U.S. Government Removes Tornado Cash Sanctions
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
I find this a bit shocking, as I don't think there is a suggestion they actually laundered any of their own money through Tornado Cash. (Although there is some possibility that they profited indirectly from others laundering money this doesn't seem to be the basis of the charges).
I can see an argument that Tornado cash facilitates money laundering but only as a biproduct of otherwise reasonable privacy features.
If the privacy allows North Korea to launder stolen money then I can easily see why western governments would not like Tornado Cash. But are the developers really at fault? I find the precedent this sets really scary. Would the developers of TOR have been treated the same if they weren't researchers working for the US government?
North Korea used the author's algorithm/protocol but the authors weren't personally involved.
The fee aspect is slightly unclear. I think the authors may have benefitted but I think it was indirectly rather than through a fee. I'm not sure exactly how that worked. It might be because they held a lot of Tornado cash and it appreciated in value.
OPs headline feels like cheap rage bait.
But also, Tornado runs on proof of stake platforms, while the Monero network will continue to consume outsized resources via proof of work. While certainly a minority of crypto users, there are nevertheless many who want to avoid proof of work platforms due to the environmental implications.
Monero's hash rate also isn't obscene like that of Bitcoin, so far less computation is needed to mine it.
It is government issued fiat money that has led to banks having a strong bias toward funding funding fossil fuel development for the last century and the current one. If debt-fueled fiat money were to go away, continued environmental destruction by new fossil fuel projects would largely halt.
It's decentralized software that runs on the blockchain itself. If all the devs went to prison, it would keep on running without them.
It doesn't make sense for it to be sanctioned, since you aren't really sanctioning anyone.
Prosecuting the devs is also a stupid idea. The service will stay running regardless and no one benefits.
The sanctions were for the use of that software knowingly not in compliance with the laws about money laundering, even after knowing there was extensive use by North Korea. The developers could have changed the service and chose not to, which is how they ended up being sanctioned.
But the decentralized service is more or less independent of the original Devs and will stay running without their involvement.
The code is open source so I dont think anything technical would prevent some random person deploying the same software again into the blockchain, I'd be surprised if that hasn't already happened.
You raise North Korea as a user, so sanction them. There are other users who just want their finances to be free of government control. Perhaps they are ordinary people living in a dictatorship under capital controls and just want to get their money outside of that system.
That’s really the point here: there are laws, they knew that their software did not follow them and was being used for large scale money laundering, and not being part of an organized crime group they were soft targets. Providing infrastructure for criminals is inherently high risk activity.
The North Korean government, being a state actor, will always find ways to move money around with or without crypto.
Ordinary North Koreans on the other hand could use a service like this to keep their wealth away from the hands of their repressive govt.
Arguably describing an algorithm which facilities money laundering is a freedom of speech issue.