Someone Is Trolling Celebs by Sending ETH from Tornado Cash
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
BTW, is there any wallets known to be owned by government agencies?
If this is true, I don't think it's a bull case.
Specifically - with this issue - I think it becomes easy to get "unsanctioned" - transfer a Federal Wallet the amount of crypto received from a sanctioned wallet - until then - the wallet remains on the banned list - and any wallet that interacts with it becomes banned, too.
You can build a graph and un-ban wallets when one of the banned wallets finally transfers the money to the Federal Wallet and becomes un-banned.
And more specifically - with the troll case - you can simply only ban wallets after a specific dollar amount from banned wallets has been transferred to it. Someone trolls you by sending you $10 of poisoned Eth? Who cares.
10,000,000 wallets troll you by sending you $9 of poisoned Eth? Suspicious...
Reality is USDC is so intertwined with Eth/Defi at this point that the Feds can effectively censor Eth through Circle.
So while I agree this demonstration is silly it’s more a distraction from the fact that the Feds can enforce censorship via this highly centralized US-based stablecoin which has become so central to defi activity across many major protocols
> The gag effectively points out the absurdity of such sanctions for users receiving funds from blacklisted addresses that they have no power to decline.
is it a bug or a feature?
[1] https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/at...
That's not how regulation works. No man made law can make something actually impossible. It's there to define what you're allowed to do or not, and serves as a basis for the legal consequences. Enforcement can make things impossible. Some problems are solved with regulation but this is a technology (enforcement) problem.
Murder is unambiguously illegal and yet regulation can't make it impossible. You have no power to decline being shot.
That you've been bamboozled by ETH it's between you and ETH. I can imagine future crypto regulation will include requirements that users can decline receiving transactions
they're sending 0.1 Ether, which simply means they deposited 0.1 Ether which is currently $170 each
also, when Tornado Cash's anonymity isn't the priority, you don't need to delay between a deposit and a withdrawal, so this person wouldn't have needed to have interest within Tornado Cash, they could have acquired Ether, deposited Ether into Tornado Cash and sent it out, all within 60 seconds of each other, especially with a bot
Tornado Cash has reportedly $400 million in it, 213,000 Ether. Someone with "a lot" of interest would have much more than 0.1 Ether deposits to troll with (because each denomination has a different pool, so someone using the 10 and 100 ether pool simply wouldn't bother with the 0.1 ether pool). Anyone can do this and there are alot of people willing to force the logical extremes of sanctioning a pool.
These are in no way comparable.
I'm getting tired of these dishonest "crypto is the same" arguments. It's not even close.
Banking is well regulated and monitored. There are mechanisms to protect people, rout out bad actors, and legal means to reverse transactions. Crypto is a "code is law" wild west, full of sharp edges and irreversible hacks and scams.
Maybe those affected have already spent their Christmas present from 'Santa'.
My information is correct. I worked in fintech.
> There are legal means to force the recipient to send back erroneously sent funds in bank payment systems, the transactions themselves are generally non-reversible (some banks learnt that the hard way after accidentally sending money to Lehman Brothers after their collapse).
This is not evidence to the contrary. In fact, this bolsters my claim.
> The same rules apply to blockchains too, and people have successfully demanded refunds where the other party was known.
When the parties are known actors in jurisdictions you can reach. Crypto is a Wild West of anonymity, deception, rug pulling, scams, and hacks. It's constantly in the media for how often people are screwed by these systems. We wouldn't see frequent pleas for reversals if the system itself could actually restore victims.
Banks are incredibly well regulated. You can't even start a bank without permission from the state, and applying for permits requires that you meet a multitude of criteria and have organizational and process maturity.
Don't pretend crypto resembles banking. It's a shitty pasquinade.
It isn't: https://www.thelocal.de/20080917/14357/
"Officials at KfW frantically attempted to stop the transaction once they realized what was happening, however, they were unable to get their money back."
The same bank came under fire a few years later for sending about $5.4bn to four banks by mistake, however they were able to recover all of that because they hadn't done that literally hours before the recipients went bankrupt.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi...
what guarantees reversibility is the legal system, from which crypto is definitely not exempt, contrary to what some people (including you) seem to believe. enforceability is a different question, but if you don't have a billion-dollar balance sheet like these institutions, you'll find that it's impractical for many fiat transactions too.
think about it: when you sent some money in accident, who do you contact? the bank (which could simply revert the transaction if it was reversible), or the recipient (who will initiate a new transaction if they're acting in good faith)?
I would suggest to you that you need to think of this in a different way.
There are mechanism and then there are legalities.
You may receive a transaction and you have a mechanism to reverse the transaction, but now your account is tagged as the sender is a known tracked account. You have just interacted with a known drug dealer, terrorist, enemy of state etc and you are now by association suspected of wrong doing. Reverse the transaction, your account is still a data point in some database.
Send money to the wrong account, and yes you may stand a high chance of getting it back but you may not.
The situation does differ when it comes to hacks though.
A ransomware victim accidentally transfers 10 million dollars in Bitcoin to my account and the next day the ransomware actors show up armed and dangerous to my house demanding that I transfer it to their bank account
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/pr...
- if I have a Bitcoin wallet address I can drop 10 million dollars into it
- I can do this without permission
- I can have the wrong Bitcoin wallet address
it reads like you put half a decade's worth of clickbait headlines and comments together and haven't used bitcoin at all, but since its 2022 that doesnt make much sense in a technology forum so I thought I would check
As soon as you claim ownership of an NFT, your address is known.
(Side remark: Some crypto are in fact actually anonymous. The canonical example is Monero, where sending/receiving addresses, transaction amounts, and address balances are all obfuscated.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31476551
"As a simple police matter. we can track the flow of bitcoin very easily. Imagine we created a law, one is not allowed to interact with any "blacklisted/tainted" account/wallet and any account/wallet that interacts with a blacklisted/tainted account/walletn after its been marked as blacklisted/tainted is automatically blacklisted/tainted itself (easy to determine in bitcoin). I'd hazard to say, that such a policy would have a quick impact on bitcoin's valuation.
now, at first glance, this type of law might seem reasonable - if an account has been marked as doing illegal actions, any account that interacts with it is benefiting from said illegal actions.
However, this would setup a world of griefers. In bitcoin (I believe) you don't really have the ability to accept or reject transfers. if someone transfers coins to my wallet's address, it will be mine. Imagine someone who gains access to a blacklisted wallet and just transfers tiny amounts to all the addresses that contain massive sums of bitcoin, thereby tainting it all. "