I'd really love to hear why you and other commenters are so supportive of transaction tracking.
Cash was and is still not very trackable; it's so untrackable that the IRS has to declare what events trigger tracking. Something like Tornado Cash just mixes what it's comparable to a credit card purchase down to being as trackable as cash. I don't see a problem with that.
Whether or not criminals use it is really not of concern to me. The FBI, CIA, and NSA can do their jobs just fine without transaction tracing. The fact that their jobs remain hard are also an indicator of freedom. Their jobs have already gotten quite a bit easier with the birth and success of the digital world.
Again, Tornado Cash is not money laundering. It only provides transaction privacy. Here is the difference:
The result of money laundering is clean money: you can deposit it into your bank, pay taxes on it, and buy a Ferrari. That only happens if you can give the IRS a plausible explanation for how you obtained the funds legally.
Tornado Cash does not give you this plausible explanation. After using it, you still will not have clean money with an IRS-approved explanation of income. All you gain is privacy from chain analysis.
You could launder money through a restaurant or minting a NFT, since those are otherwise legal activities that could plausibly explain ending the day with more money than you started with. But Tornado Cash does not fit that description.
If you sell $160000 worth of crack for green paper bills that nobody knows are connected to drugs, you cannot buy a Ferrari. The IRS will come knocking and ask where you got the cash. First you would need to launder the money.
If you sell 100 ETH worth of crack and send it through Tornado Cash, you cannot buy a Ferrari. The IRS will come knocking and ask where you got the cash. First you would need to launder the money.
Not when your use of the service obfuscates criminal flows and the service intentionally avoids meeting its AML/KYC obligations and doing even the tiniest iota to stop criminal use. That's when it switches from a privacy venue to a money-laundering venue and the fact you're there and using it in a legal way is incidental.
>why you and other commenters are so supportive of transaction tracking
because most people aren't a fan of tax evasion, black markets or crime. The same does in fact apply to cash which is why many jurisdictions heavily restrict large cash transactions and are in the process of reducing the usage of cash or circulation of large bills.
I think the NSA, FBI and CIA being able to do their job is a good thing because I'm not too keen on making the life of money launderers any easier.
No, money laundering obfuscates money sources because the money is illicitly gained or because the money holder doesn't want to pay taxes. It is neither money laundering or a crime to obfuscate the legitimate source of your money, because it is nobody's business but yours.
People don't money launder cash to hide where it came from, they money launder cash to provide a reason why they have it.
It sounds like the same thing, but it those are really two different things.
(I'm not a Tornado Cash proponent, but I am a digital financial privacy proponent; I support the Monero project.)