The comparisons brought up in the article (cars, baseball bats, even Ethereum) service legitimate purposes, in addition to their potential for crimes.
What's the legitimate purpose for Tornado Cash?
What's the legitimate purpose for Tornado Cash?
For me "What's the legitimate purpose for Tornado Cash?" sounds like the 1990s "What's the legitimate purpose for encryption?"
There will always exist people who will go out of their way to be privacy conscious, but the vast majority will simply trust in the basic security mechanisms.
The legitimate purposes exist. But unless they're effectively zero effort and zero cost, people won't use them. It'll always be just a few privacy advocates and a whole buncha criminals.
But this sentiment of yours is weaponized by the state to oppose a reality where everybody can enjoy better privacy with zero effort and zero cost, so the ruling class can have more power over the peasants. I don't want to live in a panopticon where an all-powerful state has absolute control over our lives and persists every single of our actions, transactions and thoughts in a database.
Imagine the privacy implication if every time you swiped your credit card, the merchant could see your entire net worth. It'd be a disaster.
These blockchains are public ledgers. If people don't make any attempt to obfuscate their transactions by hiding them among transactions of the same size, anyone who wants to can see their entire balance without much effort.
It's entirely legitimate not to want to broadcast your entire holdings every time you transact.
I mean, you can use it for that purpose, but there are ways to do it in not completely dodgy and KYC-evading ways.
Why should that be the limit? Are you against stronger forms of privacy? Sounds a bit like laws prohibiting the export of encryption software with >40 bits of security.
It does avoid KYC, but so does handing someone cash, and we haven't made that illegal yet.
Using cash doesn't get you out of the KYC requirements. It's not a law about specific tech, but what you use the funds for.
All anyone needs to know about you when you're the buyer in an ordinary transaction is that you have the funds to make the purchase. The rest should be yours to disclose if and only if you want to.
There simply is no fruit which is the product of one's labor, whether it be one person or one enterprise. Any honest analysis must start here.
If I harvest a random apple growing wild, that my labor alone.
But I know where you’re going with that argument - everyone’s work is built upon someone else’s so…the government is entitled to all of it.
Nonsense. It takes a village to raise a child, and the agricultural knowledge to harvest anything stands on the shoulders of approximately all of human history.
No. Man can harvest nature with his own labor and profit from it. Alone, with only his own work.
I know that fact burns a certain side of the political spectrum, but it's the truth.
Who owns the land it grows on? If you own it, how did you buy it?
Who brought apple seeds to the continent where you plucked it?
Who raised you to the point that you were able to pluck that apple?
Who built the roads that you drove on to get close to the apple tree? The car you drove?
Who ensures that the air and water are clean enough for apple trees to grow there?
The problem with any manufactured scenario such as this is that it narrows the focus down to a single act, and tries to claim that that is the entire system.
It never is. The system has no beginning or end, and must be considered far beyond a single act if you are to meaningfully understand what supports it and just how interdependent it is or isn't.
You can't picture a scenario where early man plucks a wild apple? Or that tree naturally replicate themselves?
The fact you ask about how they drove there made me chuckle.
You are, presumably, not an "early man", and whether or not you own a car, you certainly have access to the technology.
While it is definitely an assumption, I'm guessing you are American. If so, then any apples you would be able to pluck would have been brought there by deliberate human seeding at some point in the past.
Also, like with a great many food crops, if an early man were to pluck a truly wild apple, it would be rather different than what we would buy at an orchard today. Human cultivation over many millennia has massively changed most of the plants we eat—whether that be the leaves, the fruits, the seeds, or the roots.
Your notion of a perfect state of pure wildness supporting humans who have never had any support from any other human is nothing but a fantasy.
You really struggle with hypotheticals don't you?
Either that or you're dancing around in order to avoid admitting that someone could produce something purely out of their own labor.
It's clearly a false statement and you could use a number of other example - creating something basic out of wood, growing a wild edible food, using naturally occuring pigments to create art.
In any real situation, the very existence of that human at any age past infancy is the product of society. Even back to the first proto-hominids. So is the knowledge to be able to produce the thing.
In any modern situation, the resources and tools that human has at their disposal are also products of society (yes, even "natural" products like wood—at least in America, there are nearly no old-growth forests left, and literally every natural resource has to either be cultivated or protected in some way, or extracted with nontrivial tools).
Again: you are only able to come to your libertarian-fantasy conclusion by narrowing your focus to the single act, rather than being willing to acknowledge all the supports that make it possible.
In any case, to the extent that you're pointing out that it's another tricky case of how to distribute responsibility for bad stuff, I agree. Other examples range from electricity (clearly has good uses, bad results are mostly by accident), through littering (how much is Coca Cola's fault, how much is the end user's) to guns (only have "bad" uses -- but you probably still want your own country's military to have them).
I don't know of any way to allocate responsibility in these cases that doesn't ultimately amount to pure subjective opinion. Does anyone know of a more objective approach?
the greatest benefit from guns is their deterrent qualities, which are very difficult to quantify. We never hear of the thefts or violence or other horrors that don't happen because potential perpetrators cannot manage the risk that their victims may fight back.
How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence? It seems like it instead paves the road to escalating to violence in less-severe scenarios.
I suspect it is very difficult to qualify because there are no such qualities in practice.
They don't, but they if you're _not_ if you live in a gun-hostile nation. And knowing you might be is a deterrence, for the same reason knowing you might get caught by the police is.
>How is gun ownership supposed to prevent theft or violence?
Well, because of the risk of being killed if you try to commit a crime against someone with a gun. The cause-effect there is pretty clear.
Do you start shooting when the odds are that high that someone might shoot back? Maaaaybe, but not as soon as you might if you were surer that you would get away with it.
I've lived in Maine my entire life—from the most rural parts to Portland—and this is just nonsense. There is absolutely no way that even 10% of people are armed in public.
>Do you start shooting when the odds are that high that someone might shoot back? Maaaaybe, but not as soon as you might if you were surer that you would get away with it.
Perhaps you'd like to consider what JUST happened in Lewiston last October.
There was a combined six minutes between shots fired at the two locations and officer response, four at the youth league event, and only two minutes at the bar.
I didn't say nobody's ever going to try it. Some people are going to break, and show up with a lot of firepower and a plan. All I said was people will try it later than they might if they were sure most of their victim pool wouldn't shoot back.
This is an extraordinary claim that demands at least some evidence in order to be taken seriously.
>A youth league bowling tournament would be an exception, given the preponderance of children.
To the contrary: if you honestly believe that somewhere between 10% and 25-33% of Maine adults are carrying for protection—and, once again, there is literally no way that this is even close to true—it would make even more sense that the adults there would have been carrying To Keep Our Children Safe(TM).
They don't. As with many things in life, they have to estimate that risk. A would-be home invader correctly estimates this particular risk to be higher in jurisdictions where guns are legally permitted -- and especially in areas where keeping a gun in the house is known to be common.
Does that would-be home invader themselves own a gun that they are prepared to use, which would tend to neutralise this risk? Possibly. I don't know how that probability varies with legality of gun ownership, but I would expect that in both cases (gun ownership legal, gun ownership illegal), more home invaders than home owners have access to guns. If that's true, then more home owners with guns fired act as a deterrent.
>It seems like it instead paves the road to escalating to violence in less-severe scenarios.
Yes, it probably also (not "instead") does this. There's no dichotomy here.
At the end of the day, the reasons for and against legalising gun ownership are similar to the reasons for and against arming your military. Doing either one raises the stakes -- the hope (assumption) being that the other party will then find the stakes too high to engage, even if they themselves are similarly armed.
"Would it explode or just punch a hole" depends on the energies of the impact involved. If there is only enough energy to break chemical bonds, it would punch a hole.
As energy of the impact gets higher the hole gets deeper. Probably punching all the way through the ship.
Once the impact energy gets strong enough to break nuclear bonds, the story changes. Now we have an e=mc^2 event at the impact site. It isn't just the impact energy anymore. At minimum, the punched hole just got wider and potentially radioactive as byproducts go on adventures. Once the hole is wider than the ship, I think that counts as "exploded".
And shooting somebody if they have a gun, just in case they shoot first, seems to be considered normal in some circles in the US: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69013312, so carrying a gun seems like a big risk.
It's an example in one of the quoted tweets, which is of course an image and not text despite being purely textual content.
Thinking about it some more, this question is closely related to the concept of negligence.
I’m not sure what you are saying exactly but guns do have legitimate uses that aren’t bad. As soon as you don’t live in high population density, those uses become apparent. I’ve also met people who live on very little means and hunt to provide for their family.
The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page says Ethereum networks are public by default. This gives you more privacy. People may value privacy because they don't want others to know they have money and target them (kidnappers, surprise sixth cousins, etc.).
It's pretty straightforward, a bunch of money was laundered using Tornado Cash, this guy contributed code to Tornado Cash, therefore he should be subject to money laundering penalties. (Translated Dutch, "As a result of the Kidwelly investigation, the suspect is accused of complicity in habitual money laundering.")
[1]: https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2...
"Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals," it said. "The defendant and his co-perpetrators developed the tool in such a manner that it automatically performs the concealment acts that are needed for money laundering."
I still think there is more info we don't have, and/or maybe they are interpreting the design of the app to be explicitly for laundering, which is probably where the intent/conspiracy ruling(s) come from.