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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> your argument rests on the axiom that tornado cash protocol is only being used for illegal money laundering, which is not supported by the evidence

If it was only being used for money laundering, it wouldn't actually be laundering. To launder money you need to mix up your illegal funds with a larger pool of legal funds to give some plausible deniability to whether your funds are legal or not.

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Not sure if that is correct. If 100% of funds entering a mixer were from many different exploits, it would still be laundering and obscuring the source of funds from illegal activity. It would no longer be clear which wallets are associated with which hacks.

Still money laundering, just not with clean money on the other side.

Lmao no. The whole point of a launderer is that you can't know if it's clean money or not. You _need_ a stream of clean money to hide your dirty cash in. Otherwise you just have a firehose of dirty money.

In this hypothetical scenario, it would all be dirty, but you would have no way to pinpoint which funds are associated with which illicit activity. At this point it becomes hard to levy any specific charges: "you are hereby charged with either breaking into a $100M bank vault, or fleecing grandma for $10, but we aren't sure which exactly."

In practical terms it might not matter, the funds would just be frozen. But it is still a form of money laundering that obscures the true source of the funds.

I'm pretty sure that money laundering exists to hide an illegal source of money, not to put a flashing siren on your head and dare prosecutors to figure out what you did.

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