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Comment by mathieubordere | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain this in English please?

You can send a ton of really small transactions (colloquially referred to as "crypto dust") for an insignificant amount of money to innocent wallets from a single tainted wallet. The "tainted wallet" in this case would be one tied to Tornado Cash. The Treasury, having sanctioned TornadoCash, now considers the targeted wallet as having done business with a sanctioned entity.

Does it make any legal difference that 0.1 ETH is actually $150 instead of an insignificant amount of money?

This is currently uncharted territory. Currently, you can get banned by exchanges if your account has any interaction with mixers like tornado. There's no precedent in regards to how the government views accounts tainted by attacks like this.

>if your account

What is "your account"? There's no "first-last name, date of birth, ID number" attached to an ethereum account unless an account is on a centralized exchange.

Generating a new account is a matter of 2 seconds.

Ethereum wallets work like a bank account that anyone can deposit funds into. This dusting attack would be as if, say, Iran or North Korea decided to start depositing a few dollars into every American's checking accounts to try and implicate the entire country's citizenry in financial crime.

Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.

> Bitcoin has one defense against this attack: coin control. The way Bitcoin works is as if every time you wrote a check, you had to also include a list of all the other checks that the money comes from. So you can technically avoid implicating yourself in financial crime by not writing "payable by Iran/NK super hackerz" on your checks.

Isn't this terrible for freedom? When I pay with fiat, I don't have to include a list of where that fiat came from.

The entire ledger is public anyway, everyone can already see the transactions that went into your wallet.

Can you imagine having some savings in crypto and getting unknowingly dusted by this attack, only to find your Coinbase account and your bank account suddenly frozen a few weeks later and not having any idea why or what to do about it?

> Can you imagine having some savings in crypto

Nope

Hardy har har

That's not super different from having money in Voyager before they halt all trading.

Losing you whole account is just business as usual in crypto.

From what I can understand, and I'm probably off-base a little:

Government: "We are sanctioning these known criminal wallets."

Tornado Cash: "Anyone receiving deposits from these criminal wallets will be blacklisted."

Criminals: deposit a small amount of crypto into every wallet they can find associated with Tornado Cash, blacklisting all of them

> deposit a small amount of crypto into every wallet they can find associated with Tornado Cash, blacklisting all of them

They're likely just sending small amounts to just about anybody. Not only addresses associated with Tornado.

Regulators: Please forward all unexpected deposits from (addresses) here: @address

If not done past date <whenever>, add account to OFAC.

Not an issue.

Hmm, that sounds like fun scam for someone to actually run.

Now what to do with those funds after you receive them is an other issue.

And this is why every government outreach tends to require having an Agent attached.

Nevermind that people are more than willing to impersonate Federal Agents.

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