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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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