Does one really need to teach zero knowledge proofs in the context of money laundering?
Similarly, there are other uses for anonymous money than laundering illegal money, for example, getting an abortion, buying a gift, having a vacation in Las Vegas as a Korean citizen (they get prosecuted for gambling overseas), anonymous donations, etc.
The technology to grow food also grows drugs; to teach technology is to teach all its applications, even if it goes unsaid. That doesn't mean we should forbid people learning to grow food in case they might grow drugs, or might launder money.
Tornado Cash isn't for laundering money, it's for breaking the chain of public transactions on block explorers. It doesn't make withdrawn fees look "legitimate".
Tired of these goal posts getting moved.
I can use Torando Cash to conceal the origins of my paycheck, for example to preserve my privacy when transacting with peers.
Probably. After it’s been publicly outed as a known money laundering venue, however, you should switch to another service. It’s also reasonable for everyone who deals with you henceforth to subject you to additional scrutiny, to make sure you were not in face laundering. Because while the privacy vs. friction tradeoff may be acceptable to you, it’s not to everyone, and just as you have a right to privacy they have a right to not associating with you.
I'm sympathetic to the free speech argument, but also, if I put up plans for the Kitty Murdulator 9000 whose principally designed to kill kitties, then yeah I'd call that bad. Like sure you could do something else with it I guess, maybe, but it's clearly designed for one thing, and one thing only.
Don't want your transactions to be public? Use a bank like a normal person.
Tornado Cash has legal uses under the law (like the one I described above), because it can be used to conceal the origins of legally obtained money.
See the legal definition of money laundering here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956 , it specifically calls out "unlawful activity".
For example the money stolen in the Axie Infinity hack was lauded through Tornado Cash.
An obvious example would be a software engineer working in web3 that gets a portion of their pay check in a crypto asset.
I think something like 1/4 of all the transactions on Tornado were laundering lol. Imagine any other business that operated like that. For instance, a bank where 1/4 of tellers are stealing the deposits of customers. At some point, the banking that happens is incidental to the actual business.
So like, if you have a legitimate use for the service, and you know that by participating you're facilitating money laundering, you're complicit IMO. And if you don't want to be complicit, go find a different service.
This privacy-absolutism is silly though.
Second, if true, is that a good thing? Or are you saying that if one person is getting away with something then everyone should just be able to do it.
This has big 'but mom, Jeffrey Dahmer got to kill and eat people' energy. Nobody gets to kill an eat people. Just because Jeffrey Dahmer did it doesn't mean you do. And it doesn't mean we should be building tooling that allows people to more efficiently kill and eat each other just because one guy found a way to use it as a hat pin.
Estimated ~60+% of worldwide employment (and 15+% of GDP) is "informal" thus no verifiable source of legal funds would be found if those persons put it into Tornado Cash. I'm not sure how you define the 1/4 cited figured in Tornado Cash, but the point is I'm not sure that it indicates anything unusual about the proportion of transactions, especially considering informal workers tend to have less access to the formal banking system.
Whether that is a good thing? I don't know, I guess it would be better if those people starve to death so they could make sure they had a traceable source of tax-paying employment? This kind of thing probably covers the vast majority of people in places like Argentina where the tax on corporations is 107% of profit [see publication 'doing business argentina'], that is there is basically no legal way to run a business fully above board. I definitely don't see these people trying to survive on otherwise honest employment as Jeffrey Dahmer, but I agree it would be better if they had a way to work that allowed them better access to the banking system.
To put it simply using your analogy, if 1/4 (or more) of the wold is 'Jeffrey Dahhmer' it doesn't look like your service favors Jeffrey Dahmer if only 1/4 of the service is servicing Jeffrey Dahmers.
the owner of the money decides to do that; private transactions are a thing
People don't money launder cash to hide where it came from, they money launder cash to provide a reason why they have it.
It sounds like the same thing, but it those are really two different things.
(I'm not a Tornado Cash proponent, but I am a digital financial privacy proponent; I support the Monero project.)
Cash was and is still not very trackable; it's so untrackable that the IRS has to declare what events trigger tracking. Something like Tornado Cash just mixes what it's comparable to a credit card purchase down to being as trackable as cash. I don't see a problem with that.
Whether or not criminals use it is really not of concern to me. The FBI, CIA, and NSA can do their jobs just fine without transaction tracing. The fact that their jobs remain hard are also an indicator of freedom. Their jobs have already gotten quite a bit easier with the birth and success of the digital world.
The result of money laundering is clean money: you can deposit it into your bank, pay taxes on it, and buy a Ferrari. That only happens if you can give the IRS a plausible explanation for how you obtained the funds legally.
Tornado Cash does not give you this plausible explanation. After using it, you still will not have clean money with an IRS-approved explanation of income. All you gain is privacy from chain analysis.
You could launder money through a restaurant or minting a NFT, since those are otherwise legal activities that could plausibly explain ending the day with more money than you started with. But Tornado Cash does not fit that description.
You are free to use the proceedings even if we know for a fact that the originating wallet had proceedings of illegal activities.
The crime has been washed.
If you sell 100 ETH worth of crack and send it through Tornado Cash, you cannot buy a Ferrari. The IRS will come knocking and ask where you got the cash. First you would need to launder the money.
You can trade your Tornado Cash ETH for a Ferrari. But after you drive it home, the IRS will still come knocking, because you didn't launder your money.
because most people aren't a fan of tax evasion, black markets or crime. The same does in fact apply to cash which is why many jurisdictions heavily restrict large cash transactions and are in the process of reducing the usage of cash or circulation of large bills.
I think the NSA, FBI and CIA being able to do their job is a good thing because I'm not too keen on making the life of money launderers any easier.