The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity
wsj.com
wsj.com
And since the transaction history is traceable, you cannot posit mysterious other transactions that are unaccounted for. Those would be quickly revealed.
> Wouldn't that, in fact, be evidence of a system that is successfully punishing corruption?
I think that's the OP's point? The system (successfully) invested a lot of effort tot punish the corruption.
(corruption part starts at https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1641927647440830465?s=20)
It does sound like the history of corruption from 2013 means they have to stay alert to this problem.
And it also sounds like the revolving door of government has allowed a lot of the former investigators to get high paying gigs at crypto scam outfits. Not a good look.
Overall, it seems like the government dealt with the corruption adequately, however. It is not reasonable to assume that any institution will be free of bad actors. The question is whether those actors are punished or not.
I have become tired of the overly cynical and hostile rhetoric directed at law enforcement, especially just lazy stuff. But this thread was thorough and fact-based.
I tried to look up the case but couldn't find anything that shed a light on that.
Crime as an event. Crime as a state. ;)
Is it perhaps that by continuing to act on the proceeds from crime, the individual(s) are prolonging or tacking on additional crimes?
This is a very simplistic view and this mistake is made a lot. There are several reasons why the statute of limitations could either be longer than 5 years or not yet expired even though it is 5 years:
- Tolling. This is when the suspect exits your jurisdiction, preventing you from apprehending them. If the statute of limitations really is 5 years, and you leave the country 4 years after the act; even if you stay abroad for a year, or 5 years, or 20 years, the clock only resumes when you return. You can still be charged 24 years after committing the offense.
- Furtherance. Put simply, if you continue to engage in the activity, the statute of limitations is reset. For example, this article describes his repeated moving of the assets after the initial theft in order to avoid detection.
- Special Circumstances. In this case, there are exceptions that mean that the statute of limitations is not actually 5 years.
It's not clear which of these apply. I would definitely bet on option #2. If he spent any time outside of the country, also apply option #1. If any of the special circumstances defined in the law apply, also apply option #3.
If so, that is even more tragic than his inability to get anyone to wet his whistle even with all that cash >..<
It seemed to me that option #1 only applied if you were a fugitive and your whereabouts were unknown, not when you simply leave the state or country.
As to furtherance, I wonder how precise the definition of it is; is using proceeds of a crime, furtherance of a crime? Is obfuscating a crime, furtherance of a crime?
Edit: This answers most of my questions and the answer seems to be "it's complicated" https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL31253.pdf
No statute of limitations shall extend to any person fleeing from justice
Edit: Thanks for the link!
could be this one . maybe someone can do FOIA on the case
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3293
I wonder if the clock resets if he converted it to real money after those five years, I mean selling stolen goods is a separate crime from stealing, isn't it?
I think the best thing he could've done is to move to a country without an extradition policy with the US. Then of course comes the challenge of cashing out BTC that's been marked as stolen, but I'm sure there's ways and means. But for 3.2 billion, someone can live like a king for the rest of their life. It's just that because it's marked, they won't ever be able to go home or go where they want.
It sounds like one of those "will you press the button" catch-22's.
If there was a police report about a crime, if the police were unable to determine who committed the crime but at a later date could do so beyond reasonable doubt?
What if the perpetrator evades police for 5 years but remains in-state?
What’s your location also, that would be relevant to the laws your referring to.
Some district courts have held that the statute of limitations can be tolled while the suspect is actively evading law enforcement even if they remain within their jurisdiction; some haven't.
I'm in England, but I'm talking about United States Federal Law.
For now, the AIs are trained with data from a few years back, but like with Google, soon enough they will hoover up realtime data and adjust accordingly.
For funsies, here's a comment on this article from ChatGPT:
> (prompt)
> Write me a Hacker News comment about the arrest of James Zhong, who stole 50.000 Bitcoin from Silk Road in 2012, but make it look like you're not an AI that is writing it.
>
> (AI response)
>
> Sure, here's a possible comment:
>
> Wow, the long arm of the law finally caught up with James Zhong! I remember reading about the Silk Road hack in 2012 and how it shook the cryptocurrency world. 50,000 BTC was a huge amount back then, and it's worth even more now. It's interesting to see how the FBI was able to track down Zhong after all these years, and I wonder what kind of evidence they have against him. Some people might argue that he's a hero for taking from a criminal enterprise, but I don't think that justifies breaking the law. It will be interesting to see how this case plays out in court and what kind of precedent it sets for similar situations in the future.It will be very much tested this year when Trump is prosecuted under the theory that being in Washington DC counts as "out of the country" or "outside the jurisdiction of the city of New York" and therefore the statute of limitations has not run out.
> So, Mr. Zhong, the statute of limitations for the crime you're charged with in the information is five years. Accordingly, you could argue that the time to prosecute you for this crime has passed, and that the crime is now time barred; you can no longer be prosecuted. Have you discussed this with Mr. Bachner?
> THE DEFENDANT: Yes, your Honor.
> THE COURT: And is it true that you agree to waive any statute of limitations defense you might have with respect to this charge in the information?
> THE DEFENDANT: Yes, your Honor.
For some reason this bug was not as sophisticated as I thought it was:
> THE DEFENDANT: ...In September of 2012, after using the site just once or twice, I decided I no longer wanted to buy anything else from Silk Road and decided to withdraw my bitcoin from the website. While doing so, I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited
His sentencing submission is also interesting: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...
> After Jimmy took the Bitcoin from Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht contacted Jimmy over the Silk Road messaging service and asked him to explain how he accessed the Bitcoin. After Jimmy told him what he did, Ulbricht never asked Jimmy to return the coins. Rather, he thanked Jimmy for his candor and sent him, unsolicited, additional Bitcoin. Silk Road’s response to Jimmy’s conduct is hardly the response of a victim.
> The Government notes that Jimmy waited around four months from the date of the search to turn over control of the Bitcoin to the Government
> Although the Government had seized the physical device needed to control most of the Bitcoin, the Government had no way to use that device to control the Bitcoin without Mr. Zhong’s cooperation. Jimmy gave the Government, with no promise of anything in return, the keys and tools needed to take control of billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin—control that the Government would not have been able to gain without Jimmy’s cooperation
Psychological report: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...
> He recalled converting some of his Bitcoin into $700,000 in cash. He stated he did this so that he would have a “case full of money like in the movies.” He hoped the visual appeal of the cash would impress a female into having sexual relations with him. He stated his plan did not work.
Government was fairer than usual in their sentencing submission, only asked for 24 months. Honestly this whole story just makes me kind of sad. Also makes me wonder why he even agreed to give up the coins.
As a parent of young men, I'm glad it didn't work. IMHO it would have been bad for the character development of both parties.
My guess is that because the other party is not the type of person who would have sex for even a suitcase of cash with them, is why the perp wanted them so much they tried a suitcase of cash.
People don’t even need actual bitcoin, they just leave their phone wallet open on a watch address while they “go to the bathroom” on a date, and let their nosy date take the bait and watch the tune change in real time
Money still overrides other preferences and exacerbates poor character development across genders, it just means his way was so bad…. Carrying around suitcases wow.
Chances are his social dysfunction really stems from something deep he’s refusing to look at and acknowledge; and it’s feeding all these behaviors maladaptively. He probably had one particular person he wanted the validation he saw as coming from sex with, and that’s why the suitcase.
Especially since, quite frankly, if he just wanted to get laid and had cash, it’s not like it would take that much looking to find someone to help him with that and it wouldn’t involve more than a small handful of bills. If he could get his act somewhat together, anyway.
How does this even work?
So can the defendant "knowingly and voluntarily" give up their right to defend via Constitution?
They were worried they'd get a worse sentence at trial, so they plead to get a better deal. They didn't just give up their rights...
Sorry, but there's no reading of it where a plea deal isn't threatening unreasonable punishment if you refuse to forfeit your rights.
Let's step back, and see if you still think this is "give up your right! Or else!"
The prosecutors are 50/50 on getting a conviction. If they win, they're sure they're going to see the defendant go to prison for, say, 10 years. If they lose, the defendant walks, and thanks to the fifth amendment (almost everywhere in the World has double jeopardy protection), unless substantial new evidence emerges, they'll never get to prosecute this individual again. They're pretty sure they have everything they'll ever find, so this is it.
The defendant and his legal team are 50/50 on getting an acquittal. If they win, it's over. If they don't, it's 10 years in prison which is pretty awful.
The trial is going to be expensive for both sides. The prosecution will work to get the odds in their favour, the defendant's legal team will be trying to figure out how to get it in their favour, and so on.
This process is expensive, and eventually the taxpayer is going to pay. Even if the proceeds from the crime have been recovered and sold, the money going into public funds is going to come right back out again to prosecute, and if the defendant has nothing and can't afford their own legal bills, the taxpayer is paying both sides.
Everybody - and I mean everybody - knows the defendant did what he did.
There are interviews that are barely credible, paper trails of assets moving, lots of evidence of obfuscation and trying to cover tracks, but there's confusion in the story about intent to commit a crime.
The judge might decide to throw it out on statute of limitations, a jury might look at the psych reports and think the kid seems nice and naive and not the criminal type, so let's believe his story.
It's a bit of a mess.
Neither side really fancies were this going because there is concern you're setting off a train of case law, too - as a prosecutor do you really want to test statute of limitations if the person wasn't "fleeing from justice", but just enjoying some money he came into? That defence lawyer really looks like he fancies his day in the Supreme Court...
Meanwhile, the clock - and publicly funded meter - is ticking.
Prosecutor approaches defence. "Plead guilty, we wrap this up, your guy gets 5 years instead of 10. Parole eligible at 3 years".
Defence retorts "2 years, suspended".
Prosecutor comes back "2 years, no suspension, no parole, but time served taken into account".
"Deal". The judge gets a call. He decides to make sure there is no risk of an appeal to make clear to the defendant in court that there are questions about statute of limitations that he would need to waive. Defendant agrees to waive his rights. They move to sentencing, the prosecutor asks for 24 months, the World moves on.
Everyone wins, even though the defendant goes to prison for a while. He's got 20% of the likely maximum penalty on an even money shot, which any gambler will tell you is superb "value".
The prosecutor has lost out in terms of seeing time served, but has got a conviction and saved the taxpayer many, many dollars.
The defendant didn't lose their rights. They looked at a 50/50 shot and decided they'd prefer 2 years guaranteed and get on with their life rather than take a 50% chance of 10 years.
It’s 83/17 where 83% is the “feds win.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
Until you realize these are peoples actual lives… then it’s also sad.
Well, relatively free, his face and name are known and if he is exonerated, everyone will know he's a multi-billionaire and the life of himself and others are in danger.
Hilarious.
I wonder how the feds bypassed the statute of limitations on this. He was not identified until almost a decade after the theft. I am guessing his attempts at laundering the money and spending, reset the clock.
but it not clear, see this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548508
that's where case law comes in, probably there's some test for it made up by a few judges (like was there an active warrant, or named as person of interest in an active case, etc..)
Bitcoin is not a cipher it's the whole system so it is valid to say a weakness in bitcoin was used to find the person.
How are you supposed to turn fraudulently obtained btc into dollars without doing that?
We're talking about 1e9 orders of magnitude, here. I'll take that fraction.
> running into a sting
This was the basis of Operation Dark Gold. They had a ton of other evidence against the people they rounded up, I think it just helped them find targets. Receiving cash in the mail is not illegal.
That’s the neat thing… You don’t.
For example, if you were some random cryptobro buying personal quantities of drugs in 2015 there’s some risk but the FBI probably isn’t going to spend time on something that small. If you do anything which reveals funds going to or from a tumbler, however, the risk isn’t just KYC but also questions like who else used that tumbler - if you were participating at the same time the North Koreans or a big ransomware ring were laundering something, that traffic might be a lot more likely to get analyzed and in the worst case scenario some agents show up trying to get you to convince them that you were unwitting small fry and not hiding more. Lying to them is a federal crime, too, so even if you nothing other than tumble coins for ideological reasons you’d want to be very careful about what you say – and think about how hard it could be to prove you didn’t know the other parties in a transaction.
You're referring to the risk of getting chased down for the "bad deeds" of others after funds are co-mingled. You're not explaining that it's prohibitively risky or not possible.
Further, I'm only aware of tumbling blacklisting [0], where the exchange gets blacklisted for co-mingling known dirty funds. AFAIK, there are still sizable tumbling vectors.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/08/crypto-mixing-service-tornad...
They have to prove you committed a crime, all you need to do is have a lawyer present during questioning.
That's a good idea, but any decent lawyer will tell you to keep your mouth shut. Especially when being questioned. Let the lawyer do the talking[0].
[0] That assumes you have a good lawyer. Which may or may not be a valid assumption.
This is true. However, I'd present a few caveats:
1. Even though it's a felony to lie to Federal (and some state/local) law enforcement in the US, you can just not speak to them. In fact, you should mostly not talk to the police under any circumstances. There are many reasons for this. Too many for me to list here. However, this attorney and a former police officer[0] (48 minute video, but well worth it. Share it with your friends and family too!) provide all those reasons.
2. Law enforcement aren't superhuman. They're just as dumb (or smart, but the really smart ones end up in corner offices rather than police stations like police and more common criminals) as the next guy. Their big advantage, especially in a circumstance like this, is that they only have to get it right (i.e., find some evidence) once. The alleged perpetrator of a crime needs to get it right (in covering their tracks, destroying evidence, etc.) every single time to make sure they aren't identified and caught.
So, unless you're prepared to cover your tracks (in this case, it was bitcoin transactions) over and over forever, you run the risk of being caught -- eventually.
I'll say it again, because it's an important point: If you're in the US (not just a citizen, anyone present within its borders), DON'T TALK TO THE POLICE!
I'm sure things are different elsewhere (perhaps someone could expound on that?), but in the US, just STFU.
This is really the main thing I was thinking about: it’s been bizarre how the salespeople kept going on about bitcoin being anonymous when it’s more like “if you do everything perfectly, you probably won’t be tracked. As far as we know now.”, which is just incredibly fragile.
Not at once
He was doing it over 6 years no problem
You don’t need a billion, you need a few million and he got that and it wasn’t even part of the investigation or why he got caught
Nothing about this article suggests any breakthrough in investigative capabilities, it’s pretty embarrassing actually
The government got lucky that someone was trying to get rid of something they found to be a burden in their lives
I don’t think they did; if the BCH transaction was in 2017 was the subject of fraud, it was within the statute of limitations when he was publicly charged.
> I am guessing his attempts at laundering the money and spending, reset the clock.
They didn’t “reset the clock” on the fraud involved in obtaining the bitcoin initially, but they were likely generally, on their own, fraudulent transactions.
Apparently he didn't voluntarily give away he's secrets, they were found around his place.
I'm curious though, if Zhang had not plead guilty and the government had not succeeded in getting a wire fraud conviction for Zhang, would their argument that the assets are forfeitable under Ulbricht's conviction have failed also? In other words, was it necessary to convict Zhang to finish seizing Ulbricht's assets, or could they have won a case for seizure without a conviction for Zhang?
How? Do they rip everything apart?
I mean this is a clear case of deflation rewarding corruption. If the money goes up in value, steal it from someone to get it as early as possible.
"Bitcoin is not, and never was, anonymous."
The WSJ on the other hand…
Does any of this stuff actually help bypass KYC requirements for legal offramps in developed countries?
[1]Sorry for the very colloquial term, I don't know a better one. I mean people who care about cryptocurrencies only as a speculative "investment".
/edit 2: I should also clarify that I never cashed out my casino's BTC in this manner. That obviously wouldn't make sense because anything that touched a casino wallet would be traceable to that nexus. I only used it to bring extra spending cash and rent money to countries where it was hard or expensive to transfer USD through banks.
Never has anything even remotely untoward happen.
Just sit, have a beer, wait for confirmations to happen, and be on your way.
FWIW, we Jews (speaking for my family) mostly think the Rothschilds were pretty smart for working out the same type of system by placing a brother in each European capital and banking to kings, keeping a ledger instead of moving physical gold whenever possible. It seems obvious now, but it was "moving fast and breaking things" in the 18th Century.
You trade in cash, in person, probably in a public place. Say that Alice then gets in trouble for the drug dealing they also do (or maybe the government just pings her for not doing KYC and being licensed to do financial transactions), it could be years later. The authorities seize Alice's computers and subpoena "localbitcoins", or the whatsapp/telegram/signal chat that you had to organise the meetup. They might even have a list of addresses that Alice used for transactions at this point. Alice may or may not have had good OpSec, Bob doesn't know.
From that there a myrriad options to identify Bob and Bob's addresses.
In your example you don't use an exchange, but that's not the only method of identifying Bob. Mass survelliance and metadata gathering noticed 100 phones within the location and timeframe Bob and Alice were supposed to meet. Bob had to take a phone to do the actual transfer of bitcoin (or any altcoin), so just leaving it at home wouldn't work. They also know the amount Alice transferred to Bob and the rough timeframe that it was completed and put into the ledger. Bob was also seen drawing out roughly the right amount from the ATM an hour before the meeting. Of the 100 phones, most haven't drawn out that much money recently.
So they can correlate a set of phones with a set of addresses. Even if Bob is not completely unmasked at this point. He has the money in but has to get the money out as well. Bob wanted as you say, to move money across the border. In order to do that Bob must cross the border[0] and meet with Charlie to do the reverse of the transfer. Only a handful of those 100 phones crossed borders shortly after meeting with Alice.
As soon as the money in that address moves again the cross reference with the locations of the tagged phones and discover that they know Charlie because he's done a KYC with an exchange and installed their app (even if he doesn't use that address for the transaction). They ask Charlie some pointed questions about whether he is following KYC procedures in his financial dealing and he caves and gives up the chat logs confirming your meeting, or maybe they just install NSO spyware on his phone and watch to find all the other people Charlie is dealing with.
So...
In a perfectly isolated one off instance maybe that's pseudonymous. In any real world transaction it's extremely unlikely that a state can't use it's resources to unmask the participants. In a one shot, the rules might be one way, but in multi-shot there are always factors that will serve to unmask the participants, and in reality you have to do those transactions over and over until you slip up and just combine them with a KYC exchange account and it doesn't even require that level of effort on the part of the state. OpSec is hard, as they say.
[0]: there is an alternative where only the bitcoin transaction crosses the border in return for something of value, either physical or digital, both have alternative paths that can be tracked in similar ways.
Get Bitcoin from crime
Wash into monero?
Pray the tumbler is legit?
Wash back into Bitcoin
Now what? Bitcoins from tumblers are suspect everywhere with kyc requirements.
Sell off books to a Russian oligarch or North Korea I guess?
Those are probably run by the FBI. It seems like a no brained for the government to try to run such services given the wealth of information they would provide.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/la-is-investigating...
I think pocketing any unlockable crypto-wallets you found along the way would cross the line. You could stick them into civil forfeiture and use the resulting cash to upgrade your department-owned car though.
Breonna Taylor (2020) - Louisville, Kentucky: Police officers entered the wrong apartment using a no-knock warrant, which led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician.
Eurie Stamps Sr. (2011) - Framingham, Massachusetts: Police raided the wrong apartment, and during the operation, an officer's gun "accidentally discharged," killing Eurie Stamps Sr., a 68-year-old grandfather.
As many have mentioned above, civil forfeiture cases for carrying cash are rare, but devastating to people who are originally from countries/cultures that don't trust banks or police.
And of course "swatting" such as https://www.courthousenews.com/texas-woman-sentenced-for-swa...
I suspect anyone that was an early adopter of crypto is somewhat considered crime adjacent because so much of the early usage was silk road.
For a while after MtGox was hacked I used BTC-e (yes, I lost money in MtGox). It was later discovered(alleged?) that the operators of BTC-e were involved in laundering money for the MtGox hack[0]. I guess my very presence in that case would be considered crime adjacent.
Then you end up like the guy asking for advice on how to sue his banks for freezing the accounts that he'd been using to run his Monero to UKP gateway.
Cash out after selling your subjective value art.
As always, you can definitely get away with this for smaller amounts, but if you go big and/or repeat it for a long time, this has all the potential to come back to you.
This story from about a year ago also showed how that worked with investigators tracing it link by link:
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
Maybe you own a car. In 10 years time a green authoritarian communist group starts to suspect anybody who owned a car, you are sent to a re-education facility.
Maybe you are environmentally conscious and bought solar panels. In ten years time an anti environmental fascist group comes to power. You are disappeared.
You make some negative comments about AI at a dinner party. The host has an Alexa home automation system. In ten years time when government is run by AI. You are assigned to sewer cleaning duty, a tragic accident happens.
Summarizing: It's not a really strong argument.
However, if you are doing things that can get you arrested today; That's another story, then you should be paranoid and not use bitcoin. Maybe Monero instead? Although, that's not watertight either.
Honestly, I feel uneasy when I know there is any active microphone recording.
Surely they are atleast building some user profile from keywords.
As computations get cheaper, commercial mass surveillance will get really bad.
There's no real alternative. You rely on the secrets technology we currently have, knowing it might not be future-proof for your entire lifetime, or you don't use secrets technology at all (and I guess live in fear of all possible futures?)
The value of breaking my communication now compared with in 10 years time is far higher too. My bank will have destroyed the records of my dealings in a decades time for example.
Bitcoin’s ledger is specifically designed to be kept forever though. You don’t need to target me today in the how if future payoff
Crypto projects like Monero (XMR) do not have this flaw, as deducing the identities of parties from the public ledger is computationally prohibitive.
This article is not the investigative epiphany that it thinks it is
Monero is better.
waits ten minutes
waits ten minutes
waits ten minutes
waits ten minutes
waits ten minutes
waits ten minutes
secure.
Mixers on Bitcoin are usually centralized and operated by a person, so they get (and have been) cracked way more easily
It also amounts to a general criminalization of financial privacy.
So hopefully the legal challenge succeeds.
That last part is potentially defensible – bankers aren't charged just because a criminal stores money in a checking account – except that each KYC law not followed is not only its own offense but also a chance for prosecutors to argue that the decision not to do so was intentional and the operators knew their service was predominantly used by criminals. That's going to be an interesting case with potentially significant implications for the entire field.
To generalize, every user of a privacy protocol increases the protocol's anonymity set, and thus its utility to all users.
In other words, Tornado Cash shares this property with every other privacy protocol.
2. The guy who wrote the Tornado Cash code operated no aspect of the Tornado Cash smart contract. That operates entirely autonomously. It's code, deployed to a massively distributed blockchain, that any one can use to encrypt their transaction.
Your belief expressed in #2 is at odds with the charges specifically saying he profited from money laundering activity. We’ll see when that goes to court exactly what that meant and whether there’s evidence suggesting that he knew where those fees were coming from.
In any case, what is being criticized in this particular thread is OFAC prohibiting all Americans from using Tornado Cash code. This is unprecedented, and clearly outside OFAC's statutory powers to sanction "entities".
Despite the US Treasury's claims, Tornado Cash is not in any way an entity, as it is not controlled by any party. It is simply code, running autonomously on a massively distributed blockchain. When someone uses it, they are using zero knowledge proofs to encrypt their transactions. The fact that this act of encryption adds their activity to the same anonymity pool as criminal activity is no more an argument for banning this encryption protocol as it is for banning any other encryption protocol.
However, actually running the code to facilitate North Korean hackers launder money and personally profiting off of it? That's not covered by the first amendment, and I sincerely urge you to not try to find that out in the hard way.
Who is "running" the code?
The US government, to this date, has not made an argument that the developers of Tornado Cash, who have deployed the code to the Network, have committed a crime; at least one of them seems to be living in the US.
Nor has the government made an argument that operators of Ethereum nodes are committing a crime; they might also be considered to be running the code.
What the government has done is, through sanctions, instituted restrictions on Americans interacting financially with the smart contract. This has nothing to do with "running code"; this is operating under the assumption that the Tornado Cash smart contracts are an entity that is party to financial transactions.
Whether they have the power to sanctions non-entities like a smart contract is what the suit intends to find out.
[0] https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/12/14/70-of-the-ethereum-net...
It does not; these sanctions only apply to US Persons. Secondary sanctions mean that the Treasury can additional designate non US-Persons for breaches of the primary sanctions, but that is a heavy-handed tool and unlikely to happen to people who merely use Tornado Cash; regardless, no law was broken by such a person.
Lebanese man extradited from Morocco for violating sanctions on himself (!): see ruling justifying this on https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-tajideen-1
It is trivial for the government to say that you directly or indirectly used some service operated by American company and therefore you are subject to American jurisdiction. Yes it’s unlikely to happen to any small time Tornado Cash user.
The WHOLE PREMISE of it was that it is an OPEN LEDGER...!
I'm not sure how this persistent myth of it being a way to secretly make payments got around and stuck so well... maybe the "crypto" in the name?
That in itself does not equate to lack of anonymity. Just have a look at Zcash[0] or Monero[1].
In general, the idea that openness and anonymity are in conflict with each other has not been true for at least 40 years. There's entire field of mathematics dedicated to solving this problem known as secure multi-party computation.
My point is: dunk on Bitcoin all you want. Just don't drag the general idea of permissionless, open ledgers into this mud fight.
Bitcoin is an open ledger. It was never designed for hiding transactions. I'm also not saying thats a bad thing. it just is what it is, and yes I hold some btc (albeit not much, just enough to experience it mostly)
The blockchain is anonymous enough, it's just that all transactions are public (forever) and conversion to real money requires identity.
Anonymity is solved with a L2 protocol like Lightning, or an anonymous currency like Monero, although it has shortcomings that Bitcoin doesn't have.
can't wait for a similar case but with xmr "cracked" using quantum computers.
1- https://www.adweek.com/media/the-wall-street-journal-grew-di...
As long as these websites keep pushing the content to the client (for SEO of course), it’s fine for us to take it. If they truly want to be paywalled, DRM that text and stop reaping the benefits of Google search.
I asked my gf's dad, a lawyer, if I could spend it. He said no: it's like someone parking their car on your driveway. It's annoying, sure. But it doesn't make it your car.
A friend of mine is addressing a similar situation right now. After her mother passed away (nearly 20 years ago) and left no will, her primary bank account was still active and the Social Security Administration[0] kept sending her checks every month.
She was notified a few weeks ago of the existence of this account (which now has several hundred thousand dollars in it). Since Social Security benefits (except in specific circumstances[1]) are not collectible by surviving relatives, the moneys paid into that account since her mother's death are not hers (she and her siblings are the only surviving next-of-kin). Rather those funds are the property of the US Government.
In such a circumstance, the funds deposited, as well as any interest on those funds belong to the government.
Transferring those funds or spending any of the interest is a crime.
As such, if you find yourself in a similar situation, I'd think twice before doing something like that.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/16/heres-what-happens-to-social...
It… is.
The difference is that the bank (1) is often in a better position to automatically recover funds from you when they discover an error than vice-versa, (2) has better resources for collection via civil process if they aren’t in a position to automatically recover funds, and (3) has better connections with law enforcement to use if there is any indication of a criminal exploit.