[epolanski]

Financial privacy is not a human right.

Moreover the kind of financial privacy you think of is from other citizens to not know your financial movements, it doesn't apply to nation states for obvious tax reasons and money laundering purposes.

[akimball]

Financial privacy is definitely a right. The question is whether that right is respected by any given institution. Since it is against the interests of existing institutions to do so, they will not unless compelled by a greater force. Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights .

(Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many loopholes in its contract to be proof against a concerted attack in typical practical applications - they usually leak too much partial information.)

[epolanski]

> Financial privacy is definitely a right.

Unless you prove it is, it's not. It's not encoded in the UN's human rights charter, nor in pretty much any legal system out there.

Governments should protect you from other individuals accessing your financials except the government itself, but that's it.

> Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights.

I am absolutely against the use of "cryptography" (which by the way any transaction system uses) and cryptocurrencies as there is one and only one purpose for such a thing: tax evasion and money laundering. There's literally no other purpose except far fetched arguments.

[amanaplanacanal]

I've honestly given up believing in anything like rights. Everybody seems to have different opinions on what they are, and they never seem to match up with what governments actually do. I'm not sure it's actually a useful word.

[akimball]

Authors who have given robust analytical treatments of rights include Rawls, Habermas, and Kant.

I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.

[Supermancho]

> Financial privacy is definitely a right.

This is a baseless, so I think you're making a bad assumption. Finance is opaque at a low level because of arbitrage and physical trade, but it's the belief that the physical world dictates social rights (which are moral at the core, so let me know if you want to jump to morality?) is simply incorrect.

What's more, I think that the default position that finance should be private actively hurts society in innumerable ways. Unfortunately, without it, capitalism immediately breaks down into monopolies. So we live in the happy middle, as with many things, suffering the inevitable (corruption, blackmail, etc).

[highwaylights]

or the purposes of funding terrorism, narcotics, human trafficking, weapons, uranium, endangered wildlife and/or biohazardous material.

There's a point at which if you undermine law enforcement enough there's no point in continuing to try to enforce laws, which means there's no point in having laws at all. The hype mob either doesn't see this or doesn't care, which is incredibly naive either way.

[suoduandao2]

In my capacity of unofficial spokesperson for the hype mob, I would say that if a tool can be created that has legitimate and nonlegitimate purposes, criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take, because it ensures that all talented people who are interested in developing it for legitimate purposes become disaffected at worst or aligned with your enemies at best. Setting aside the moral argument, the NSA's treatment of Snowden, Manning, et al. makes it much more difficult for the NSA to attract the best talent in its field.

[JumpCrisscross]

> criminalizing its creation or possession is the worst possible action to take

Sure. That’s not what’s happening.

Tornado was used illegally. Its leadership kept developing it, kept getting paid, and made no apparent course corrections. This wasn’t simply a GitHub repo; it was a remunerated enterprise.

When I’ve brought up the legal issues around mixers, a common response involves the impossibility of governments to enforce their Will on blockchains. If these guys messaged similarly they’re justifiably boned.

[suoduandao2]

Justifiable by what, exactly? International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on. Is the argument that every government should have an unchecked ability to enforce its will on the medium of exchange?

[JumpCrisscross]

> International trade in a multipolar world requires a money supply that no single government can arbitrarily enforce its will on

Do we have such a money supply? If not, do we have international trade? Is the world not multipolar?

This claim fails on face value. Most of history was multipolar, international trading and reliant on money states de facto controlled. (You’re not moving tonnes of gold without the state’s permission and not being chased by them.)

[suoduandao2]

>Is the world not multipolar?

An argument could be made that the US stopped being the arbiter of last resort wrt the medium of trade since the Ukraine war, but before that point, it was certainly not multipolar. There was one political entity that, along with its allies, controlled the value of money, and they were disincentivised from cheating too hard by the fact that they could dictate terms to the rest of the world if it was important enough to them.

But I grant you, heavily-guarded ships full of physical gold would still work today. If that's a future you're on board with you may want an answer for how the piracy problem will evolve if trends around the cost of kinetic weaponry continue.

[rocqua]

We currently have a lot of international trade that does just fine being USD based. Are we not in a 'multipolar' world? I don't know that term.

[akimball]

...and the USD is used for far more illicit transactions than any other exchange medium. This will predictably change as privacy technologies become more widely adopted. For example, transactions on the Monero network have been growing at an exponential rate for several years.

[highwaylights]

IANAL but if your website has indicated that the software is useful for circumventing the law (I don’t know if they did this) then I imagine it could be possible to make the argument that you’ve induced a lot of people to commit felonies while profiting from it directly.

[seanw444]

Counterpoint: bring back the wild west.