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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Freedom is not free, nor are you free to do whatever you want. We have rules and expectations as society, we elect officials to codify these into law. Most of us do not want anonymous money because of the downsides. It's not so dissimilar from seatbelt or smoking laws.

Tornado was shutdown because they were knowingly supporting sanction violations. The developer was arrested in a country that does not have the same freedom of speech we do in USA

The crypto commodity community will have to learn that they are part of the larger society and accept that they will not always get things their way. If you want things to change, you'll have to adjust how you approach these differences, and more than likely give up some of the absolutist views to meet in the middle.

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Code is free speech though. The rules and expectations the western world has set around speech doesn’t align with sanctions that target code and open source software. The sanctions are not against an individual person, and it isn’t clear yet why the developer was arrested. If it was for knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary.

You do not seem to be up to date with the details. The developer was arrested for running a money laundering service, not because of the code they wrote, but because of the money transfer service they ran, which happened to use the code they also wrote. The developer helped sanctioned entities bypass restrictions.

The code was taken down by a private company, freedom of speech is not protected on GitHub or Twitter. Additionally, American laws do not extend to other countries. It was the Dutch who arrested him.

You should start by understanding the basic facts and relations and not engage in hyperbole like "knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary" because this is not at all what happened here.

Very familiar with the situation, the tornado cash code, and the details of the case that are public so far.

I appreciate your optimism about freedom of speech being unaffected but this is not as cut and dry as an individual running a money laundering business, if that is what you think Tornado Cash is. We do not hold Tor exit nodes responsible for the illicit activity on the dark web and we definitely do not hold Tor developers responsible.

Some talking points raised here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpTrCA3tEKM

that source is quite biased, do you have any links to content which is not in the crypto camp?

He's actually wrong in that it executes on the ethereum blockchain. It actually executes on Optimism, a layer-2 solution, and they are quite concerned for their own situation.

He also says that there aren't people tied to it, but who was collecting the contract fees (beyond gas)?

Huh? It does execute on Ethereum, and the contracts are still accessible at the same addresses if you run your own node. This is where it was first deployed. It also runs on other EVM chains and L2s including Optimism, Avalanche and others.

The first reports on this situation originated from non-crypto sources so it should be easy to find them. A lot of the more in depth discussion is coming from crypto camp because it negatively affects all those users and their privacy.

Eventually, the crypto community will have to step back from their extreme positions.

A human paid to deploy these contracts, a human keeps the fees. This is not a "fully autonomous" contract. It is not an attack open source. There is a difference between writing code and running code, or making it runnable. Blockchain creates new scenarios we hadn't considered before, but common sense can still be applied.

A more reasonable assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8slTX2tyE

The sanctions are not targeting a human or a group of humans, they target an open source project and its autonomous smart contracts. Look up the sanctions and project source code yourself.

The only fees taken are relay fees, which can be anybody - not necessarily the developers. The conversation steers back to whether it is illegal to run a Tor exit node and whether it is illegal to develop Tor the open source project. Tornado Cash can be republished without relay fees, with zero governance, no token, would that be acceptable?

To a reasonable person, Tornado Cash is not acceptable, which is something the crypto commodity space will have to accept. Technical details do not matter, Tor has nothing to do with it. The sanctions impact people and their financial transactions, even if there is some code in there. Sure they listed addresses, it's not the first time, and it will be people who get in trouble for interacting with these addresses. That there is "autonomous" code is besides the point, most code is autonomous anyway.

If you support evil, there will be repercussions. Your participation in the pool is sufficient material support. We have laws, adjust to obey them or risk getting in trouble.

Sad and troubling that so many people hearing this will equate privacy with evil and illegal behavior. This is why I am pointing out Tor, because there are many licit users of it.

Tornado wouldn't be needed if Blockchain wasn't so flawed to begin with. Bunch of techno utopians thinking their way is better for everyone and don't want to hear any criticism or that their ideas aren't actually good... smh

What is sad is that you use and reuse hyperbole as a talking point

> Code is free speech though.

not morally, ethically, or legally

Legally yes, with legal precedent set in court. Morally depends on your perspective. Some people advocate for privacy, others advocate for surveillance.

> Legally yes, with legal precedent set in court

Typically this is followed up with a misunderstanding of the DVD-CSS decision, or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech, but I'll bite. What precedent do you imagine holds that code is somehow free speech?

Please understand that I'm going to look it up and I'm going to push back.

Bernstein v United States:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

The debate is pretty settled that code and language should be protected by 1st amendment as free speech. Based on this precedent, we should not be cheering on the barring of the open source project and it’s developers.

It is less clear if the execution and use of code should be free speech, and how to regulate code and language when the sole goal is illicit. Like anarchist cookbook, 3D printed guns. But to argue this, you will have to argue the sole goal of Tornado Cash is to aid in illicit behavior. There are many licit users of the protocol, like with Tor, who just want to seek privacy in their online communication.

The issue comes down to whether sending and receiving private keys in an encrypted way over the internet should be protected or not.

The code was taken down by a private company, where your free speech does not apply. This is closer to the debate about content moderation on social media, because after all, github is more like a social media site than most realize. GitHub suspended the developer accounts of their own accord, likely to cover their ass.

The Tornado Cash case is all about money laundering, the fact that there was code to automate the process is besides the point.

GitHub can do whatever it likes as a private company. But there are laws that protect against chilling effects:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

The bigger problem is whether republishing the source code would make you a target of the sanctions. If a user republishes the source code on Ethereum, pirate bay, Gitlab, or another host then it is reasonable to assume their actions might be interpreted as “supporting the Tornado Cash project” which makes them a target of the sanctions. If a user modifies the code and republishes it probably will fall under same risks.

Chilling effects laws have absolutely nothing to do with a company's voluntary decisions. That's a bizarre misunderstanding of their usage.

US sanctioning an Ethereum contract address and unrelated source control providers deleting user accounts and repositories is a good example of chilling effect in action. The individual developers are not in scope of the sanctions, and are not sanctioned entities. Not even the source code or its many individual repositories are directly sanctioned, but chilling effect is leading hosting services to erase it all as a precaution.

https://harvardlawreview.org/2020/02/the-establishment-claus...

Remember when I said

> or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech

Predictably, you referenced Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech, and misrepresented it as support that code is free speech

Literally exactly what I said you would do

“free speech” = “protected by first amendment”

Do you disagree with the widespread reporting on the outcome of this case?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Bernstein-vs-the-US-Departm...

> Bernstein v. the U.S. Department of State, landmark legal decision (1996) that set two important precedents in the field of digital technology. First, it ruled that U.S. government regulations that barred the export of encryption software were unconstitutionally restrictive; second, it declared that software source code can be a form of protected free speech.

and

https://casetext.com/case/bernstein-v-united-states-dept-of-...

> The district court found that the Source Code was speech protected by the First Amendment, see Bernstein v. Department of State, 922 F. Supp. 1426 (N.D. Cal. 1996) ("Bernstein I")

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