Actually I think the v1 contracts did not require or accept a fee for usage. I'm not sure about their v2 contracts which incorporated some sort of governance token called TORN.
> Because the deposits and withdrawals are not synchronized in time, users can break the link between a particular chunk of cryptocurrency and their holdings.
This is not false, but a bit misleading. Being decorrelated in time helps against analysis that tries to match inputs and outputs, but it's not what breaks the link.
On withdraw, how does the service know that the user has a claim to the funds? A centralized service can store this in a database off-chain, but Tornado is permissionless, there is no third party database, only the smart contract. If you would store it naively on-chain, the link would be public, defeating the purpose. So instead, Tornado uses zero-knowledge proofs that allow users to prove that they have a claim to the funds, but nothing more than that. Crypto (in the original meaning of the word) is what breaks the link!
But you can use the Tornado Cash pools themselves without the relayers.
Can someone smarter than me talk about how we might judge the mens rea and criminal intent of the developers?
Tornado Cash also did not comply with the OFAC list of known sanctioned wallets.
However, it's clearly not that simple, from the article:
> "If Tornado Cash knows who deposited the money and who took it out, that’s not money laundering."
> "Smart contracts are not legal contracts."
> "Every service provider has a certain amount of illicit activity."
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/21/is-tornado-cash...
I also object strongly to Tornado Cash being "designed" for illegal activity.
This the root of your misunderstanding: his paycheck is not in any way coming directly – note how your very next sentence directly contradicts this assertion – and criminals paying some taxes like everyone else doesn’t mean that the purpose of the tax is criminal, and nobody working on the project thinks their goal is to facilitate crime.
Tornado Cash’s design does not comply with legal requirements in many countries. Until that changes, it’s going to be seen as a tool for breaking laws because that’s what it does by default.
>Tornado Cash’s design does not comply with legal requirements in many countries.
As far as I know there were plenty of legal reasons for many people to use Tornado Cash, probably even Americans (up until it was sanctioned). One example is a legally owned "cold wallet" being firewalled from a hot wallet. It's not wrong to create something that may be used illegally some (or even most) of the time or some of the places.
>his paycheck is not in any way coming directly – note how your very next sentence directly contradicts this assertion –
If that's your assertion, then the person selling gasoline to the mobsters is culpable then, knowing that mobsters buy gas and knowing that gas facilitates crime, but doing nothing to specifically check if someone is a mobster before selling the gas.
> purpose of the tax is criminal, and nobody working on the project thinks their goal is to facilitate crime.
But that's precisely my point as well. You can operate or design a mixer without the goal of facilitate crime, even with the knowledge it will. The purpose of profiting may be to profit off of legitimate users using the mixer, and the unfortunate byproduct is bad people sometimes use a service for ill despite you not intending for that to happen. Now I can't prove intent, but I doubt you can either.
>paycheck is not in any way coming directly
A second point -- your problem is that it went directly and not through an intermediary? OK, so it would have been fine if a cousin or whatever set up a shell company and then paid them through the shell company, then it would be indirect. I don't buy that an extra layer of indirection somehow makes it better. Mobster paying tax (or shell company) and that tax (or shell company tranfer) going to you is a mobster paying, with an extra step. I mean Tornado cash is doing an analogous thing to what's happening with tax money -- the users may or may not be doing illegal things but the people getting paid out of the 'mixer' of the tax treasury are getting a mix of good and mobster money. You could argue taxation is in part just a way of money laundering to profit off of mobsters and crimes.
Of course the difference here is with tax money, there really is the provable intent make money directly from crime. Even if someone informs the IRS their source of money is criminal in the same envelope the money is in, IRS will happily take 100% criminal money with full intent for the coffers to directly profit off the crime.