Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrem | Hacker News Reader

If you trace back the addresses, you get to this:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6365abaad54863bfd11acb6c4b611...

Which in turn shows it came from Tornado Cash which was put on the OFAC blacklist in August. So redox will likely have a very hard time to get this converted.

See here for more https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-...

View on HN

He doesn't need to get it converted though. There are enough people that don't live in the US and would be happy to get paid in ETH to work on an open source project.

In a way, it seems almost like a feature that he can't just take out and convert the money :)

If the person who received the ETH is a US person, it may not be a great idea to use the tainted money to pay foreigners for services.

By that logic US persons can't use Ethereum at all. If you withdraw ETH from Coinbase it is very likely that those coins will have passed through tornado.cash at some point.

This logic obviously doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

Hey now you're getting it

> There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

The US government routinely spends enormous sums of money to destroy industries where significant amounts of American money is invested.

> By that logic US persons can't use Ethereum at all.

Entirely possible.

> There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

I think you underestimate!!

The reality right now is that there are coloured coins by default. We said this would happen back like at least five years ago, and now it is finally here. This is only the start and is essentially the doom of the libertarian case for the blockchain, and once that is out the window I see very little use for it that a normal DB of cryptographic public keys couldn't handle.

> The reality right now is that there are coloured coins by default.

Not for fungible coins

Yet.

There is still a diversification benefit, if you distrust the national currency, and use cryptocurrency similarly to gold.

That has been my main (only?) use case.

They just have to come to Eastern Europe and trade it for cash OTC. Works very well here.

>So redox will likely have a very hard time to get this converted.

Why would he? People sell tornado cash tainted eth on big US exchanges every day. The sanctions don't forbid this.

Pretty sure that they do.

But in reality they don't.

The sanctions technically only forbid future interactions with Tornado Cash contracts. However the compliance employees would get a note from Chainalysis saying that this guy received a bunch of ETH that was indirectly sourced from Tornado Cash and potentially do something about it (Kucoin Bitfinex et al would probably do nothing).

My understanding of the sanctions is that it's only the contract and a few addresses that are sanctioned. Coins that once went through tornado are fine.

This is why eth/bitcoin are not suitable crypto. There should be no address trail, same as cash.

Wouldn't the ledger dictate that there is a trail?

I’m assuming they mean something like Monero (maybe also ZK-something). I don’t understand how it works, but enough people say they are anonymous, that I believe them ;)

When the IRS is offering $100k bounties to break the anonymous features, it sounds pretty secure. Although if there is enough interest in breaking the obfuscation, these things normally end up finding the hole.

Only time will tell.

If I wanted people to think I hadn't cracked the anonymous features, I would post a $100k bounty to break it.

And when people go to collect on that bounty?

A lot of security companies with have multiple holes in a system. Having more backdoors isn't a bad thing.

I agree. I meant more in the sense that if the vulnerability is fairly obvious, multiple people will claim the bounty and if you try to simultaneously not pay all these people because their find was not unique, and also say that nobody has claimed the bounty, I can't imagine that going well. People tend to get mad when they don't get paid.

I did think this too. I would hope that I am small enough fish that I'm not worth them wasting that backdoor on, as I assume it will be patched once revealed.

At what point do I have to stop being paranoid so that I can get anything done?

Join me friend and welcome to the finer arts of procrastination, where our minds shall tirelessly conjure up vivid departures from reality in order to avoid doing something simple that needs to be done.

if u use it with people that also accepts eth as a form of payment, there is no need to convert anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com