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.