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Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

And you're buying into propaganda suggesting someone pushing the envelope in cryptography is creating tooling specifically for money laundering. 30 years ago, the NSA toed a similar line in their war on PGP, saying it was used in practice for "money laundering, child pornography, and terrorism" - https://reason.com/video/2020/10/21/cryptowars-gilmore-zimme...

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For the umpteenth time in this thread: intent matters. Regardless of what the NSA said 30 years ago, it is manifestly apparent to every single person in this conversation that neither HTTPS nor PGP nor any other cryptographic scheme designed for individual privacy was designed with money laundering in mind.

At the absolute worst, they were agnostic to the presence of criminal activity. This is in contrast to Tornado Cash, which was repeatedly told that their service was being used to launder money.

So if the developers of PGP were told that ISIL was using their service to facilitate terrorism should they shut down the project?

What project? PGP was bundled up and thrown onto the Internet; there was no development or services community established around it. The US Government threw a hissy fit over that and they ended up distributing it as a "book" instead, converting it into a question of free expression.

There is no meaningful sense in which PGP could ever be said to "facilitate" terrorism in the same way that Tornado Cash is rightfully characterized as facilitating money laundering. PGP is a program that runs on your host, encrypting your email. Tornado Cash is a service, run by an individual who was warned to cease serving sanctioned entities, and failed to do so.

Ignoring the front-end (which is unnecessary to use it), Tornado Cash is a protocol, run by a decentralized network of computers. The code for the protocol is shared by a network of computers execute this code according to specific rules and validate transactions. A specific deployment of the code was sanctioned, but this means anyone else using the code (which has to be deployed to this network to be used trustlessly) is risky to use now

> Tornado Cash is a service, _run by an individual_ who was warned to cease serving sanctioned entities, and failed to do so.

This is false. The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash contracts were either deployed to Ethereum as immutable contracts, or updated in 2020 to revoke mutability (once the final zkSNARK parameters were included) [0], meaning that they could not later be updated by the user(s) that deployed them. Arguing that Tornado Cash is run by an individual means arguing that the entire Ethereum network is run by an individual. There was no way for a warned individual to comply with that warning.

[0] https://www.coincenter.org/education/advanced-topics/how-doe... - Section titled "Can Tornado Cash be removed or updated? If so, by whom?"

>The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash contracts

Thousands of little contracts doesn't absolve a financial institution from a few many-billion dollar illegal transfers, especially after they've been warned repeatedly.

What do you mean by "thousands of little contracts"? I haven't looked at Tornado's source code too much, it's entirely possible there are additional contracts created by their contracts as part of the protocol, but this would be pretty unusual.

Usually a smart contract protocol is a set of contracts working together, deployed to the blockchain, which provide application logic that executes regardless of who is interacting with it (via "transactions")

Thousands of different private keys doesn't absolve a corporation from billions of illicit conversations, especially after they have been warned repeatedly.

Well it probably was, among other things. But we're censoring a network here, not just a tool. Nobody is making the cryptography behind Tornado illegal.

The open source software and cryptographic protocol is implicitly targeted with this order. You can see it in how private companies are now handling the Tornado Cash code and contributor accounts. If you create a similar privacy tool with zk-SNARKs do you really think it won’t also become a target for sanctions in time?

This is known as “chilling effect” in a legal context.

To expand on this, the chilling effect here is that even if the code behind tornado cash isn't explicitly illegal, using it on a blockchain in practice is incredibly risky.

People who might otherwise want to use this for financial privacy would be wary, since if they deposit funds to the contract, they don't have any way to know if they'll be able to use the unlinked funds later if withdrawn.

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