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Comment by whatisweb3 | Hacker News Reader

It could be argued the sole intent of unleashing a virus on the internet is malicious. The sole intent of publishing a privacy protocol on GitHub is not. Look at Tor for comparison.

GitHub has a section on this[1]. There should be no problem with allowing this software online for research and educational purposes.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...

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Does anyone want to dispute that Tornado Cash is a money laundering tool? When at least 20% of the money that has moved through it is already known to be ill-gotten gains, with the rest being indeterminant, it's kind of hard to say it's a anything but a money laundering tool. I've only seen childish arguments that "money laundering is a fake crime", not that Tornado Cash isn't a money laundering tool.

It is a tool for privacy, full stop. Criminals can use this for criminal activity, law abiding citizens can use this for law abiding activity. Also see end-to-end encrypted chat apps, VPNs, onion routing and other privacy tools that are widely used by criminals.

also consider applications that might be illegal but often considered moral like paying for an abortion with tornado cash ETH in a state where abortion is illegal, or donating to a state that your current regime is at war with.

So "privacy of money movement" is not "money laundering". I see.

Y'all always wanna talk about what people could use the system for and never what people actually are using it for.

Well, if it's just about privacy, then I guess those people could use other forms of money laundering. Aherm, I mean "privately moving large sums of money around to avoid regulatory oversight".

People are using the system for these reasons. Vitalik himself has gone on record saying he has used Tornado Cash to donate large sums of money anonymously to Ukraine.

Conveniently no way to actually verify that

lol, the goalposts have shifted from “nobody uses it for this” to “we can’t know if people use it for this.”

Imagine applying this logic to E2EE chat: we can’t know if anybody is using it for legitimate reasons, because we can’t see their messages.

Besides, you can check the chain yourself - if Vitalik is truthful, you should see at least that some tornado linked funds have been donated to Ukraine after the point he placed them in the protocol.

When governments are not able to know wth you're doing all the time they get worried.

Remember the Patriot act? Or that it went after Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP)? I see some parallels here.

PGP can be used for law abiding private communication as well as non-law abiding private communication. Maybe we need to rethink the use of https?

A little of a stretch, but you can say that there are law abiding gun owners and non law abiding gun owners. What should we do about that?

I tend to raise an eyebrow, when the government uses the excuse kids/guns/terrorist/criminals to intrude into my privacy.

I will dispute that. It's a privacy tool. Just because you don't want the world to know what you spent your money on, doesn't mean you are doing anything illegal.

What if it's a virus that targets politicians?

Then it would be malicious?

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