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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?

Of course not, because intent matters.

The team at WhatsApp works super hard to keep people who shouldn't be using it off the platform, so that everyone else can derive use and enjoyment. If WhatsApp was built as a platform to facilitate terrorist communication you're damn right you'd be held liable for working there.

Tornado was built, and is operated, specifically to facilitate money laundering. It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters if the funds were acquired illicitly. They do not now, and have not ever, attempted to stop the service from being used for this purpose - after all that's why it was created.

A shocked pikachu face isn't a defense.

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> It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters the funds were acquired illicitly.

This doesn't feel sincere. Obviously money laundering is one reason why anonymity matters, but you can't think of any other reason?

I'll give a prompt: Several threads ago, someone expressed their desire to pay for a VPN service in cryptocurrency.

Remind me why you need to launder your crypto to do that?

Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.

The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.

If you don't mix your coins I can see you have signed up. If you do mix your coins I cannot. When I say I, I literally mean I could check the chain and see you were a vpn user. After mixing I (me) can no longer see if you are paying for a vpn. Hope that clears it up lol.

Privacy is about much more than whether your transactions can be trade back to you - it's about who can trace them back to you. There's a huge difference between "VPN who already has all my IP addresses knows that I did business with it" and "Everybody on the Internet knows that I did business with this VPN provider". If you disagree, let's see you post your credit card history and tax returns on Hacker News - after all, your bank and the IRS respectively already have this information, so you're not gaining any OpSec by keeping it private.

For a lot of mixer transactions, your adversary is probably not the government - it's any hacker that you may want to prevent from knowing your Ethereum balance and the services you transact with.

What if I don’t want my employer knowing I spent my BTC/ETH/etc on a porn website — so I want a way to disassociate the payment address they know from my spending account?

…or guns, alcohol, abortions, etc.

People have a need for privacy and disassociating spending from receiving for perfectly normal and legal reasons.

Or you don’t want your plumber knowing your payment came from your porn industry work.

Or someone knowing you book a lot of hotels and flights, so your home must be empty a lot.

This seems like a better argument for using a system which is correctly designed. A public ledger is a bad fit for currency and layering kludges on top isn’t as good as a better design, especially when that exposes you to being an accessory to criminal activity.

That's some seriously circular reasoning: It only exposes you as an accessory to criminal activity because they've labeled it a criminal activity despite legitimate uses...

No, it makes you an accessory because you are mixing your traffic with criminals’ to help hide all of your activity. Everyone trying to hide criminal activity needs to use a mixer but only a small percentage of other users are going to pay for an optional service so the odds are worse that you’re more likely to attract attention to your transactions, too, just like you would if you were known to take home large quantities of cash from a mob-owned casino, too. Maybe you’re just a really good poker player but it’s more likely to make law enforcement curious than if you don’t.

There are cryptocurrencies that are private-by-default, eg. Monero and ZCash. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and whether governments go after them as well, particularly since (I suspect) Monero is used for a lot more illegal activity than Tornado.cash.

The thing about Ethereum's public ledger approach is that it enables a lot of features - broadly advertised smart contracts, for example. Tornado.cash is literally an attempt to replicate the privacy benefits of ZCash inside of Ethereum's generalized blockchain. From a computing perspective that's quite interesting - you start with a public system and find a way to emulate a privacy within it.

Yeah, I’ve been surprised to see so many people prosecuted after using Bitcoin for serious things long after the privacy concerns were well-publicized. I guess it shows how many people fall for marketing.

Given how arbitrary the Tornado enforcement seems, fully private ledger cryptocurrencies will probably be declared criminal too. While this won't deter criminals from using them, it will deter normal people, as publicly offering goods or services in that currency would be illegal.

It's not hard to imagine that the end goal is CBDCs having a monopoly on legal privacy. (Privacy from your neighbor, not your government.)

It doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described.

It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned. The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.

> It doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described.

It remains to be seen what they mean by this. Tornado doesn't extract fees, so the profiting couldn't be exactly direct.

> It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned.

I specifically said "fully private", not "private from your neighbor", to differentiate with credit cards or PayPal where users have no transparency or control over who sees their data.

> The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.

It's not possible for a decentralized system to "comply with KYC laws". That's like asking that paper dollars require an ID to transfer. They can't do that, they are bits of paper existing in physical reality.

Similarly, autonomous consensus-based systems like cryptocurrencies and trustless smart contracts can't just say to users "sorry, I'm not able to serve you until I see your valid government-approved ID", they are "things" not "services with a helpdesk, a street address and a CEO".

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