary users of strong encryption would be criminals, terrorists, and other malicious actors, implying that law-abiding citizens had no need for such privacy. I've used tornado cash even for small amounts because I'm privacy conscious. For me "What's the legitimate purpose for Tornado Cash?" sounds like the 1990s "What's the legitimate purpose for encryption?"
  • jfengel 2y ago
    Even today, most people don't go out of their way to encrypt their emails. They don't want to go through the additional effort. Similarly, people rarely pay for things in cash, despite the privacy risk of having a transaction record. There will always exist people who will go out of their way to be privacy conscious, but the vast majority will simply trust in the basic security mechanisms. The legitimate purposes exist. But unless they're effectively zero effort and zero cost, people won't use them. It'll always be just a few privacy advocates and a whole buncha criminals.
    • kelthuzad 2y ago
      >The legitimate purposes exist. But unless they're effectively zero effort and zero cost, people won't use them. It'll always be just a few privacy advocates and a whole buncha criminals. But this sentiment of yours is weaponized by the state to oppose a reality where everybody can enjoy better privacy with zero effort and zero cost, so the ruling class can have more power over the peasants. I don't want to live in a panopticon where an all-powerful state has absolute control over our lives and persists every single of our actions, transactions and thoughts in a database.