I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.
If it wasn't so sad it would be funny that the countries with highest levels of freedom and least corruption tend to be the ones with most vocal privacy absolutists...
Correlation or causation?
My point is that the most powerful countries don't need to clean their dirty money to spend their money abroad, because they are the center of the world economy, and everything is available to them to buy. Russia is economically on the periphery and thus does need to clean it.
If 99% of Tor's volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM, etc, should it be demonized as well?
You can apply basically the same argument to money. If I have $20m in Bitcoin I don’t want my name to be tied to my wallet address (because a KYC exchange saw where the money went to) because it makes me a target, for example. And in the case of censorship or something I want to be able to do with the money what I please.
Privacy is a fundamental human right, in my opinion. We have to use cumbersome technology to get any modicum of true digital privacy. Just because people use it for illegal things doesn’t mean that the desire for privacy or the technology itself is bad. One day things we find morally just may be illegal too
Intentional consealment of illegal financial transactions is a crime in-and-of itself (the crime is money laundering, which is a seperate offence to the original criminal activity that the money came from).
Easy answer: Yes! Although I think it would be hard to call it demonizing when something is already 99% demons.
All I'm saying is that if there's something where "99% of [...] volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM" that that is obviously terrible for the world and we should be asking some strong questions about who's supporting it and why. Is somebody gaining something that's more important than the lives forever ruined?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/10/crypto-criminals-laundered-5...
Is $540M considered a tangible amount? I'll let you quibble over that but I'd think most criminals would be more than happy to be able to launder $540M.
If you made it this far, then you start the laundering process.
You can't launder money with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is not well integrated with any country financial devices in any meaningful manner.
Scenario two. I want to have on-chain identity (e.g. exo762.eth domain name). To register it I need to have some ETH (gas, registration fee). If I sent this ETH directly from my "money" account, I will forever link my public identity to my money, which is like walking around with "my net worth is at least XYZ USD" banner.
We're in a thread about a rogue state using the tech to steal money to fund their operations (Chemical attacks in airports, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, etc.) How many nuclear detonations would you consider acceptable in exchange for the cryptobros to have their toys?
We've come a long way from Mario Bros!
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169
More prosaic wire fraud is common in real estate and B2B transactions, and if not noticed immediately the funds are often lost after being transferred internationally and cashed out. It wouldn't be surprising if NK is behind some of that, given what they managed against Bangladesh.
I would also suspect that using data collected by governments is used for business advantage. Of course it is hard to prove quite often. Personally I think that in principle it just doesn't make sense to spread your data around, as the benefits are tiny and the potential downsides can be big.
Basically if you were high profile enough, people would watch your wallets to see what you were investing in/transacting with, and use that as market intelligence.
As far back as 2016 or so I recall someone specifically offering their blockchain analysis platform as a way to do this.
So you would use tornado to make the money you planned to invest/use appear "somewhere else" disconnected, to maintain privacy/security of a project.
Tornado and mixers and such become necessary specifically because all transactions are public - unlike in tradfi where transactions are opaque except to parties and intermediaries.
Similarly to how investors in tradfi tend to keep their investment strategies secret where possible.
For example, library records generally have a fair amount of privacy. Criminals sometimes consult libraries. Crime is not the dominant use of libraries.
Mixers have a fair amount of privacy. Mixers are used by criminal, and crime is overwhelmingly the dominant use of mixers.
To rebut this you’d need to show large and innocent use cases which use mixers. Not an unrelated app.
Yes.
It’s definitely usable for non nefarious activities.
Should I be demonized for having one in my house?
Probably