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Comment by JohnHaugeland | Hacker News Reader

This isn't open source privacy code. Whether or not someone else does something bad with it isn't relevant.

Until you can face what it really is, you aren't going to come to terms with what's happening.

This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations, then complaining "but I'm not the burglar, I didn't kill anyone" when you get shut down.

This is and always has been the obvious explicit purpose of this code. This has nothing to do with "privacy" and you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides.

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What do you think the purpose of this code is?

There are people operating on blockchains in which transaction parameters are a matter of public record who: 1. May not want individual amounts and recipients to be publicly inspectable. 2. And are not criminals.

It may not be a right, but Tornado Cash is absolutely a tool to increase privacy. It is not solely for criminals to liquidate blockchain assets.

Even if there is people who want that, that doesn't justify it. Privacy has limits, and there is some really bad people using crypto to transfer assets. Banks are required to report suspicious transactions, so working around banking laws by using crypto is clearly breaking the spirit of those regulations. If an individual wants privacy, there is a more standing if they do it themselves, but when a third party gets involved, they must follow the same laws all businesses must follow. You can't code yourself out of legal responsibility.

Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.

And taxes are kind of proof that the government has a right to see ones personal transactions. You can't have income taxes without verifiable income requirements and reporting.

When I traded crypto I just self-reported on my taxes. It's not that hard. It's already illegal to "evade" taxes, so we don't need to make it "double illegaler" by banning crypto used to evade taxes.

>Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.

The issue is due to FATCA as a US citizen I have no exit valve to simply leave and seek residence elsewhere because leaving the country still makes me a US person reportable to IRS by worldwide banks (and in fact also by legal self reporting requirements) and the US charges a oft prohibitive multi-thousand dollar exit tax renounce. If we're going to put these kind of imposition on people we should at least streamline renouncing and make the payment to leave the gang something almost as cheap as the walk to Mexico.

You are assuming that people using Tornado Cash are only seeking privacy from governments.

You could want to use Tornado Cash for other forms of privacy, while still respecting your obligations to governments.

For example, suppose you are a company that pays salaries in tokens on the Ethereum blockchain but you want to do this without disclosing each employee's salary to the rest of their peers. You could fund a bunch of fresh accounts through Tornado Cash and distribute private keys to your employees off chain so they could access their funds.

Everyone involved could be completely respectful of taxes, etc. but they would still benefit from the privacy offered by Tornado Cash.

> 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

You don't have the ethical right to force people to disclose their financial transactions, either. Nor use threats of violence against people for designing tools that allow people to keep their transactions private. Doing so is the action of tyrants. Many people in the world do not have the luxury of immunity from state violence for supporting activism, and this technology is meant to shield them from such.

Cash is unwieldy in large amounts, which is why most authorities don't care about cash transactions. When cash is used at scale for anonymous transactions (e.g., when the US airlifted cargo planes full of cash to Iraq in 2004 to pay government workers without an Iraqi paper trail), it is international news.

If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD), I guarantee that no one in authority would give a shit.

> 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.

That amount of cash is heavy and difficult to obtain. It's possible, but it's certainly not ergonomic, and in the US, withdrawing $10K+ in cash from a bank will create a paper trail.

The 500 euro note, which would allow you to carry an even larger sum in the same 30 liters, was discontinued because European authorities were concerned about how much the note was being used to facilitate illegal activity: https://www.bis.org/review/r160211e.htm . In the US, all bills with a face value greater than $100 were recalled in 1969 for similar reasons.

You can transport a greater dollar value in the same volume using diamonds or gold, but again, the amount one person can carry is not unlimited.

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.

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.

Now, it's true that these things are hard to enforce, or even impossible for small enough sums. But people systematically flaunting the rules for large sums of money will get arrested, even with cash.

> 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

>This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations,

That is actually legal in the nation that was in the news for sanctioning Tornado Cash.

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