Privacy, Code, and the Future
Roman Storm, one of the developers of Tornado Cash, a smart contract on Ethereum designed to enable transactional privacy, has been found guilty of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business [1].
Tornado Cash is simply code. It runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, autonomously.
Yet, in 2022, the U.S. government designated it as a sanctioned entity, making it illegal for U.S. persons to interact with it in any capacity, including simply receiving coins therefrom [2].
This case, and its verdict, makes writing open source code that enables privacy a crime.
It makes receiving a transaction from autonomous code a crime.
Technology is becoming more powerful, more decentralized, and more foundational to society. With that power comes tension between openness and control, privacy and compliance, innovation and regulation.
It’s very easy to overlook these moments, since they feel distant or abstract.
But make no mistake, they set precedents.
They shape culture.
They influence what we, the cypherpunks building at the edge, believe is possible or, rather, permissible.
“We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.” — Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993
Today is a setback for cryptography, for open source and for digital rights int he so-called land of the free [3]. We’ve taken one step back.
It’s time to take two steps forward.
The Crypto Wars never ended. They simply waited until the cypherpunks were all but gone.
But you are still here.
Now is the time to rise.
- Andrew
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/tornado-cash-roman-storm-found-guilty-partial-verdict
[2] https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20220808
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner