They don't deliberately run a service explicitly built to enable money laundering.
Basic things you can think about if you try really.
It'd be more akin to if you had say McDonalds and people used your parking lot for Craigslist transactions (some of which were fradualent). Should you be required to close that McDonalds?
But if it really were happening at any kind of volume, it's obvious that Spotify would be quite willing to make their KYC requirements for artists stricter. Any payments they'd made would obviously be made through the banking system, and the law enforcement would be able to trace them to the next hop, which again would have done their KYC due diligence.
The crypto mixer, on the other hand, has no real use case except money laundering. They are also obviously unwilling to do any KYC, and unable to manage their system in a way that would prevent it from being used for money laundering. And it wasn't by accident. It was fully intentional and by design.
Is that true though? What if I am in a country which disapproves of $activity that is legal in most of the world but not in my country. I might simply want anonymity in my Bitcoin transactions.
It's a bit weird how much scrutiny there is over obscuring the transaction history for cyrpto. Like you money launder via houses you get a slap on the wrist first [1] but if you aren't actually directly involved in the transactions you get 5 years. The guy's not running a server; he published a contract that other people's computers are paid (by also other people) to run. Afaik, there wasn't even an allegation that he profited per transaction.
[1]: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/anti-money-laundering-agency-imposes-5...
The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.
Also some things you can discover if you try, really.
I would accept that operating such a system is indefensible.
But it's not as if the creator of Tornado Cash was solely maintaining servers that made this possible. Everyone running an Ethereum node (even if they aren't mining) is running the infrastructure that Tornado Cash runs on.
So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?
> So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?
I mean, you say it yourself. They're the ones who actually executed on the idea. They didn't write a paper on this being theoretically possible. They wrote the code. They deployed the code. They marketed it. They continued operating the system for years, and profited monetarily from it.
That there are other people who are also culpable for other things related to the mixers doesn't remove the culpability of the original creators.
And again: if you implement a system that's doing something illegal, and by design you make it impossible to turn that system off, that's not a defense.
Certainly via a slippery slope argument there is no difference between mathematics and code.
I think we are at a point where we just have such different world views that we are unable to communicate meaningfully about this. Any society that decides to adopt your view is a society that would imprison me for simply operating a node.
Anyway, I enjoyed Linjat.
Should we jail Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman because their work is used to encrypt illegal data? They wrote the paper. They published it. It's impossible to turn that system off, and as you said, that's not a defense.
Non-KYC money transfer systems do not have such a raison d'etre.
They didn't build a service because it's "just" a web client and relayers is an interesting take but sadly, very stupid.