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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

The quote from prosecutors in the article is actually really good: it is about human behavior, not the tools.

Abstracting the question to whether tumblers or cash or guns or whatever should be 100% legal or 100% illegal is too reductive to be useful for anything but rhetoric.

It’s when people take actions with intent and outcomes that the law gets interested. Those are what we should talk about.

Cash has lots of legitimate uses and some uses which I’m fine saying are illegal. Ditto with guns, even speech.

In this case the summaries at least sound like there was tons of evidence he was specifically designing and building features to make the service better for criminals, with the intent and outcome of facilitating criminal activity. Behaviors, as the prosecutor said.

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Was he making the software better for criminals because he wanted to help (and presumably benefit from) criminals, or was he just making the software more private for anyone, and that happened to help criminals too?

I don't know the answer, but I imagine looking at the benefits of his actions would help inform. Did he have ties to criminal organizations, or receive payments from them?

> While Pertsev added functionality to the web interface that allowed legitimate users to separate their funds from those arriving from known criminal addresses, they characterized the effort as “too little and too late.”

When you add a "don't mix my stuff with the known criminal accounts" toggle in the UI, it's hard to argue ignorance.

I don't think you understand what it means.

The on chain contract like that can't possibly know which funds are "illicit" or "marked as suspicious". Only users entering the contract can possibly have some logic on the client side to bail out if they notice the would be joining funds with some best effort list of "illicit" addresses, and there's really nothing forcing them to use it.

I bet generally here both the public and judges do not understand the technical details.

A contract can reference a list of addresses that have been marked as suspicious as long as someone stores that list on chain. It doesn't need to be client side.

I'm not so sure. An idealist might build something to be totally agnostic, and only after adoption from criminals might then realize they need to do something about that, hence adding in a filter. Then that effort is seen as evidence against them?

Lots of open source software activists are idealists. This is why I asked if there's evidence they were actually receiving illicit funds.

If he was not receiving funds, why even host it for these users? Make it easy for people to self host it on their AWS, PaaS, etc. and then you’re not directly involved in the use of that software. If software was really the issue, how could Kali Linux exist?

In order for it to work, you need as many people tumbling the same exact amount of crypto. If it’s self hosted, it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out that if two or three transactions went in, you only need to track the two or three transactions that come out.

> An idealist might build something to be totally agnostic, and only after adoption from criminals might then realize they need to do something about that, hence adding in a filter. Then that effort is seen as evidence against them

So, if he had an epiphany that criminals were using the system and the feature requests he was getting an naively implementing were benefiting criminals, why not block those accounts rather than implementing a "keep my stuff separate from the criminals the system knows about" switch?

The whole point of a trial is to establish guilt, and part of guilt is mens rea. Well, at least I assume that's true in the Netherlands, please correct if I'm wrong.

An idealist who just happens to believe that firing guns into the air is the most noble expression of freedom is still going to be liable for bad outcomes. You can argue murder versus negligence, but there is no "maybe he just wanted to see a bunch of lead in the air" argument for actual innocence.

He was making the software better for criminals because he wanted to benefit from criminals. I can’t read Dutch, so I don’t know exactly what evidence was presented with regards to this guy, but the US DOJ has pretty damning evidence that Tornado devs knowingly allowed their service to launder the proceeds of the Axie Infinity hack. (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/file/1311391/dl?inline)

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