Tornado Cash and bullets
blog.yossarian.net
blog.yossarian.net
This is where all the reasoning falls apart. We do sanction these things. We sanction types of paper commonly used for printing different countries currencies. We sanction types of metal alloys that are most useful in fissile material production. We literally sanction guns and bullets.
Tornado Cash is a large chamber, fully automatic, machine gun. We should sanction it and remove it because what it is most usable for is mowing down large amounts of people, not helpfully killing a wolf that's about to eat an Albertan heifer.
To us programmers language and code and free speech sure seem like all the same thing, but as you zoom out it stops being language and it starts being technology. I don't want gangsters and kleptocrats tornadoing cash. I want order and good government and societies built on peace, trust, and reliable justice.
I mean everyone wants that. Why give a small group of people so much power to achieve it? Doesn’t the US government have enough power over people’s finances already to achieve those aims?
LOL I'd be curious to know which country you think this is possible in. The contemporary democratic nation state is a facade over a distributed and decentralized oligarchy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy#:~:text=....
Tornado Cash was always about Ethereum, not USD. You can't even use Tornado Cash to get in/out USD from the contract.
Why not go after the actual entities that are doing the washing/laundering instead of one of the utilities they (and other lawful users) are using as a step in the process?
Real estate is used to launder money, that doesn't turn buildings into money.
Yet "real estate" is not on OFAC's sanctions list. It's almost like we should go after the people doing the money laundering, instead of things that could possibly be used for money laundering.
Tornado Cash and some people behind it were targeted, nobody made Crypto illegal.
That's incorrect. They literally made it illegal in the US to send/receive transactions to/from a Ethereum contract, which is just code.
See https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... and search for 0x910cbd523d972eb0a6f4cae4618ad62622b39dbf (https://etherscan.io/address/0x910cbd523d972eb0a6f4cae4618ad...) as an example.
While I've never claimed cryptos are not a kind of cash, it doesn't have to be. For TC to be a money (laundering scheme), it just has to have resale value. Artworks can be washing machines too, doesn't make them money.
No, I'm acknowledging that it is a dangerous technology that has cash in its name. I don't literally think it's a tornado nor do I literally think it is cash anymore than I think the bits of electricity that carry a bank transfer are cash.
I'm trying to have an adult look at it without falling into the perfect abstractionism trap that so many of us software folk fall into. Politics and power is not built upon perfect abstractions or perfect mindshare. It's built on violence and realism at the worst of times and I don't want ideologues destroying peace and the planet.
The sanction was on tornado cash specifically and not on Ethereum or cryptocurrencies as a whole. The latter would be similar to banning cars IMO.
It so happens that, until very recently, our government keepers have enjoyed unfettered access to data about our lives on a scale that is unprecedented. We will continue to see this same battle "privacy is only to the benefit of criminals" play out over and over in every medium.
For me, I prefer privacy and for government investigators to be forced to do their job. This has the unfortunate (for Americans) side effect of unraveling much of the American financial hegemony.
That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any data or arguments to back that up? Millions (billions?) of people use those technologies every day for non-criminal purposes. Are there really more criminals out there using them for nefarious purposes?
Excellent observation. You could claim a gun is just a metal sculpture and therefore protected by free speech, but that's not going to fly because it's an unreasonably expansive interpretation.
There are a lot of pretty bizarre ideas tech people often have, because they're too focused on tech and too immersed in the tech subculture to see their blindspots. IMHO, it's pretty useful (especially as a tech person) to start with the assumption that any "techie" idea or attitude that intersects with any non-tech thing is majorly flawed (e.g. using "technical system" mental tools where they're inappropriate, a tendency towards oversimplification or over-consistency, engineer's syndrome and other kinds of ignorant arrogance, etc.).
By the same argument, guns are meant to kill things, that is their primary function, yet we do not go after the gun manufacturers based on morality. Just because something can be used for harmful purposes, does not mean that it has no useful purpose in our society.
Change in society depends upon privacy. Women’s suffrage would not have happened without the ability for women to meet in secret to plan public assembly. This is also true of the civil rights movement. Gay marriage required gay relationships which were also illegal at the time.
Imagine how much more oppressive the in-crowd can be with perfect surveillance of financial transactions.
To be clear, I think money and speech are different. I also believe that a fully financially surveilled society is a totalitarian state where free speech is impossible.
We have to find a compromise where we retain some semblance of privacy in the digital banking era. To lose any hope of privacy is to accept tyranny.
It is possible for us, as technologists, to build systems that both comply with the law and create privacy for the customer, at least in the US as the laws are written today. The danger is the incredibly rapid expanse of surveillance powers as they relate to finance.
Please take a moment to research what is happening in the US right now. This is the front page of Bloomberg from a couple days ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-12/china-....
It's almost like the establishment of a national currency had as one of its goals fungibility of notes as a priority (over notes from any of hundreds of local banks and trading of IOUs).
To use your metaphor, a person who it would be a crime to sell anything to went to a gun vending machine to buy a gun. Given the nature of gun vending machines, it would be difficult, but not impossible for the vending machine company to prevent this scenario. However, in terms of assessing whether a legal violation occurred, it doesn't matter that the item the person bought was a gun, if the gun was then used to commit a crime, or if the item was instead a rubber band or a brown paper bag, or if the gun vending machine company designed the gun/band/bag or produced the gun/band/bag.
[0] Proxy contract: https://etherscan.io/address/0xd90e2f925da726b50c4ed8d0fb90a...
[1] sanctioned address using Proxy contract: https://etherscan.io/address/0x4bf2c2956942b2dd40517bce42391...
If norms and law were the only tools we had, nobody would have communications privacy. Every large government around the world is constantly battling against privacy. When the government turns against its people, technology can help. The only realistic solution for privacy in today's environment is to "put it in a computer" using encryption. Would you also argue that instead of adopting HTTPS, we should have written a letter to our congressman?
Or you can take matters into your own hands, with encryption.
If someone calls me a fool for using HTTPS and encrypted messaging, I'm fine with that.
Great read.
This seems incorrect. Tornado Cash developers have no ability to execute code. Rather, "deployment", is in actuality Tornado Cash developers proposing the code for execution. Ethereum miners execute the proposed code, and they can refuse to execute.
More seriously: this is actually an interesting point. But I don't think it overrides the argument: nobody would propose a thing if they had a strong reason to believe that it would be immediately refused. The Tornado Cash developers had every reason to believe that the Ethereum network would pick up their code, and that is in fact what happened.
Every time I hear "common-sense argument" I am expecting to be greeted by partisan nonsense.
> No, probably not. The error is apparent: the bullet only traveled because something made it travel. The something that made it travel is the gun, and guns do not make bullets travel unless someone or something pulls their triggers4. For this particular bullet and gun, that someone is the defendant.
I don't like this analogy because the area of self-defense law is extremely murky. (a) incontrovertible evidence that someone shot someone else simply proves that, and does not prove or disprove self-defense. Moreover there have been more than enough cases of accidental failure that make this analogy extremely leaky.
> For example: Imagine if the defendant were to have forced the victim to put their head in a noose and their feet on a stool, with the stool tied by a rope to the leg of a horse. It would be absurd for the defendant to claim that he were innocent of murder because he “merely” spurred the horse into pulling the rope5; we can recognize that the victim’s death by hanging follows necessarily and foreseeably from the defendant’s action. Basically, that one scene with Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
This example should've been the leading example. There's no ambiguity here.
> Tornado Cash (as a smart contract) is the clear instrument of action. As designed by its programmers, it necessarily launders money: there is no way to make it not launder money, because it cannot distinguish money laundering from “legitimate” tumbling.
This is a hot take with VERY dangerous implications. Using the treasuries own definition [1]
> Money laundering involves disguising financial assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them.
Laundering is only with illegal money. If I take my legal dollars, convert them to gold, then convert them back to dollars this is "laundering" under the definition of the author. If I deposit money, and then take it out as cash this is also laundering under the definition.
> For parsimony: Tornado Cash exists, effectively, to hack around the public and immutable nature of the distributed ledgers it runs on. In other words: it solves a self-inflicted problem, one that regulatory agencies are correct to identify as unnecessary (and can evidence this by pointing to the billions of people who accomplish their financial goals without it).
If I have cash that I let sufficiently "age" under my bed and I convert it to gold, is the gold seller responsible if I then use that gold to commit a crime? Billions of people are completely happy using fiat to accomplish their goals. This is dangerous Nanny State level implication. The underlying implication of OPs post is that because something is designed on its principles to evade the tracking system of the "greater" system, then it must be used in crimes.
> And if you don’t think sanctions are valid at all, well, fine. This post probably isn’t for you
It sounds like my assumption was correct. Yet another "common sense" take that is actually partisan nonsense.
While I don't know the entire case of Tornado Cash, or if it's used to launder money any more than a regular cryptocurrency or any other number of ways you can launder money, the idea of punishing an entire idea (tumblers in general it seems) for being used this way is insanely heavy handed. Carefully chosen definitions, and a misunderstanding that so, so many instruments that are not tornado cash can be used for it's purpose weaken the author's arguments for sanctions. It is indeed a hot take, and the only thing common sense here is relying on the readers lack of knowledge of financial systems and the assumption that evading a tracking system implies laundering rather than the other way around.
“You are presented incontrovertible evidence for the fact that your post inspired someone to kill”
should we lock you up for murder?
reasoning by analogy across different criminality is filled with risks
i’m hopeful society and eventual the law will catch up with what is reasonable. sadly, i suspect what is reasonable to the majority won’t be reasonable to me.
or worse yet the flaw of reasoning will be borne by future generations like the blood letting cures of prior centuries
i offer no solution only the occasional comment bordering on full blown troll.
1. You intended to inspire that person to kill.
2. You could reasonably know that someone who would read your post would actually murder someone.
Then yes, this is clearly murder by proxy. Tornado has never been shy about mentioning how it could be used for illegal purposes, nor was it unknown that NK was using it to launder their ill-gotten gains. Being sanctioned was only a question of time IMO.
In the gun analogy, wouldn't the comparison be putting the CEO of Smith & Wesson on trial because someone used one of their pistols in a murder?
Like a pistol, the Tornado Cash smart contract has legitimate and illegitimate use cases.
On the other hand, if someone could demonstrate that S&W intentionally sells guns to markets where they know people will go and murder with them, you could draw a connection. And that is something someone could possibly demonstrate!
Guns are a generic item and they have more purposes than killing people. A machine gun has more purposes than mowing down people. They are generic items used for defense also.
The NUMBER ONE usage of a machine gun, as used by people that are not in law enforcement, daily, a million times a day in the United States is: cash protection. You think those armored car drivers don't think they are USING a machine gun every time they park at a designated stop? The usage is deterrence. That's a highly valuable purpose for a machine gun.
Also, if the ONLY people using tornado cash are "the bad guys stealing money" then it would be easy to find that only one person is using them. But no, a lot of people are using it, therefore there's more than one usage than just "bad guys cleaning money". It might be good guys cleaning money or don't want a known transaction to be known publicly, even if the transaction was clean.
T.C is a generic item like a bag. edit: Also, don't let them fucking take away your rights.