Wow, just wow. Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity? There must be more. Perhaps he also deployed it? That would be a different story. The article is quite murky in that regard. Perhaps they don't know yet.
In there is an interesting paragraph explaining what Tornado Cash is:
… The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services. Users of a mixing service mostly do this to increase their anonymity.
Note how they sneaked "criminal" in there. There are of course legitimate reasons to desire anonymity for financial transactions! It's one of the reasons people like to pay cash.
> Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity?
Probably. That said, he is arrested under Dutch law. We have no evidence this is tied to U.S. sanctions. As others mention, Dutch law restricts cash transactions in ways U.S. law does not.
Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing. Again, I think that wouldn’t per se lead to criminal charges in the U.S. But we’re sticklers about speech and privacy in ways most of the world is not.
> Also, in June—when the link says they began the investigation—it was publicly known Tornado was being used to launder money. If the developer kept working on it, they knew what they were doing.
People keep saying this in this thread. Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
As usual, it's an argument for harming people that produce legitimately useful things that criminals pervert. It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
"Iranian authorities arrested Malekpour during his visit, accusing him of designing and moderating pornographic websites. Malekpour had designed photo uploading software, and according to his supporters, that software was being used without his knowledge for the creation of an adult website."
> It's the same argument people make for banning guns in the US.
To be fair, I think most are arguing to restrict guns rather than ban. I’m not saying you did this, but many people deliberately distort that into “they wanna take all your guns” in bad faith.
Taking some leads to all. It's not something that should be compromised on. Gun restrictions won't end until ownership is so legally complex and time consuming that nobody can reasonably do it anymore. Of course it won't be an outright ban. That would never succeed. The frog in boiling water analogy applies here perfectly.
Would that really be a bad thing? Most other developed nations seem to get by fine with very strict rules on gun ownership, and coincidentally they have far lower rates for gun violence.
When something has far more capacity for harm than practical utility, it makes sense to regulate the crap out of it. Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
> Most people buying AR-15s in the US are not buying them to keep pests off their farm.
Now, explain why you think an AR-15 is so dangerous? Tell me why you’re so focused on that gun when it’s both not the major gun used in mass shootings[1], and when more homicides are committed with pistols[2].
I know quite a lot about guns, and I can explain the obsession. AR-15’s are hopped up 22’s. Literally. They take a 55-ish grain bullet and stack a lot of powder behind it. For reference the “not at all dangerous” 22 rimfire the government wants everybody to move to has a 40-ish grain bullet. What this means is low recoil, with good power. Coupled with relatively cheap ammo, you can sport shoot, compete and defend your farm with a single gun. Further, the AR platform is highly modifiable. I can swap uppers and change the caliber entirely. I can have an upper used for sport shooting, and a different one for hunting.
Not the GP but I read that sentence as an anecdote using the AR-15 as a well-known example of a common firearm that is seen by most non-gun-owners to be on the upper end of the scale between .22cal and RPG/50-cal machine gun in terms of power and/or risk of abuse. That is to say that I do not believe that the GP was actively making a point against the AR-15, just that they were using it as an example anecdotally to lace their statement with a touch of irony or euphemism.
I’ve just explained why, using your spectrum, it’s on the lower end.
I completely understand that guns are difficult to understand for non gun owners, they simply don't do any research. Couple that with the amount of research required to be knowledgeable takes weeks or even months for even the most competent of us. But imagine what you sound like to someone who is knowledgeable. It’s like someone challenging a PhD on knowledge. You should know what you’re talking about and if you don’t keep your mouth shut.
If you want actual visual proof that the AR-15 is on the lower end of the spectrum then watch this video, timestamped at multiple different locations:
FWIW the AR is fundamentally a platform, although in its pure form it does refer to the "underpowered" variant. Hunters might chamber 6.5 grendel, which is a nice intermediate cartridge commonly used to take down larger deer and elk. People who own firearms love the AR in part because it is so easy to change configuration and even caliber like legos. There are even AR chambered in .50 cal (but not that .50 cal).
If reincarnation exists, I hope that such people who are busy restricting others freedoms get all assembled together on a big island where they all get to live a very long life restricting each other to the ground, and when their nation makes Orwell blush, they get to live another 1500 years, enjoying each others company in a zero-freedom society, until they finally learn that it's not their f-ing business messing with others freedoms.
Edit. In this type of society, your freedoms are being gutted constantly for arbitrary reasons: one of your neighbors complains he's feeling unsafe around firearms so police comes and takes them all; another neighbor complains about cars making him feel uneasy, so you have to ride a bicycle; then a random passer-by complains about you using harsh words, so a court puts a non-removable collar on your neck monitoring your speech; then some worried activist complains about food and from now on you can get only approved food from the food-police. But you aren't wasting time: you complain about your neighbor's green lawn, then force him to live in a tent, restrict his water consumption for climate-concerns, make him reduce the size of his pets and so on. I'd argue the downward path of restrictions has no bottom.
At best, gun ownership should be viewed as a regulated privilege not unlike driving on public roads.
Everyone who drives has to be licensed to do so. There are different licenses controlling the use of larger vehicles on public roads. There are safety requirements vehicles must meet in order to be street legal. Every vehicle has a unique registration number tied to the owner.
All of these regulations have made driving considerably safer today than it was 80 years ago.
Czech Republic has had a gun tradition for ~500 years.
Homicide rates are lower than in over-regulated nearby Germany and quite a few other European countries. It’s even lower than some famously entirely gunless Asian countries.
The Czech Republic is a welfare state with universal healthcare, free university tuition, and other incredibly strong social safety nets in place. As a result, they rank #12 on the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index. More people living happy lives without fear of economic destitution is a good way to keep crime rates low. Desperation breeds antisocial behavior.
I'll never argue that the presence of guns directly cause gun violence. There are many factors at play. Strong gun regulations are one proven means to reduce gun violence, even if they are merely treating a symptom rather than the real disease. Unfortunately, making the necessary changes to truly solve the problem is even more of an uphill battle. I could see meaningful gun legislation passing within the next 10-15 years. But it will probably be decades before we solve our problems with inequality, healthcare, and education, assuming our entire democracy does not disintegrate first.
I never seen this "inequality-adjusted Human Development Index", but I'm certain Germany ranks higher on it than CZ, it is quite bit more developed than CZ in many areas. Many
Yet, they don't have shall issue laws, no constitutional rights like in CZ and USA, and their homicides (firearms or not) are somewhat higher. They border each other and have a long shared history going back a thousand years.
Seems regulations actually matter very little, except maybe appeasing the anxious that something is being done?
> Even foreigners from friendly nations can obtain a permit and carry, not even the USA doesn’t do it.
People admitted under ESTA can legally possess a firearm (state law still applies). The 2nd amendment rights are the same for Green Card holders as they are for U.S. citizens, and for everyone else there’s the hunting permit loophole.
What do you mean, even the USA doesn’t do it?
In Czech Republic you need to take an exam on weapons law, which you must take in Czech.
You are definitely right about this (many of my green-card friends have multiple weapons), and of course you're right about state law.
I think what parent post was saying is that in Czech Republic (national not state level), foreigners can not only obtain firearms, but also carry (presumably concealed), which as I'm guessing you also know varies widely from state to state, and here in California from county to county.
Of course I'm mind-reading here, I could be totally wrong.
When my brother-in-law and his son come visit from Switzerland they love to go shooting. In fact they get bored with my stuff and rent things with more punch (e.g. .338 Lapua). We visited a friend of mine in TX, and the things you can rent there (e.g. .50 BMG), we've only heard myths of those in CA, no one's actually ever seen one.
What a country where you can buy as many guns as you could possibly afford but when you try and put up a clothesline or solar panels the HOA will come and foreclose on you.
Yes it would be. I've come to understand that if you are well-versed on history, you'll come to the conclusion that taking civilian access to arms is a slippery slope that absolutely should not be tried again. I'd rather history not repeat itself once more.
Here's a comedic piece by Awaken with JP, where he points out many historical events where within ~2-10 years of a government taking the guns away from the population then genocide occurred: "Why Guns Must Be Banned Now!" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbkNIoJ-9jY
This is the same guy who didn't know the difference between Infection Fatality Rate and Infection Fatality Ratio, then compared the The IF Ratio of Covid to the IF Rate of the Flu and proclaimed the Flu was deadlier because math, and straight faced didn't realize he had two orders of magnitude error.
Then he post a video making fun of his video getting removed due to misinformation that he never retracted or corrected.
I am claiming this guy puts huge amounts of one sided misinformation out there including this video.
1. Mass shootings are committed by those brainwashed by government psy-ops programs to motivate the masses to outlaw guns so they can become tyrannical.
2. Only tyrannical governments enact gun control
3. Gun control leads to extermination of a population.
4. The USA is following this pattern and I guess the left is essentially compared to Hitler or Stalin rising to power to perform genocide after they successfully disarm the right.
He never mentions once all the countries with successful strict gun control and free societies such as most of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. As though by enacting more strict gun control will lead to genocide always with complete surety.
His whole channel is an exercise in Brandolini's law and he's is most definitely a huge part of the problem.
The funny thing I am a gun owner and support the second amendment, but everyone seems to forget the "well regulated" part of that amendment and the fact that currently there are many "arms" we are not allowed to own, the same ones the military uses. Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher? What about a nuke? We already draw a line at certain arms moving that line or adjusting the regulations around it would not be without precedent.
Would it shock you to learn that mass shootings aren't the results of guns, but actually the result of mind-altering medications by pharmaceutical industry that are legal - but 1) in the clinical trials showed an actual increase in suicide [e.g. you're less likely to kill yourself if you didn't take the medication], and 2) that homicide (and homicidal ideation) are also increased due to these medications?
But we don't hear about that? Why? Because pharma, at least in the US, is something like 80% of the advertising revenues of all mainstream-mass media channels - so it's one of the big elephants in the room that they prevent from society being alerted to; health and education institutions have also been corrupted by pharma and their profits.
Otherwise, your arguments are still only at the shallow level - and don't address or even acknowledge that gun control, or gun rights being enacted, may in fact be an authoritarian effort - and most always implemented through the guise of "doing what's good for society."
So is it possible that in Canada, where the Trudeau government is planning to implement a mandatory gun buyback program [for certain guns to begin, but illogically, and that does practically nothing to reduce crime] - using fear mongering and opportunities of US atrocities or Canadian atrocities that the vast majority of weapons used were illegally obtained firearms] is aiming for tyrannical control - or you can't even open your mind to that possibility? If not, it makes me wonder what relatively shallow and skewed information/propaganda/perspective you've been exposed to?
The “well regulated” means “proficient, properly equipped, well trained, functioning as expected” or similar. You have to assess that phrase in the context of 18th century English.
It has no relation whatsoever to what “regulation” means nowadays.
> Do you think everyone should own a machine gun if they want? How about a rocket launcher?
But almost everyone can own a machine gun or a rocket launcher, where not forbidden by state law. Just pay a $200 transfer tax and wait 3-12 months for the ATF to process your transfer form.
>It has no relation whatsoever to what “regulation” means nowadays.
So it doesn't mean background checks or proper record keeping? The meaning of the word has not changed since the 18th century and certainly doesn't mean no rules whatsoever.
>But almost everyone can own a machine gun or a rocket launcher, where not forbidden by state law. Just pay a $200 transfer tax and wait 3-12 months for the ATF to process your transfer form.
So no nuclear arms or chemical / biological arms correct? The right to bear one is infringed.
Machine guns only if made before 1986, no new machine guns due to FOPA. So extremely limited supply and high cost along with the 3-12 month wait is due to more extensive background checks along with a high tax. The right to bear one is infringed.
Missile launchers are approved and taxed not only for the launcher but each round and you also must get a federal explosives permit for the rounds. The right to bear one is infringed.
State are also allowed to regulate them even more so, kind of like state level assault weapons bans and handgun laws? The right to bear one is infringed.
If you are ok with that kind of heavy regulation then doing that for semi-auto assault rifles or hand guns should not be an issue correct? That was my point, the second amendment does not mean you can own any arm you want and the heavy regulation on title 2 weapons, explosives and WMD's seems to work well in preventing their use in crimes without leading to tyranny and genocide.
>That was my point, the second amendment does not mean you can own any arm you want and the heavy regulation on title 2 weapons, explosives and WMD's seems to work well in preventing their use in crimes without leading to tyranny and genocide.
my argument would be that it does mean you can own that things.
Bans on nukes, etc should be added as amendment to constitution if they're not allowed. They are arms. Should be easy to pass the amendment if the overwhelming majority agree.
The fact you can't buy a nuke isn't some gotcha on legitimacy of restrictions. Clearly nukes should be legal until the constitution is amended to exclude classes of arms and the hughes amendment for post-86 machine guns is blatantly unconstitutional.
No right is unlimited and this has been upheld many times. From the decision Columbia v. Heller [1] which was delivered by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito all conservative and and actually struct down some restrictions:
(2) Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller's holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
I mean if we're just deferring to whatever the supreme court interpretation is today (which by the way, changes all the time), why even have a debate? Just spend your time reading court proceedings. We're both aware the supreme court has upheld infringements.
I am simply pointing to extensive case law affirmed by the Supreme Court that the right to bears arms in almost universally held to not be unlimited, which I agree with as do most even staunch conservatives.
There may be a disagreement on how limited the right is but your extreme viewpoint the even nuclear arms should not be regulated due to them not being called out explicitly in an amendment is obviously held by a very small extremist minority.
In my experience the nuclear arms argument is almost exclusively used to try and get the counterparty to admit somehow infringements are legitimate. It's an attempt to paint the counterparty as extremist, when perhaps you mean more directly to accuse the writers of the 2nd amendment as extremists (and they were).
> your extreme viewpoint the even nuclear arms should not be regulated due to them not being called out explicitly in an amendment is obviously held by a very small extremist minority.
I'm not asserting nuclear arms shouldn't be "regulated." I'm asserting the method by which their regulation is legitimate, in my opinion, would be a constitutional amendment. You're attempt to paint me as an "extremist" is predicated on the false assumption that I've argued nuclear arms should not be regulated at all, when in fact my only assertion is that any regulation should be done in a way that makes it evident to the reader of the amendment that they are not protected.
The reason the nuclear arms argument is used is because its a logical argument and breaks through the ridiculous assumption that the second amendment in an unlimited right.
Do you or do you not believe the right to bear a nuclear arm should be infringed?
Its sounds like (I think) yes you do believe it should be infringed but disagree with the current laws technical implementation. You are an extremist in that most people agree with the current law and do not think a new constitutional amendment is needed to regulate nuclear arms.
2) IF it is to be done, how can it be done legally.
I think we can answer (2) without the prejudice of opinion of (1). My opinion on (2) would be the right to bear arms should not be infringed until the constitution is amended to state the right to bear <whatever words have the effect of excluding nuclear arms> shall not be infringed. I believe there would be little political difficulty in passing an amendment excluding nuclear arms, and if it helps us depend much less on implicit interpretation then it's good for everyone. Hopefully it would shut down some of these gotchas that try to drive a wedge in towards legitimizing other infringements by trying to get the counterparty to relent banning of nukes is constitutional under the currently written constitution (not saying that's your argument precisely, but I've seen it a lot).
You did not answer #1, do you believe the right to bear nuclear arms should be infringed? Can you answer?
Yes this is a gotcha question, which is the point, the strict reading of the second amendment says "Arms" the whole point is a logical exercise in whether that literally means all arms or if it is in fact not an unlimited right to all arms.
Making an amendment for every new form of arm would be a colossal waste of time if we can just agree that the second amendment is not an unlimited right as almost everyone understands it to be including conservative Supreme Court justices. This is actually settled case law and is "legal" your assertion that it is not legal is a farce so #2 is a non-issue except in an extremists mind.
Here we observe the devolving into ad-hominem calling the counterparty an extremist. If painting your counterparty as an "extremist" is how you want to make your point, that's your prerogative, and I'll give the you the benefit of the last word and never having to deal with me ever again. So after replying to my statement below (or not) rest assured you can feel well knowing you have the last word to an "extremist", which is of course whoever disagrees with you. You can walk away feeling proud and strong your name calling was necessary to make your point.
>You did not answer #1, do you believe the right to bear nuclear arms should be infringed? Can you answer?
No. I believe as the constitution is currently written they cannot be infringed. I believe if the 2nd amendment is amended they could be. Of course, if the constitution says arms aren't protected it would be a lot harder to call it an infringement. I also completely reject this notion of you holding the second amendment hostage which suggests our options are accepting legitimacy of implicitly banning nukes (and by extension, perhaps other unnamed things), or accept all arms. Clearly an amendment excluding nukes is an alternative.
>Making an amendment for every new form of arm would be a colossal waste of time if we can just agree that the second amendment is not an unlimited right as almost everyone understands it to be including conservative Supreme Court justices.
I don't agree with this interpretation. Again if you just want to defer to the courts that is fine, but I don't see the point in debating. You can simply say "my argument is whatever the latest interpretation of the supreme court is" and we both understand it's not really up to debate that the supreme court agrees with you that nuclear arms are bannable.
>Making an amendment for every new form of arms
I mean you don't even have to do that, you can change the second amendment to say "firearms .50 cal or smaller and knives" or say "excludes anything that a reasonable person would presume would be used to be killed 10+ people in a single activation of the munition." We can debate the wording aforementioned, maybe you don't like the exact phrases I used, but if we can word laws against these things then we can certainly make an amendment.
>would be a colossal waste
You might be the first person in history who simultaneously wants restrictions on nukes but thinks it's just too much work to solidify the framework banning them from people you don't want to have them. If the belief is banning nukes saves humanity or whatever I don't see putting pen to paper as a waste of time (and if universally agreed, not even that politically difficult.) Amending the constitution to exclude nukes would make this a lot more clear and less of a precarious position of being dependent on implicit interpretation by the courts, so I don't see a downside.
>the strict reading of the second amendment says "Arms" the whole point is a logical exercise in whether that literally means all arms or if it is in fact not an unlimited right to all arms
Yes my position is that it literally means all arms. If someone says something I think is absurd (I do not think the literal interpretation of the second is absurd at the time of its writing, but many would), I don't simply choose to re-interpret what they wrote to convince myself they implicitly did not mean what they said.
>assertion that it is not legal is a farce
Of course what's currently considered by most to be "legal" is whatever the supreme court says it is, I'm growing tired and bored of you suggesting any other opinion is a farce. It's pointless to debate, just go read the court proceedings if that's your position. It's worth noting at various times the supreme court changes its mind on what is legal, what is considered legal (or illegal) today could be considered different tomorrow upon appeal to the supreme court. I don't think it's inconceivable at some point the courts may take on more literal interpretation of the constitution, which could result in a constitutional convention (which some may argue we are due for).
And a second note on this point: supreme court justices themselves disagree on what's "legal" so even the majority opinion could be considered legal by one justice and illegal by the other. But of course a minority opinion justice is allowed to have these opinions of dissent and I am not... because that would make me a farce unlike the dissenting judges.
Enjoy the hocus pocus hand waving below of your counterparty trying to explain the why the framers' writing of the 2nd amendment implicitly meant to to allow the kind of logic that machine guns from 1985 are ok but not ones from 1987.
And that the founders had zero foresight to assume weapons technology would advance significantly beyond muskets. I mean really, do people think they were actual idiots?
To be fair, I doubt that they expected that nuclear weapons would be developed, and I'm sure they wouldn't be okay with chemical weapons either. But that's the strawman argument.
After all, the 2nd amendment was written at a time when civilian ownership of warships was okay, so I don't see how it shouldn't extend to all arms—past, present, and future.
I'll bite: Turkey — true (Armenian genocide). USSR — false (genocide against who? there were famines (btw in US too). all people suffered).
Though I know that the opposite is claimed by propaganda (at least, Obama failed to recognize Armenian genocide, and anything bad is easily believed without questions about USSR).
"Taking some leads to all" logic doesn't really follow.
If that idea applied then the US would already not have guns as many types of firearms (ex. fully automatic) and weapons (explosive munitions) are heavily restricted (and have been for a very long time).
Is anyone proposing without access to an AR-15, or any firearm for the matter, this mentally-troubled yet ignored by all the appropriate authorities youth would not have lashed out violently?
It's not too long ago homemade explosives were a seriously real threat in this nation (and others with much more strict regulations, such as the UK). Mass knife stabbings aren't that uncommon around the world, and driving a vehicle through a crowd remains one of the most effective means of violence readily available.
The point is... the tool isn't the problem it's the person. It's a figurative band-aid to think we can solve mental health issues by taking away objects and ignoring the actual core problem... which is mental health.
Stable, mentally healthy people do not commit these mass violent acts. Full stop.
Gun ownership has a long-term downward trend. Part of this is non-government factors like change in population from rural to urban, changing demographics, occupations, etc. But we can't rule out that part of this drop may be contributed by the additional barriers placed, such as great expansion of who is a felon, expansion of domestic violence firearm restrictions including some local agencies charging someone every single time a policeman is called out for DV no matter what actually happened, NICS (which can wrongly deny people who then have to appeal), increasingly difficult to navigate carry laws such as the gun-free-school-zone act that can incriminate someone for merely being within 1000 feet of a school with a gun. The no-fault divorce era has also seen the weaponization of spousal restraining orders during divorce, which have the effect to disarm while also being a bargaining chip and ace during divorce proceedings and a way to beat down your spouse with the court by leaving them helpless and disarmed even in many cases where the spouse has done nothing criminal. And then there is the attack on anyone who happens to have guns and gasp pot at the same time, as is seen in the federal charges against "FPS russia" who was disarmed because the feds didn't like he smoked a vape pen with his girlfriend.
There seems to be a somewhat slow boil in the United States, starting with the NFA, then the GCA, the hughes amendment, and a myriad of state and local laws.
There is expansion of the ban every time they add new types of "felons." The government has focused the past ~60 years years on greatly expanding who is a felon, and then enshrining that they do not have the same civil rights as others after serving their sentence.
I, for one, believe that felons should lose some rights. Personally I think felons should keep speech and voting rights, but anything related to violence should be prohibited.
But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law, as well often a lack of empathy for others. The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I think the hardest one to talk about is the non-violent sex offender -- CSAM and the like. They have a high re-offending rate, and rehabilitation efforts aren't very effective in this area. On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender, but on the other we don't want to lock them up for life.
>The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
This is called recidivism and it’s a product of fuckwads like yourself who write people off for life the first time they run afoul of the law. It’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy that people return to crime when society deems them as subhuman when they return from prison.
> On one hand they're only a handgun away from being a violent offender
You’re only a handgun away from being a violent offender by that simple logic. You’re literally talking about non-violent people suddenly becoming violent for no reason.
1) The deterrent effect of gun-laws on felons are questionable when obtaining arms is trivial for anyone. Although I won't argue the punitive aspect of "justice" still remains. Note that just because laws don't always work doesn't mean we shouldn't have them, but see below.
2) If the punishment does actually have a deterrent effect (which is questionable, but lets presume it is true), then it should have a deterrent effect on the underlying violent crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon. Assuming the punishments for murder and assault with deadly weapon are worse than felon-in-possession (and I would hope they would be), one would conclude the marginal deterrent effect against violent crime is minimal for felon-in-possession laws. On the other hand defending genuine threat to life with a weapon is generally legal, so the deterrent effect for felon-in-possession is nearly all constituted of felon-in-possession laws. That is the felon-in-possession laws likely have little to no marginal effect on preventing violent crime while they may have significant marginal effect on the ability of felons to legitimately defend themselves. Put simply, it moves armed self defense from "legal" to "super illegal" while moving violent crimes from "super illegal" to "more super illegaler" -- which just seems like an extremely poor tradeoff.
3) In a world where arms are trivial to obtain (felon or no), if people can't be trusted in public not to kill others they should not be released from jail. The idea people would be ok with killing others (or other armed violence) but too scared to break the law to 3d print a gun just seems ridiculous. Releasing people who legitimately are believed to be a threat to the public in the event they obtain weapons just seems bat-shit insane to me. If you want a half-step of probation under which no weapons are allowed while they are closely monitored by a PO, to me that makes more sense. But a free man off probation can be assumed to be able to get weapons whenever they like, so we can't be releasing people to be free if we expect them to kill others with weapons.
4) >The best predictor of whether you will commit a crime in the future, is if you've committed one in the past.
I mean that's probably true. If someone owns a pot plant today, it's not unreasonable to guess they will own one tomorrow. Which if they own guns at the same time, is federally a felony. Of course many of those people were never a particularly worrisome threat, that is until you made that illegal which in your own words turns them into people likely to commit crime again. It's the government taking peaceful people committing a victimless crime and damning them into situation where by your own admission makes them more likely to be trapped into a world of crime in the future (perhaps because felony record hurts their job prospects).
> CSAM and the like.
And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society. Otherwise, they need their rights restored when they are returned. I'd really prefer not to have a conversation revolving around these kind of offenders, because I find it is often just a clever trap to try and make someone out to be a supporter/defender specifically of people involved with materials involving disgusting acts to children. And of course even these people have civil rights, but defending them is so incredibly unpopular (I admit I don't enjoy advocating for their rights), so it's a cheap and easy win to introduce in a debate system with upvote/downvote to grey out comments.
I'm of the personal opinion that crimes against children should require some nexus to the physical abuse (i.e. the person that did the filming, abused the child, etc) because digitally planting evidence for this kind of crime is so incredibly trivial for police and so rapidly turns the opinion of jurors and everyone against the subject that in effect it's almost like a blank check for police to put anyone they like in jail for a long time without finding an immediate nexus to the abuse of a child or even any witnesses / claims by the child or their family. People merely found with a photo and the cop says "I promise I did not put it there, I am a good honest person" always sat very poorly with me, and I can't help wondering how many innocent people have been convicted of these offenses.
5) If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well. You may argue crimes such as even those make one more predisposed to violence, but even if that were true I would argue there must be _some_ amount of time (10 years? 20 years?) without committing further crime when there is a regression back towards, within the noise of error, of the general public.
6) >But it does show a lack of respect for the rule of law
When it comes to matters of armed violence I'm far more interested in whether the person respects human life against unjust violence than I am generically about all laws such as whether they used a stock instead of a brace on a "pistol" (felony) or stood in front of a mining truck during a protest (felony in Arkansas I believe, if not one of the adjoining states). One could argue by your (and my) standard the US government should be disarmed.
I don't think you did a great job of arguing your point, because you conflated me with whoever you argued with in the past, and then are dumping your angst from them upon me.
I do think my post triggered you though. You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
> And here's the nuke everyone likes to drop as a bad faith effort to force others to specifically defend CP offenders rather than generically non-violent criminals.
It's not bad faith. There are roughly 750,000 sexual offenders in the US. In 2020, the US held around 1.2M prisoners, and has about 5.1M felons in the population at large.
> If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children...
I don't just believe it. There are studies to back it up. Note that the recidivism rates for sexual offenders below are vastly underreported as sexual offenses are not as likely to be reported as other offenses.
The question you didn't answer, is how to fix it -- but instead, blasting me for providing one, when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
> If we're going to cherry pick offenses, I'd like to point out owning scary mushroom or an undersized lobster is a felony as well.
At any point in time, any passed law might be considered unjust in the future. The founding fathers said they wanted to make a "more perfect union" as a response to the punitive laws made by the Crown. MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice." as a response to the human injustices to slavery and Jim Crow.
But as a whole, we -- that is society -- believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well. Real CSAM (not any artistic rendering) means some child in real life is being abused in real life.
Yeah you focused your whole post here again on CP / child abuse, apparently your favor topic, rather than other points. It's just a cheap shot designed to try and make this about defending (or not defending) the civil rights of the most hated segment of society rather than generically non-violent felons, and you know it. If you bothered reading what I said, I did propose that if they were unfixable and a threat to children they shouldn't be released from jail, which fixes your concern about them getting firearms. I get the fact that laws are ineffective aren't an argument against them, but it is worth noting making handguns illegal does fuck all to stop those people from getting one after released. Anyone can 3d print the frame in a few hours and have the slide shipped off the internet. If they can't be trusted in public not to hurt innocents they really shouldn't be released.
> when you don't have a good faith solution yourself.
Hilarious because you clipped off the second half of my sentence in my quote where I provided the answer. If you believe CSAM offenders can't be rehabilitated and their crimes amount to torture/abuse of children, then they need locked away forever or somehow gone from society.
Your obsession with CSAM is bizarre, I might add. And the fact you glossed over pretty much all my non-CSAM related points pretty much goes to show your intent here.
>believe that crimes against children should not be legal, and that's the view I take as well
My argument revolves around civil rights after full release from jail+probation/parole/community control, not whether crimes against children should be legal.
>You may want to think about why you reacted so strongly to this.
I really don't appreciate what I've seen you and many others do which is try to make someone who defends the civil rights of people who are free and released as someone who somehow doesn't want justice for children. These kinds of accusations made under the veil of academic debate are just an intelligent version of slinging shit at the schoolyard.
No ban, just increasingly restrictive laws on ownership and use that end up resulting in something tantamount to a ban. Look at gun ownership in most countries in Europe if you want an idea of what the future could look like.
Then give some thought to what Europe was like in the early 20th century!
> Most guys I know here in the Austria boonies have a hunting rifle.
First of all, Austria is the only country in the European Union where firearms are only partially licensed.
Second of all... Sorry, what I really meant was to say was that European gun ownership (broadly speaking) is very different from USian gun ownership. Europeans generally need permits, reasons for ownership, training, et cetera just to own a firearm. Carrying is heavily discouraged, and often illegal without a permit... which the state is under no obligation to give you. Magazine size restrictions are rampant.
In the United States, in many territories, we don't have equivalent policies. Many states allow for entirely permit-less ownership and carrying of firearms. We don't need to ask permission – that's the difference I'm trying to indicate here.
As always, correlation doesn't imply causation. It's not clear that gun laws themselves even enabled the rise of fascism or that they had any negative impact on quality of life. With widespread gun ownership early 20th century Europe could have been even worse.
> "The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country's population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson's suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on."
Events such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising showed some Jews really were willing to defend themselves with arms. The Jews were not cowards and the characterization as people who won't "mount resistance" is woefully wrong. It may be true they may have not been able to successfully overthrow the Nazis, but it is possible some of the oppressed may have survived another 10 or 15 minutes (in the Warsaw Ghetto, days) after initiating self defense and even if them being armed would have made things worse for them, that should have been their choice to make and not yours.
There is some sort of fundamental honor as well to allow to allow someone the tools to at least maybe shoot a Nazi on their way out, as one last act of resistance before certain death. Arms are a right even when desperate circumstance make it almost only symbolic.
Glad to know you're distancing yourself from the absurd opinion of this wikipedia article, which totally is a quote you never meant to support even though you intentionally framed it as part of your counterargument to the "tired" nazi gun control argument. I changed it to "the" rather than "your."
That argument is a bit of a straw-man though. Nobody is realistically claiming the Jews, or East Germans, or Soviet citizens, or Syrian citizens, could defeat their government with personal weapons.
The more reasonable version of the argument is that the unofficial purges, before the evil becomes fully embraced by the government (the Nazis), or where hidden and unofficial (the KGB), can be deterred by armed civilians. If you know the Stasi are coming to take you away in the night to certain death you'll be willing to fight, and if armed you have a real chance at inflicting casualties. And if every raid leads to dead troops and PR disasters the state is less likely going to get to the point where the terrorists adopt the mantle of government (Nazi Germany) and can then bring the sum total of state forces to bear.
tl;dr the argument is more about resisting unsanctioned or non-governmental terrorism so it doesn't become governmental.
No it doesn't. Here in Austria, only cops have pistols and semiautomatic arms virtually don't exist. However most of the guys I know have at least one hunting rifle.
Ever growing restrictions start creeping in. In many US states where handguns are hard to acquire it is now difficult to buy small caliber rifle ammunition that can be used in some handguns.
Take for example California's "safe handgun roster". They added a new rule that for every one pistol that is added three are removed. It's hard to construe that regulation as anything other than a backdoor attempt at banning pistols.
Discussions on the internet are tons of fun and extremely useful when we just ascribe whatever secret end goal on to organizations that we want. May I try? Actually, the majority of activist organizations are fronts for gun manufacturers to create a fear of them being regulated away to help push a buy-now mentality. claiming otherwise is bad faith distortion of reality!
To be Fair, based on the History of " restrict guns " it is clear no amount of restrictions is enough to satisfy those that want to restrict guns, confiscation and total ban is the clear end goal
it is NOT "bad faith" to say that, when there is clear evidence that no matter how many times compromise is reached they return the very next day asking for more and more restrictions
Factually false, if you believe this you are in an echo chamber. Yes, there are a few who want to ban guns, but I know many people, some of whom are gun owners, who support reasonable restrictions.
Trying to paint the entire movement with the views of it's most extreme members is absolutely bad faith communication.
There are some that over lap, but I am not a sport shooter, i own guns exclusively for self defense, most gun owners that "support reasonable restrictions" do so because they only care about maintaining shooting sports, and are fine with restrictions because normally they are targeted to self defense uses of fire arms.
There is also a small subset of gun owners that are ignorant of the current state of law and believe rhetoric like "closing the gun show loop hole" or other such non-sense.
None of this however changes the fact that the MAJOR organizations that support gun control, and big name politicians pushing for gun control have their implicit stated goal of total ban of the most common weapons in use today, (Semi-Auto rifles and pistols with capacities greater than 8)
So sure maybe they will allow people to have a black power musket, or some other such non-sense and you believe that classifies as "not a total ban" but to me that is a total ban
Again, not true. You need to get out of your filter bubble and meet more kinds of people. People own guns for many reasons and those different reasons do drive different gun usage.
A ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity pistols is not even remotely the same thing as banning all guns or even banning all non muskets. I don't think such a ban has popular support even among those who do support greater restrictions.
Are there countries where guns have been banned, and mass shootings increase?
Are there countries where banned guns have been allowed, and mass shootings increased?
Other countries have their own version of mass shootings. They often involve knives, explosives, or vehicles instead.
You trade one for the other. Mentally unstable/unhealthy people commit mass violent acts regardless of the tools available.
In practically zero cases of mass shootings was the assailant completely mentally healthy. Taking away one particular violent tool is not going to solve the mental health problem in this country.
Or, you get a bloodbath, like what happened in Kenosha, where everyone (except the first person who was killed) involved was convinced they were the good guy with a gun.
In the fog of war of an active shooting, nobody has any idea of who is the threat, and who is responding to the threat, and nobody has time to sit around and wait for 8 months for a jury to determine whether the shooting was justified or not.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on what happened in Kenosha.... Because your rendition of events as no match for what was reveled in trial, and other sources
When you're in an active situation you don't have time to wait 8 months for a trial to clear things up. Rittenhouse believed he acted in self-defense... And at the time, so did Huber, and Grosskreutz.
This seems to be a complete re-writing of the facts revealed from eye witness and video accounts of the events of that evening. The jury also seems to disagree with this alternate narrative.
It may be what some folks want to believe happened, but it is absolutely not the facts.
People absolutely have and occasionally do rush active shooters, which is what happened in the second part of the situation.
And if you don't ever believe that confronting an active shooter is ever the correct thing to do, why do you think having a gun will help you? Take your own advice and run away, you don't need a gun to do that.
When your in an event the person running TOWARDS the police being chased by a mob is generally not the criminal, just saying...
I do not believe that the people who attacked Rittenhouse believed that he was an active shooter they needed to stop, not for a moment do I believe that, nor did the jury, nor did anyone else that has a rational mind
Active shooters do not run toward police with their hands up
I think this sort of question is being argued with youtube-dl and we can see where it goes. The entertainment industry argues the purpose of youtube-dl is to pirate content. Youtube-dl argues that there are in fact many legitimate uses for it and this argument has so far prevailed.
In the case of WhatsApp, the app has many legitimate uses, notably speech, which is often protected as a right. In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy.
> In the case of Tornado Cash, the app's only use is concealing the origin of financial transactions, which some could argue is never a legitimate use (and which others would argue is a legitimate use). Maybe the final arguments will come down to this legitimacy.
There are legitimate using an open ledger as Ethereum, privacy is a right.
Privacy should be a right, with limits (like all rights). I'm not sure where in the world privacy is a constitutional right beyond unreasonable-search-and-seizure.
Yeah, this line of reasoning is exceedingly silly. Stethoscopes can be used to help crack safes, should the people who make them be in legal jeopardy as a result? Good luck convincing anyone to invest in innovation in that kind of legal environment, my friends.
Demonstrating that there's one legitimate use should probably be sufficient in most cases. If you want to be uptight you can think about adding a requirement that the best fit use case must always be legitimate
If the law required communication providers to obtain licenses, and as a condition of those licenses to have credible controls against use by terrorists, and Whatsapp just scoffed at all that & went on being trivially used by terrorists, then why not?
>Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
If the law is written by authoritarians they very well could be. What is legal has absolutely no relation to what is right, wrong, ethical or unethical. It depends entirely on the people passing the law.
Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent. So before they knew the Taliban uses it, not a crime. Now that they know? Well, kind of a grey area. I bet you could construct an argument that they commited a crime if any NEW feature/code commit somehow benefits the Taliban after they knew the Taliban uses it. It's legal for me to sell someone a car. It's no longer legal for me to sell someone a car if I know they are paying in drug money or they need it to have a new 'anonymous' car while on the run from the police.
Funny story. Drug dealers try to do this with analogs. They will go to a lawyer and get the lawyer's opinion that whatever benzo/fentanyl derivative they are ordering from Alibaba does not fall under the Analogs rules. They then try to argue if arrested that this shows that they didn't have criminal intent and went to great lengths to make sure that what they imported was not illegal drugs and hence no Mens Rea. Don't try this. It doesn't work. You have not found that 'one secret the Feds hate'.
>Most crimes have what's called a 'Mens Rea' element, which means you had to have criminal intent.
That's what Ross Ulbricht was arguing; the creator and the operator of the biggest Dark Web drug marketplace called Silk Road but it didn't work out for him. Because you as an operator of a platform have liability of what your users do or in another words you need to take action in order to prevent illicit activities. Ross argued that he created neoliberal free for all marketplace but that the bad guys invaded it and ruined it. Ofc that was BS argument just like not regulating who is mixing funds and what kind of funds at your crypto mixer is also BS.
And just like Ulbricht set a great example for future darknet market operators to take OPSEC far, far more seriously, so too will this overreach of authorities drive authors and operators of tumbler/mixer software/services to do the same.
The authorities are stepping on their own dicks, here, in a manner of speaking. Most of the biggest darknet markets operate far better, and far more clandestinely, precisely because Judge Forrest threw the book at Ross.
And they're doing the same thing here. This really sucks for Pertsev, but going hard on him like this will set the standard for a brighter future in the fight against State-enforced financial tyranny.
That makes no sense and I don't think that lines up with liability.
Every hammer maker knows some people use hammers as murder weapons. Their continued manufacturing of hammers obviously does not constitute a criminal act.
This argument makes no sense, and while I'm not a lawyer, I doubt it actually has legal basis (at least in the US).
Mens rea isn't some radical idea. If hitting specific sales targets on Bushmaster AR-style hammers is tied to your bonus you might end up settling for $73 million when you get caught pushing them too hard and they're used in a bunch of massacres.
The developers of Tornado Cash don't directly profit from its use (the article claims that erroneously), it's a fully permissionless immutable smart contract without a fee component.
So this argument, while potentially valid, doesn't apply here.
I feel like this can only be true because you must have defined "launder money" to be any private usage of money (which isn't a sufficient definition of money laundering, to be clear). If you claim otherwise, then you need to be more specific with your reasoning.
To start: why would anyone need privacy--of communication or of shared resources (payment)--but for something illegal? If you have an answer for that for communication (which you claim to and of course should), then it also is the same answer for money.
Do you believe someone should be able to keep secret that they have some medical condition, and that that knowledge should only exist between them and their doctor? Well, fat lot of good that does when the doctor specializes in some specific issue and there is a record of you paying them.
Think it is sufficient to trust the bank, because you think their security and privacy are awesome? Well, that's the same argument for WhatsApp vs. something like Facebook Messenger: no need for end-to-end communication if you are willing to trust people.
FWIW, I didn't just say that and then drop the issue: I provided the step-by-step explanation as to why. I also certainly understand people disagree: that's why I felt the need to leave the comment at all ;P.
Providing infrastructure that money launders could use, or actually do use, is not categorically illegal. But the law establishes certain obligations to try to mitigate money laundering. There are controls you need to implement, expertise you need to have on staff, a level of sophistication that your AML program needs to demonstrate. And there are enforcement regimes with audits and licensing to backstop all that. It is not a free for all.
I am not sure how you expect to implement any of those without undermining the end-to-end nature of the private communication. Can you maybe explain how this would work in the context of the messaging application?
False. Here is the definition of money laundering:
1. The act of engaging in transactions designed to obscure the origin of money that has been obtained illegally.
2. concealing the source of illegally gotten money
Anyone can use a cryptocurrency mixer with legally obtained cryptocurrency.
Tornado Cash has legitimate, non-criminal use cases.
Anyone can, but realistically, it has probably been used almost exclusively for either laundering money or concealing the source of money used to purchase illegal goods. I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal.
I'm not advocating for the developer to be prosecuted, I'm just saying in the eyes of the law, they probably won't see it in the way you are describing.
I can think of pretty much no cases where you would _need_ to convert your money to cryptocurrency, then conceal where it came from using a mixer, and then use it for something legal.
Why would you need a mixer? If you want to hide it from your friends just send it to a new address and then buy with that address. Who can prove that new address is yours?
Also if your friends then regularly snoop and trace every single one of your transactions so they can laugh at you for your purchases, I wouldn't consider those to be your friends.
I mean fair enough, you have contrived a legal example. Yes, I admit it does have valid use cases, I just don't think they're very common at all.
Why would you need a mixer? If you want to hide it from your friends just send it to a new address and then buy with that address.
Let’s continue the example. Imagine you use your shiny new NFT as your twitter avatar. Now anyone can see the wallet holding that NFT received funds from wallet x. Wallet x is your main wallet.
I disagree with that, as there are things you may wanna buy without making public you bought, that is still legal. For example, some specialist hobby you'd rather not want others to know about.
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to buy an NFT with legally purchased Ethereum from an exchange like Kraken or Coinbase, but you don’t want your friends to know you spent $2,000 on a jpeg. So instead of buying the NFT with your Coinbase wallet that is linked to your [ENS] name, you create a brand new, single-use wallet and use it to buy the jpeg. And instead of funding the single-use wallet from your recognizable wallet, you obfuscate the source with a mixing service.
1. Russian citizens or political figures wanting to donate to friends and family in Ukraine without being prosecuted / jailed / killed.
2. Not wanting to give your entire financial history to every single person you interact with.
Do you like such a privileged life that you can't imagine a government or adversary using knowledge about your finances against you? Do you think Russians trying to help friends and family should be restricted from doing so because Putin says so?
Let's arrest Satya Nadella, Tim Cook and Linus Torvalds for they are responsible of the three major OSes that are used for the computer related crimes.
> Is everyone at WhatsApp also guilty of a crime for continuing to work on WhatsApp even though they know the Taliban uses it for communication?
Of course not, because intent matters.
The team at WhatsApp works super hard to keep people who shouldn't be using it off the platform, so that everyone else can derive use and enjoyment. If WhatsApp was built as a platform to facilitate terrorist communication you're damn right you'd be held liable for working there.
Tornado was built, and is operated, specifically to facilitate money laundering. It has no other purpose but to conceal the source of funds which only matters if the funds were acquired illicitly. They do not now, and have not ever, attempted to stop the service from being used for this purpose - after all that's why it was created.
Because you don't want your crypto currency to be traced back to you... because then the VPN you paid for with it can be traced back to you... and sometimes the entire point of a VPN is so that connections cannot be traced back to you. The funds used to pay for the VPN were not acquired illicitly, but having it traced by to you _could_ be dangerous for you.
The VPN has every IP address you connect to it via. I fail to see how laundering your coins before paying for one is going to add any opsec. You are dependent on trusting the VPN for any security or anonymity it provides you.
Privacy is about much more than whether your transactions can be trade back to you - it's about who can trace them back to you. There's a huge difference between "VPN who already has all my IP addresses knows that I did business with it" and "Everybody on the Internet knows that I did business with this VPN provider". If you disagree, let's see you post your credit card history and tax returns on Hacker News - after all, your bank and the IRS respectively already have this information, so you're not gaining any OpSec by keeping it private.
For a lot of mixer transactions, your adversary is probably not the government - it's any hacker that you may want to prevent from knowing your Ethereum balance and the services you transact with.
If you don't mix your coins I can see you have signed up. If you do mix your coins I cannot. When I say I, I literally mean I could check the chain and see you were a vpn user. After mixing I (me) can no longer see if you are paying for a vpn. Hope that clears it up lol.
What if I don’t want my employer knowing I spent my BTC/ETH/etc on a porn website — so I want a way to disassociate the payment address they know from my spending account?
…or guns, alcohol, abortions, etc.
People have a need for privacy and disassociating spending from receiving for perfectly normal and legal reasons.
This seems like a better argument for using a system which is correctly designed. A public ledger is a bad fit for currency and layering kludges on top isn’t as good as a better design, especially when that exposes you to being an accessory to criminal activity.
There are cryptocurrencies that are private-by-default, eg. Monero and ZCash. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and whether governments go after them as well, particularly since (I suspect) Monero is used for a lot more illegal activity than Tornado.cash.
The thing about Ethereum's public ledger approach is that it enables a lot of features - broadly advertised smart contracts, for example. Tornado.cash is literally an attempt to replicate the privacy benefits of ZCash inside of Ethereum's generalized blockchain. From a computing perspective that's quite interesting - you start with a public system and find a way to emulate a privacy within it.
Yeah, I’ve been surprised to see so many people prosecuted after using Bitcoin for serious things long after the privacy concerns were well-publicized. I guess it shows how many people fall for marketing.
Given how arbitrary the Tornado enforcement seems, fully private ledger cryptocurrencies will probably be declared criminal too. While this won't deter criminals from using them, it will deter normal people, as publicly offering goods or services in that currency would be illegal.
It's not hard to imagine that the end goal is CBDCs having a monopoly on legal privacy. (Privacy from your neighbor, not your government.)
It doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described.
It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned. The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.
> It doesn’t seem that arbitrary if it’s true that he was directly profiting from money laundering as described.
It remains to be seen what they mean by this. Tornado doesn't extract fees, so the profiting couldn't be exactly direct.
> It also doesn’t follow that a private ledger would be banned any more than, say, credit cards or PayPal are banned.
I specifically said "fully private", not "private from your neighbor", to differentiate with credit cards or PayPal where users have no transparency or control over who sees their data.
> The thing which would get them banned would be refusing to comply with KYC laws, which is a political choice rather than a requirement.
It's not possible for a decentralized system to "comply with KYC laws". That's like asking that paper dollars require an ID to transfer. They can't do that, they are bits of paper existing in physical reality.
Similarly, autonomous consensus-based systems like cryptocurrencies and trustless smart contracts can't just say to users "sorry, I'm not able to serve you until I see your valid government-approved ID", they are "things" not "services with a helpdesk, a street address and a CEO".
That's some seriously circular reasoning: It only exposes you as an accessory to criminal activity because they've labeled it a criminal activity despite legitimate uses...
No, it makes you an accessory because you are mixing your traffic with criminals’ to help hide all of your activity. Everyone trying to hide criminal activity needs to use a mixer but only a small percentage of other users are going to pay for an optional service so the odds are worse that you’re more likely to attract attention to your transactions, too, just like you would if you were known to take home large quantities of cash from a mob-owned casino, too. Maybe you’re just a really good poker player but it’s more likely to make law enforcement curious than if you don’t.
"We have no evidence this is tied to U.S. sanctions."
Hmm, I suppose you are correct technically ( no direct evidence of connection ), however:
1. Sanctions are issued on 08/08/22 for Tornado Cash by OFAC
2. Guy writing software for Tornado Cash is arrested
It does not take a large leap of faith. I will go a step further, given how much companies like to avoid OFAC issues ( and that does include non-US companies ), I am all but certain the two are connected.
Source: I used to work with sanctions in banking environment.
I hear criminals keep using cash to launder money, but the central banks keep printing cash! Outrageous! Unbelievable behaviour! To jail with the lot, straight away!
> Then, by assuming that any cash that the surveyed consumers do not fess up to holding must be held for nefarious purposes, he concludes that 34 to 39 percent of all currency in circulation is used by criminals.[1]
By contrast only 14% of Tornado Cash activity has been traced to illegal activity.
I’m sure that far more cash transactions by volume are not money laundering compared to tornado cash. Tornado cash’s only real purpose is money laundering.
Ballistic table calculators can be used by insurgents/guerilla fighters and even by regimes you or me personally oppose to.
Do we need to hold ballistic table calculators' developers accountable?
What if these calculators' developers submitted a PR to SQLite source code or just a feature request and SQLIte devs got it done, are SQLite developers also culpable by proxy?
Where do you stop your "they knew what they were doing"?
Satoshi has demonstrated inhuman levels of restraint. The only explanation is that he is dead.
The others are that he is not human, or that it's a committee defying Hanlon's razor: i.e. not governed by stupidity like most human affairs, but malice. Both are equally improbable.
My pet theory is that he's just one of the myriad of early developers who made hundreds of millions from crypto and keep relatively private. At that point he'd have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by revealing himself.
Basically contribution laundering, by blending in with the first 10 or so contributors and killing off his old persona he would get most of the benefits but still not get targeted as the inventor of bitcoin.
Exactly. It's consistent with the personalities of the early contributors that I've met. Private individuals who enjoy their wealth but don't seem like they really need any more.
Assuming he had some later money (in the Blockchain) that's maybe "just" a few dozen / hundred million worth.
That's plenty money for one person without the liability and the publicity. You can live a life in pure luxury and fulfill all your material wishes.
Maybe he lost the keys or threw away the machine after a year or two. There's nothing to be gained from going public in this case but a massive threat to your life.
Selling this may ruin the story and crash the price. It would probably go against his values and mission. He could easily have other early wallets and have $B's. Most likely explanation though is that it was Hal Finney who passed shortly after Satoshi disappeared.
If any of the BTC founder's blocks suddenly became active it would crash the price because most people would suspect someone found an exploit in the contract/hash or the keys were stolen.
That’s fine when you’ve already locked the price into something else that’s not-btc.
While you could sign a message with your key, you would still need something that accepts the proof but isn’t public, which might be possible with a properly structured/constructed smart contract, maybe?
That doesn't really answer my question. If you're a modest private person, what can you buy with 20 billion that you actually want, that you can't buy with 300 million?
That message was sent about 6 months before Hal Finney died. (Who, incidentally, lived a couple blocks away from Dorian Nakamoto.) Personally my money is that Satoshi Nakamoto = Hal Finney, and he's cryopreserved and likely to come back in a couple centuries to sit on top of a few quadrillion-dollar Bitcoin hoard.
Some people have alleged that Paul Leroux, who is sitting in prison right now, is Satoshi.
That would explain why Satoshi hasn't moved any coins or sought fame.
I invested a lot of time on his identity, not for anything just because I was bored and curious. I highly suspect it’s Adam Back and he currently sits in a tax haven, Malta.
Very unlikely. Hal Finney is the more likely candidate.
Adam is/was not a good programmer like Satoshi was.
Satoshi was in favor of alt coins in Adam is notoriously against them.
"Adam put enough effort into proclaiming that Bitcoin was based on the concept of HashCash that, if he was Satoshi, Satoshi would have given HashCash more credit." - Another HN User.
Satoshi had a positive attitude and Adam is notoriously unpleasant.
Hal is a great programmer, worked for Phil Zimmerman on PGP.
Hal is the first person Satoshi contacted, first person to mine outside Satoshi (op sec).
Hal was aware of all the prior works that failed, b-money, bit gold, hashcash, etc.
Linguistic analysis of the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi's forum posts most closely match Hal's writings.
Hal lived in the same town for 10 years as did Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hal died of ALS shortly after Satoshi disappeared (he knew it was coming and that he couldn't continue).
I also think living somewhere he could have seen Dorian Nakamoto's name is a very, very strong pointer towards Finney.
It may seem like a dumb opsec mistake to pick a name from your town, but lets remember, at that point we're talking about launching a cool experiment about digital money worth $0, not about picking a pseudonym as the figurehead of a project worth a trillion dollars.
After reading an article about it, I do wonder about Len Sassaman, who apparently fits Satoshi's timezone and "accent" better. It could even have been both of them collaborating...
However, there are some valid counter arguments in this thread, such as Satoshi coming out of retirement in March 2014 to state that he was not Dorian Nakamoto, in the wake of a Newsweek article that falsely fingered the latter as Satoshi.
The Len Sassaman theory really does it for me. It's been a while since I read up on it, but the similarity of Bitcoin and his remailer tech was the main thing that I found pretty convincing. Plus of course the timeline of his death.
That would be highly interesting. Not like you can get easy access to the internet inside a prison so he would have to either convince a guard to bring him a phone to access it or possible use his lawyer. Anyone who visits they would likely record his conversation with the exception of his lawyer. But what good will the money do him, he isn't set to be out until he is like 72 years old and looking at him he is not in prime shape and may not even last that long. Maybe he could wait until enough is at stake like other countries adopting bitcoin as a currency and when the time is right find a way to put all his coins on the table causing a crash in price. I can't imagine what end game he would choose if he truly is the creator and how he has had so much will power he has had up until now to not move any of his coins. One thing is for sure I really do hope I come to HN one day and see the top story with 2000 plus points saying Satoshi's coins have just been moved.
Although Bitcoin is resistant to the "charismatic leader" problem, his second coming would give him incredible fame, following but also personal danger.
Yet I do not think any human would resist a moment in the spotlight, if not to renounce its child and its current direction.
Of course. Various people have claimed to be Satoshi over the years, but failed to provide any sort of proof. Satoshi could either actually be one of those people, or realize that without proof he would be subject to the same fate.
I think someone who believes that it will bring certain death could resist.
It wouldn't surprise me if he destroyed his private keys to prevent himself from ever succumbing to the temptation.
Those coins are of little value when using any of them would kick off a race to track you down and kidnap you with the intention of rubber-hosing the key out of you before going short on bitcoin. Having a secret in your head that can be converted into billions of dollars is not a good position to be in if you are not already a highly powerful individual with tons of people looking out for you.
You are overestimating the odds of that happening.
Vitalik Buterin is widely known, travels all the time to many countries, and although he might not be as rich as satoshi, still owns like a billion in crypto.
He must have lost the keys very early, when Bitcoin was just a fun experiment, and that would still be dubious: how did he imagine his creation would be so big as to prompt destroying his keys right there and then? The common human response at that idealistic stage would be greed.
And even if he had the foresight, it's probably harder to just stay silent for 15 years. I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
I think it's likely when they started Bitcoin they used a "genesis" account which they never intended to keep the keys of
They probably also had other keys that they mined early coins on that they did keep, this would be consistent with Satoshi being Hal Finney or Nick Szabo
> I imagine one would just come out, say they've lost all their BTC, that the original project was a failure but they have an even better idea now, and starting a new cryptocurrency with his name attached. Overnight billionaire once again.
1. They probably made enough off BTC to retire rich already, why go through any trouble to make even more money (not everyone has the drive to accumulate billions when they already have millions)
2. If they've destroyed/lost the original keys there is no way to prove they are Satoshi and nobody would believe them, like Craig Wright who claims to be Satoshi and started a BTC fork which picked up very little traction
You don't need 15yr of foresight. I can see someone keeping their mouth shut for the first X years on the basis of "things are going well, my project is being adopted, I had better not F with it by increasing the number of coins in play lest there be unintended consequences" and then at some point deciding that things have gotten out of hand, the stakes are too high, pulling the hard drive off the shelf, drilling it and tossing it in the bay.
I can't see anybody having that self-control is my point. I can't think of any person in history that has shown this level of restraint, especially about a very valuable and very controversial invention.
Occam's razor says it's easier to assume he's dead than trying to imagine him as the most patient Buddhist monk, with deep economic and cryptographic knowledge, the world has ever seen.
But we could go on with this discussion for years, so let's just agree to disagree and wait and see if his name surfaces again or not. There's bound to be more and more hucksters trying to claim they're Satoshi the longer this legend lives.
I think most people in the space have a pretty good idea who it is, quite likely the guy who made the predecessor. The important thing is it's ambiguous and unproven which stops this kind of legal stuff.
Yes! Plus Faketoshi most likely waited until the person/people he knew (or strongly suspected) were Satoshi were dead to launch his scams. Less chance of a forum post saying "I'm not Craig Wright".
Committee? Like as in Satoshi was a team of people? That’s one possibility.
As a side note the Nakamoto Institute website archived all of Satoshi’s emails and ‘his’ IP is Californian. Make of that what you will. For all we know it could’ve been one of Musk’s side projects that caught on and went viral.
We're talking about someone with inhuman self-control, and GP is talking about someone that just can't keep his mouth shut and loves being in the spotlight.
If the genesis block did contain the image of a trollface (or any other 2008-era meme) instead of "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks", I could entertain this theory.
Anonymous cash transactions in the Netherlands over €10,000 are already illegal (https://www.amlc.eu/cash-limit/). The government intends to ban cash transactions over €3,000.
The way I read that, large anonymous cash transactions in a non-professional capacity are still fine? Could I not gift somebody a million cash euros or buy a home with cash?
IIRC you can't buy a house anonymously in Netherlands, no matter if you pay with cash or not, you'd be required to register the transfer of ownership in the cadastral system, and any real estate deals must be with a written contract that identifies both parties.
And I believe the NL tax reporting for large gifts also requires you to identify the donor.
In essence, the limitation is not on the method of payment but on the core activity, that any significant income from contracts, deals, trades, barters, transfers, gifts, settlements etc need to be non-anonymous in order to be legitimate, so if the method of payment does not identify the payer (i.e. cash) then simply it's your duty to identify who you're dealing with, from whom you are earning money.
I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west. Typically all large transactions get auto reported to the financial intelligence unit, with the tax man getting access to the data set as well. If paid via crypto they'd find out when the recipient cashes out, forcing him/her to do source of funds.
> I doubt you could buy a house anonymously anywhere in the west.
In New York, properties are commonly held by LLCs. Transferring ownership of the LLC can be done without any public or auditable record of the transaction.
Current EU AML laws are full of requirements for explicit registration of the true beneficiaries for all these companies (including chains of companies); anonymous ownership of companies is becoming illegal in the last couple years.
At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names.
Last time I sold a house, the only reason I met with the buyer directly was because I didn't use an agent for the sale.
Are you staying that the state/county doesn't know that you are the person owning that house, or doesn't know who the previous owner was?
This thread is not about privacy from other private citizens/companies, but privacy from the state authorities. For example, my bank account is private in the first sense (even my parents couldn't find out how much money I have unless I tell them), but it's not private in the second sense (financial authorities have the right to ask my bank how much money I have).
> At least in the US, house purchases are by default anonymous. The only reason I know the sellers of my house is because they put in their trust name their full legal names.
But most homeowners don't have the house in a trust. That's mostly a rich-people thing. The default is that it's your personal name(s) on the documents, including in e.g. county tax records.
Property taxes are between the owner and the county where I live. They are paid in advance, so you can't sell a house without paying the property tax first. It'd be liened by the tax authority to prevent the sale.
But if the owner is anonymous, how does the country know who to ask for paying the taxes? How would the county even find out that the house changed ownership?
In the grandparent example, it seems the new owner is a trust, which is also liable for paying the taxes (or there can be action taken against its property i.e. the house), but the person owning/controlling that trust is obscured.
Perhaps a relevant different example I've seen sometimes is that in some markets for tax reasons developers who build larger buildings (offices, apartments) will make a separate LLC for each building, so when they want to sell it, the title to the real estate doesn't change hands (it still belongs to the same company) but rather they sell the whole "company" instead with the building as its main/only asset.
They don't need to know. If the property tax isn't paid a local judge just writes up a new deed to whomever pays off the delinquent property taxes. It is literally property in their jurisdiction. They can take possession any time.
Home sales do not universally count as income. Also, it is important to realize that 1099-S reporting applies to individuals like a licensed realtor. Which I am not.
I doubt any company wil accept that, and suddenly owning a new house with no data on where that money might have come from will raise so many red flags, you'll be able too start a new flag company.
The law also applies to barter with equivalent Euro thresholds, so cryptocurrencies aren't excluded. Anyway, the point stands, financial privacy (from the State, at least) is not a feature of life in the Netherlands (or anywhere in the EU, with AML3/4/5/6).
It's perfectly fine to pay off your 900k€ house with cash in Germany which is why it is considered a financial haven for all kinds of organized crime.
> Germany
No limit on cash payments for the purchase of goods.
Consumers who want to pay amounts which are higher than 10. 000 Euro in cash, have to show their ID card. And the trader has to document the surname, first name, place of birth, date of birth, the home address and the nationality.
This is perfectly going to fly if they find one small chat where he admits he merely knows that his code was used for money laundering.
If memory serves me correctly, the ground for convicting Phantom Secure was the fact that one of the founders admitted that he knew that his service caters to criminals, although the service itself is not illegal.
I think the only real case the gov would have is if he ‘knowingly’ supported laundering for sanctioned nations, like if he noticed it, and commented on Twitter or discord to a friend like “Ha! Look, DPRK used my tool”.
However, if that did happen, the gov also just gave him threee days lead time to delete any evidence of that, which is extraordinary. I’m surprised the arrest and sanction did not happen on the same day
I don't think there's any causation from the USA sanctions to the arrest, possibly even vice versa, with some investigation before this arrest leading to some part of the sanctions.
The specific USA sanctions are not retroactive, it's not a crime to have violated them before an entity was sanctioned; and I doubt if it's a Netherlands crime to violate USA sanctions.
In any case, the article seems quite clear that he was arrested for facilitating money laundering, not for a sanctions-related offense, the sentence about sanctions was just extra information for context. And for this part, the big issue is intent - if it turns out that he developed this mixer with the intent to facilitate hiding illegal transactions, that would be facilitating money laundering. And looking at some comments here I wouldn't be that surprised that he might have explicitly admitted it in writing.
They were waiting for the reactions from the community. There's a low chance there could have been extreme and unified non-compliance, e.g. everyone depositing funds to Tornado Cash (which is still up and operating at https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/tornadocash.eth/ )
Financial anonymity is _actually bad_. KYC and anti-money-laundering regulations and etc. are _actually good_. These positions are the result of thousands of years of human history and economic activity. Ignore them at your peril (shrug)
"He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash."
This does not read as "all he did was write some software."
Yes, he might have written software, but if it was with the purpose of money laundering, for example, and that can be proven, that's not just writing some software.
We do not have enough information to decide either way, but what information we do have now (which has yet to be verified, of course) is that he did not just "write some software."
> this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software
Stephen Watt had his life destroyed because he wrote some software. He didn't use it, he didn't directly victimize anyone; he just wrote the software that other people used[1].
Case law already exists that simply writing software can be a crime, so let's not fool ourselves that prosecutors/judges/juries will even remotely consider this line of defense valid.
How often are cryptocurrency projects developed with no interest in personal gain? This isn't the DeCSS days of hackers just wanting to stick it to the RIAA and MPAA. Chances are that the developer was involved in running a for profit service based on their software.
US sanctions on mixers in the past have been associated with an individual, not a piece of code. This is the first sanction to target an open source and non-custodial mixer.
Maintaining code is, in the US, likely a 1st Amendment-protected activity. Operating live services like a mixer (including any RPCs needed for Tornado) is not. (And yes I know this arrest was not made in the US, so that might be the distinction.)
You can take a look at the Wikipedia site for Defense Distributed, which filed suit against the state department for blocking the distribution of CAD files under export control rules. It hasn't been smooth sailing, but many of the legal cases seem to be breaking in the direction of DD. Of course that case is more complicated given that there is both a 1A and a 2A argument.
It doesn't have to "fly" if you can waste 10 years of his life in court and ruin his finances, relationships and employability. The effect on him and the deterrent to others is basically the same...
An American could be excused for thinking it is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity. Unfortunately much of the world does not operate under American law.
> The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.
Even omitting the "criminal" implication, that sentence has a big problems.
> The origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services.
Let me rephrase that:
> The origin of cryptocurrencies is not checked by cryptocurrencies services.
The idea is ridiculous at face value.
However, it does illustrate the best & worst part of blockchains -- everything goes on the blockchain. The government loves that audit trail. But how is an ordinary person to know some wallet addr is a pedophile, or terrorist, or druglord, or whatever? I mean that as an honest question. Is there some public crypto-wallet watch-list everyone is supposed to be referencing prior to doing p2p transactions?
Like you, I wonder how this person could be prosecuted? In the free-world, writing software is considered free-speech, at least in the USA, but I'm not sure in the Netherlands or wherever this person was apprehended? There are of course exceptions... like writing malware or viruses, etc.. So like you, the situation seems to entail something more.. like perhaps running an operation with clearly articulate facts indicating criminal activity. You know, the old saying goes "it's what you know, and when you knew it". So like, if the person was aware of criminal activity, taking part in criminal activity, etc.. I suppose an argument could be made.
I think the question of "deployment" is an interesting one when it comes to smart contracts. When you deploy a contract, you're publishing the code to the network to run, not deploying it to a server you operate. I think we are going to need to have a much better legal framework around what exactly a person is doing, legally, when they deploy a smart contract to the blockchain.
Everyone keeps mentioning how "it's why criminals use cash, so there's no point in banning this, as they'll just resort to using cash." But they must fail to notice that various governments of the world are trying to implement a trackable digital currency to replace cash. They don't even like cash either.
> Wow, just wow. Am i alone in thinking this is not going to fly if all he did was write some software that helps with your financial anonymity? There must be more. Perhaps he also deployed it? That would be a different story.
Does that really make a difference? I’d not worry about writing anything and putting it online saying “this can be used for evil so don’t do that”. But if I was approached by a criminal who asked me to write code for their criminal activity and I did so knowingly, then I’d expect legal consequences, possibly even if my code was never deployed at all.
The difference must be in whether or not there was a conspiracy to commit crimes or if there wasn’t?
In this case I don’t know whether this was purely open and no such contact between user and developer existed. But in principle I’d expect writing (almost) anything in the open to be safe.
This is not a criminal hiring a contractor to work on Tornado Cash. It is an open source project on GitHub that many developers and researchers contributed to, in the interest of privacy.
To use an analogy, see the open Matrix protocol, a tool for privacy that can facilitate encrypted communication between criminals.
Well, we're not seeing arrests of all the many developers and researchers who contributed to Tornado Cash simply in the interest of privacy as such (because that is not a crime), however, I presume that for this particular person there is some extra evidence establishing probable cause for the arrest.
For example, if it can be shown in court that he contributed to it with a knowing intent to facilitate privacy of illegal deals, that might be considered aiding and abetting "the concealment or disguise of the true nature, source, location, disposition, movement, rights with respect to, or ownership of, property, knowing that such property is derived from criminal activity", which is a crime under EU/Dutch AML law.
Yeah, in that case unless there are specific laws violated by the code (earlier DMCA violations come to mind) then it should be safe as I said.
But as usual things are only legal until it’s tried.
A machine that prints counterfeit bills might be illegal to make or sell even without ever being used in some jurisdictions while not in others. And whether the machine has other, legal purposes, may or may not matter.
The “dual use” thing is a common argument for most technical things when there is talk of bans and regulation. I think it’s mostly a hollow argument in cases where the primary actual users are criminal users. That some technology can be used for illegal purposes should not be enough to ban it, but nor should whether there exists a legal use for a technology be enough argument that it shouldn’t be outlawed.
You seem to believe that if a tool is illegal, as long as it's open source and the people making it don't have a criminal background, and as long as you call it something like "privacy software," somehow it's suddenly not illegal
But this is a tool whose specific purpose it is to make it difficult to track illegal transactions. Of course this is happening.
Programmers get way too wrapped up in "but I called it open source! I called it privacy software!"
What you label it has no actual power here. It was used in illegal behavior and that appears to be its goal.
Matrix protocol’s sole purpose is to obscure usernames and messages and enable privacy. Tornado Cash’s sole purpose is to obscure blockchain addresses and enable privacy. Privacy is not a crime. Using Matrix to hire a hit-man would be a crime, but we don’t sanction the Matrix protocol or it’s developers just because it can be used by criminals to obscure their crimes.
What's the practical difference between the kind of privacy Tornado Cash provides and the kind of privacy offered by a local money laundering operation? If there is none, why should the latter be illegal while the former remains legal?
One exists to facilitate privacy, the other exists to facilitate money laundering.
Compare with E2EE Matrix protocol: it does not exist to facilitate criminal communication, but it does facilitate criminal communication.
TC is also different because it is an open source protocol, not a legal entity or group. You deposit funds into the protocol, and anybody in the network can help you withdraw them by relaying your transaction. It is a set of rules that any group of people can follow to allow for private transactions, and the same protocol can run on many blockchains.
Reminds me of the arrest of Isamu Kaneko, the developer P2P file sharing software, Winny, in Japan.
He was prosecuted for aiding copyright infringement for writing a software that can share any files including copyright protected files.
He won the case at supreme court but it costs a lot. Many Japanese free software developers lost their interest for publishing the software may lead to the arrest from police who don't understand any of the technology behind it.
If you are told repeatedly that your work is facilitating money laundering and you keep doing that work, don’t be surprised if you get arrested for facilitating money laundering.
Jurisdiction is something of a problem, as we can see with the Panamanians being non-extraditable. That's why it was the Panama papers in the first place! But if you're going to facilitate money laundering, at least have the common sense to not do it under your own name in a jurisdiction where that is illegal or that will extradite you to the US.
So far about 1200, including 400 celebrities, three heads of state, nine former heads of state, and 150 sitting politicians worldwide.
It's the third largest successful corruption sting in history.
Also, edgelords online who don't know what's happening in the real world like to pretend there was no fallout, so that they can feel wise about corruption, and like to demand that other people look things up for them so they can feel like they made a point.
In reality, it was about half of the names in the document base so far, and that's despite it being international prosecution with an unwilling nation.
Things in the Panama Papers are going quite well for law and order, albeit slowly.
Would you be kind enough to tell us what result you were expecting, and what point you were trying to make?
In the future, would you please consider knowing the answers to your sarcastic questions before asking them, please?
Knowledge and intent seem important here. If the developer had specific knowledge of a someone using their service to commit a crime and did nothing to stop it, then they could be an accessory to that crime.
If you sell a weapon to someone knowing ahead of time that they are going to use it to rob a convenience store, you are not innocent.
In there is an interesting paragraph explaining what Tornado Cash is:
… The (criminal) origin of the cryptocurrencies is often not or hardly checked by such mixing services. Users of a mixing service mostly do this to increase their anonymity.
Note how they sneaked "criminal" in there. There are of course legitimate reasons to desire anonymity for financial transactions! It's one of the reasons people like to pay cash.
Satoshi Nakamoto is wise to remain anonymous.