Judging by what's happening right now, if I'd live in the US, I'd definitely be concerned right now. I hope I'm not gonna be put on a list of sanctions just because I chose to publish my software as MIT and some criminal happens to use it.
Plenty of people use services like that to move funds from their cold wallet to their hot one, in order to not make visible to the public how much funds they have. Again, as long as you properly file taxes, this should not be a issue.
And yeah, some people do work on privacy-preserving services that can and will be used for bad purposes. Anything involving E2E encryption is usually made for privacy reasons, is this bad enough for you to say the same thing about it? What about things that can be used to skirt copyright like youtube-dl, do they deserve the same treatment?
Isn't that literally what money laundering is?
> As long as you file your taxes correctly, it wouldn't be illegal to use services like Tornado Cash.
IIRC, money laundering businesses pay their taxes too (e.g. the Breaking Bad car wash pretended the drug profits came from washing cars, and paid taxes those "car washing" profits).
If the funds you're shielding via something like Tornado were legitimately earned by you, it's your right to do whatever you want to protect your privacy (as long as you report the proper tax paperwork to the government, otherwise it can turn into tax evasion).
It seems that regulators can change their position at any time. See the recent example PredictIt.