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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

You cannot in any way facilitate the moving out of any denomination of value from the addressed on the SDN list.

Moving value cross-chain is itself a violation of sanctions. If you start up a new Tornado.cash instance, you're still probably not going to get touched by the rest of the financial network. Risk departments are going to have dig into the details, and legal (if smart) will steer clear. Further, law enforcement will likely root out and make known to Treasury any additional instances of the same infrastructure they uncover, given that inevitably, the usual suspects will be running things through said channels until caught if they don't.

...And you will be hard pressed to find a judge that has the gumption to go so activist from the bench that they go against what Congress has already authorized.

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>f you start up a new Tornado.cash instance, you're still probably not going to get touched by the rest of the financial network.

This is what I'm referring to. In the hypothetical that someone tweaks TC to call it something besides Tornado Cash, and runs it with different addresses. It seems to me by the letter of the SDN, from a layman's perspective, it wouldn't violate sanction.

IMO they should have sanctioned any execution of all forks of TC if their desired effect was to stop the service of TC.

They can't "sanction all forks". Sanctions are applied against people and organizations, not technologies. Criminal money laundering is still a crime. It doesn't matter if you use TC or not.

This very sanction is against a tech called “Tornado Cash” which is not an organization or person. If somebody forks the protocol and renames it, and everybody uses it in place of TC, it will probably be under scrutiny by US treasury.

I'd wager it'll end up getting treated like a machine gun. As soon as something too recognizably close to it pops up again, onto the list it goes. In fact, now that I think on it, I could see a case whereby an Office to monitor new smart contracts pops into existence that categorizes pieces of logic such that usage thereof requires some form of bureaucracy.

The "if the U.S. government publishes smart contracts, I win" --Vitalik Buterin or whoever snark may not be as far fetched once tooling is bettee understood.

Humorously enough, ATF already has more than enough experience at that of enforcement (surveiling new designs and classifying new works as NFA/non-NFA) for it to not be converged upon as a potential model for regulation of such logical constructs.

Throw im some aggravating statutory enhancements for any crimes to which cryptocurrency mixing is found to be a component, and you've got a recipe for at least ensuring normal folk in U.S. jurisdictions tend to stay away from it.

...Good God. I hate this. Please don't make me right on half of these guesses.

Most of the value in a mixing service comes from how many people use it. If another one gets significant enough usage they will just sanction that one (assuming the current lawsuit results in a ruling saying they have the authority to).

So... To clarify, When you say "start another instance pointing at different addresses" are you referring to addresses TC previously used as stores of value prior to having it withdrawn from the Ethereum Chain?

Simply starting another with another set of pool addresses will probably not last long. One of the benefits of a public ledger is it's possible to statically analyze transaction traffic in a statistical manner to quickly home in on new sections of the address space. A sanction will come along once the intelligence community or law enforcement has enough actionable intel to say with confidence that that pool address is channeling activity it shouldn't be, then onto the list it goes, locking any value stored therein out of being moved out of those addresses.

Over time, this will create black holes in the address space essentially. More and more quickly as LE/Treasury/Intelligence Community tooling improves.

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