Conviction of Tornado Cash programmer: Privacy is not a crime
patrick-breyer.de
patrick-breyer.de
I can’t fathom what’s wrong with Tornado Cash when I can have the same privacy with real cash. Just because my transaction is on the internet, I shouldn’t be forced to de-anonymize
People launder money through Spotify, why aren't the creators of Spotify being raked across the coals like this?
They don't deliberately run a service explicitly built to enable money laundering.
Basic things you can think about if you try really.
It'd be more akin to if you had say McDonalds and people used your parking lot for Craigslist transactions (some of which were fradualent). Should you be required to close that McDonalds?
But if it really were happening at any kind of volume, it's obvious that Spotify would be quite willing to make their KYC requirements for artists stricter. Any payments they'd made would obviously be made through the banking system, and the law enforcement would be able to trace them to the next hop, which again would have done their KYC due diligence.
The crypto mixer, on the other hand, has no real use case except money laundering. They are also obviously unwilling to do any KYC, and unable to manage their system in a way that would prevent it from being used for money laundering. And it wasn't by accident. It was fully intentional and by design.
Is that true though? What if I am in a country which disapproves of $activity that is legal in most of the world but not in my country. I might simply want anonymity in my Bitcoin transactions.
It's a bit weird how much scrutiny there is over obscuring the transaction history for cyrpto. Like you money launder via houses you get a slap on the wrist first [1] but if you aren't actually directly involved in the transactions you get 5 years. The guy's not running a server; he published a contract that other people's computers are paid (by also other people) to run. Afaik, there wasn't even an allegation that he profited per transaction.
[1]: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/anti-money-laundering-agency-imposes-5...
The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.
Also some things you can discover if you try, really.
I would accept that operating such a system is indefensible.
But it's not as if the creator of Tornado Cash was solely maintaining servers that made this possible. Everyone running an Ethereum node (even if they aren't mining) is running the infrastructure that Tornado Cash runs on.
So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?
> So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?
I mean, you say it yourself. They're the ones who actually executed on the idea. They didn't write a paper on this being theoretically possible. They wrote the code. They deployed the code. They marketed it. They continued operating the system for years, and profited monetarily from it.
That there are other people who are also culpable for other things related to the mixers doesn't remove the culpability of the original creators.
And again: if you implement a system that's doing something illegal, and by design you make it impossible to turn that system off, that's not a defense.
Certainly via a slippery slope argument there is no difference between mathematics and code.
I think we are at a point where we just have such different world views that we are unable to communicate meaningfully about this. Any society that decides to adopt your view is a society that would imprison me for simply operating a node.
Anyway, I enjoyed Linjat.
Should we jail Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman because their work is used to encrypt illegal data? They wrote the paper. They published it. It's impossible to turn that system off, and as you said, that's not a defense.
Non-KYC money transfer systems do not have such a raison d'etre.
They didn't build a service because it's "just" a web client and relayers is an interesting take but sadly, very stupid.
Tornado is flagrantly mixing with known offenders, and even indicated them as such in the UI.
The contracts are permissionless. Any Ethereum account can call the "deposit" function. That same account can generate a zk-proof of the deposit. Any Ethereum account can withdraw, provided they have a proof of deposit.
The proof of deposit could be communicated in any number of ways that have nothing to do with Tornado Cash - mail, email, Signal, whatever.
If the account into which you are receiving a withdrawal doesn't have money to pay for the transaction, you can send your proof to a relayer who submits the transaction for a portion of the withdrawal amount. Because it's a zero-knowledge proof, the relayer does not know which account made the initial deposit.
The whole system is private and permissionless. I don't know what Tornado Cash could do other than simply indicating that a known bad actor made a deposit.
Not exist.
Like, this is the fundamental disjoint between this complaint and reality. "Your system behaves enough like a pattern that is core to how society works" is the filter here, not "have I cleverly designed it to not perfectly fit the pattern". The law isn't applied via robot.
Does that mean the creator of the mathematical concept and the code should be punished?
I understand what you are saying, though. My complaint is really that the authorities are willing to stifle such radical innovation to continue to maintain control. Even that shouldn't be a surprise, but I continue to feel outrage when I see this kind of thing.
Code isn't an idea, code's a thing you make. There are entire classes of thing that are illegal for a citizen of many countries to make or possess or both. While I don't particularly care about this case except in the general "cryptocurrencies appear to exist for grift and need to actually prove their value to society or be stomped" sort of way I view all of it, it isn't legally outlandish.
> My complaint is really that the authorities are willing to stifle such radical innovation to continue to maintain control.
I don't think a system of blind drops but, in fine patent-office-esque fashion, With A Computer are particularly innovative at all, so this is begging the question.
You mean the guy that launched the service? Yeah.
Side remark: diamonds are not hard, see
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
> https://web.archive.org/web/20240510011736/https://www.theat...
The former - I don’t think anyone could convict him. It’s just code in a git repo somewhere. The latter - he is responsible for kyc like all other financial applications.
For an extreme example of the same concept: creating an open-source terrain-following and target-tracking drone software that accepts plugins for “cameras”. People are using it to make hunter-killer weapons and you know about it. You’re going to have a very bad day when federal police come knocking.
Software isn’t created in a vacuum. How you react when the police come will often determine your outcome. If you immediately take it down upon being informed, then you have the defense you didn’t know it was illegal. You’re unlikely to be charged. Fighting for “your rights” is proof you intended to facilitate illegal use of the software and people will be wanting to make an example out of you.
(Note, this is in reference to criminal law, not civil law like copyright.)
The only "infrastructure" in the traditional sense operated by him was a static website hosted somewhere online (which was eventually taken down at the request of law enforcement). The static website offered an optional interface to the Ethereum network for convenience in interacting with the deployed smart contract. The network requests from this website were made to a public Ethereum API provider specified by the end user through their own general-purpose Ethereum wallet browser extension.
If he had not deployed anything and it was just code in his repo I would have said this is a really dangerous ruling. It opens up every open source dev to be on the hook for any use of their software.
On the other hand if this was something deployed then it becomes much more subjective.