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Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

If Tornado Cash could be banned, couldn't the same logic be used to ban Tor?

The former obscures financial transactions, and the latter obscures communications, but there's a similar principle in play.

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The US military itself uses Tor. They don't want to ban it, because even if the traffic on Tor is illicit, it still serves to mask the military's own traffic. Don't forget that Tor was originally developed by the US Navy.

>The US military itself uses Tor. They don't want to ban it

That's not really any reassurance in the long term, if they find a better/different solution that goes out the window.

I’d be willing to bet there is US government black budget money that moved over Tornado Cash, too. The issue then becomes that Tornado Cash wasn’t originally developed by the govt and whatever further implications that has.

I hear NK uses it too, it should probably be made devastatingly illegal therefore.

Most of HN actually thinks like this unfortunately

That is the point of your parent comment: defeating their argument by their logic. To be logically consistent, the US should either ban both Tornado Cash and Tor or allow both.

> couldn't the same logic be used to ban Tor?

No. Despite attempts to conflate code on a blockchain with code as a concept, the code comprising Tornado Cash hasn’t been banned. You can publish it. Hell, you can re-deploy it, though that would be stupid.

Right, I was referring to the wholesale banning operation of the service, not the source code. Sure, you can print the source code on a t-shirt or something like DeCSS, but that's less relevant.

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