sneed-oil

Developers can write a smart contract without running it on their hardware, the people running it are miners.

> If they filter transactions, ETH will become worthless

I'm not sure about that. Some hodlers of ETH might be fine with governments being able to censor transactions. In that case what will determine the price of ETH is also how much of it these people own.

People in Lebanon are not being allowed to withdraw their money from banks, something similar happened in Greece a few years ago. With crypto if you have your own keys that's not an issue.

I don't see how the North Korea thing is an issue. I'm not sure what hacks you're referring to but when it comes to smart contracts code is law and the people who use them know that, if you can't get back the tokens you sent to a smart contract it's only your fault for not understanding how the software works. I don't think North Korea should exist in the first place but I don't think the act of getting money from a smart contract is immoral.

As for using works of art to launder money, I meant something like rich person A offers child prostitutes (or any other illegal service or item) to rich person B, who pays A by buying one of their paintings for a higher price than what A paid for it.

Telling exchanges to remove it and making it illegal for merchants to accept it as payment

> Transactions and storage of money are already decentralized, through the traditional finance system

That's not the case for every country on the planet

> Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.

And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?

Depending on the drug and the country it might not even be a crime

Transactions and storage of money. You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.

Both cash and crypto have their downsides when it comes to money laundering. A non-tech savy person might not trust their crypto transactions to remain anonymous or their funds to be safe, because at the end of the day the only way you can be sure of that is if you read and understood the code. For that kind of person the weight of cash is the lesser issue. I've been told that decades ago my dad's uncle would go on trips to Switzerland with bags full of cash.

What's wrong with buying and selling drugs?

Is AAVE explicitly designed to facilitate money laundering?

He never said he was sanctioned

Can be sanctioned just like Tornado Cash

Did the AAVE developers say that?

Do you also believe artists should be punished if their works of art are used to launder money?

It looks like it is

> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.

The author of the article did avoid being (sort of) subject to government sanctions

It seems like they do though if you read the whole article

Did you read the article? His transactions went through in the end, just not through the website

The website blocked his transaction but he was still able to make them go through by using direct calls

It looks like they can be

> Interestingly, in the end I was able to withdraw all my funds from AAVE through direct contract calls as illustrated above. So basically the web UI is blocked but people can still use AAVE by sending transactions to the blockchains directly.

The only thing that was censoring his transactions was the website, which is centralized by design.

> If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD)

A 200 euro banknote's dimensions are about 153x77x0.113 mm, if we consider double that thickness (because unless they're brand new, banknotes tend to crumple) we get that 2,253,400 euros will have a volume of 30 liters, which should fit in a backpack. If you wanted to use the more common 50 euro banknote you could fit 615,650 € in 30 liters.

How can you possibly know that?

> If you're exchanging cash, you still theoretically have the legal obligation to declare it. Businesses accepting cash have the obligation of issuing a receipt, and you may have some obligations of keeping that receipt.

I'm pretty sure that's legally required even when buying with crypto

Teenagers are not the only ones who might want to buy drugs online

> you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides

Maybe you don't, but that's what happens by default when using cash

If they don't know a dealer for the drugs they want they might decide to buy them online with cryptocurrency, and that's where a service like Tornado Cash is useful. Cash can be laundered too.

Yes, for example a teenager with religious parents might not want them to know that they're buying contraceptives, or a buyer of illegal drugs might not want the government to know it. As long as there are anonymous payment methods such as cash, money laundering remains a possibility. Besides, getting ETH from Tornado Cash is not comparable to money laundering because whoever will be paid with those funds will have a strong suspicion that they were stolen or came from some other type of illicit activity.

It's not comparable to money laundering. When you launder money by registering sales that did not happen you'll get taxed and you can then spend that money wherever you'd like. If you try to use funds coming from Tornado Cash most people won't accept them because they'll assume they were stolen or they come from some type of illicit activity.

Its use is offering a level of privacy that is at least as good as the one a credit card offers. On the Ethereum blockchain anybody you transact with can see your transaction history.