[turingfeel]

Probably not a hugely popular viewpoint, but I can’t help but immediately think there’s a good chance it’s dirty money. There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered so it’s worthless except for altruistic purposes like this.

[andrem]

If you trace back the addresses, you get to this:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x6365abaad54863bfd11acb6c4b611...

Which in turn shows it came from Tornado Cash which was put on the OFAC blacklist in August. So redox will likely have a very hard time to get this converted.

See here for more https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-...

[mudrockbestgirl]

He doesn't need to get it converted though. There are enough people that don't live in the US and would be happy to get paid in ETH to work on an open source project.

In a way, it seems almost like a feature that he can't just take out and convert the money :)

[pavlov]

If the person who received the ETH is a US person, it may not be a great idea to use the tainted money to pay foreigners for services.

[prvit]

By that logic US persons can't use Ethereum at all. If you withdraw ETH from Coinbase it is very likely that those coins will have passed through tornado.cash at some point.

This logic obviously doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

[fennecfoxen]

> By that logic US persons can't use Ethereum at all.

Entirely possible.

> There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

I think you underestimate!!

[runako]

> There's too much American money invested in Ethereum for any government agency to even seriously consider the idea of destroying it like this.

The US government routinely spends enormous sums of money to destroy industries where significant amounts of American money is invested.

[aliqot]

Hey now you're getting it

[3pt14159]

The reality right now is that there are coloured coins by default. We said this would happen back like at least five years ago, and now it is finally here. This is only the start and is essentially the doom of the libertarian case for the blockchain, and once that is out the window I see very little use for it that a normal DB of cryptographic public keys couldn't handle.

[ls15]

> The reality right now is that there are coloured coins by default.

Not for fungible coins

[withinboredom]

Yet.

[danuker]

There is still a diversification benefit, if you distrust the national currency, and use cryptocurrency similarly to gold.

That has been my main (only?) use case.

[jbirer]

They just have to come to Eastern Europe and trade it for cash OTC. Works very well here.

[prvit]

>So redox will likely have a very hard time to get this converted.

Why would he? People sell tornado cash tainted eth on big US exchanges every day. The sanctions don't forbid this.

[mjburgess]

Pretty sure that they do.

[from]

The sanctions technically only forbid future interactions with Tornado Cash contracts. However the compliance employees would get a note from Chainalysis saying that this guy received a bunch of ETH that was indirectly sourced from Tornado Cash and potentially do something about it (Kucoin Bitfinex et al would probably do nothing).

[prvit]

But in reality they don't.

[colinmhayes]

My understanding of the sanctions is that it's only the contract and a few addresses that are sanctioned. Coins that once went through tornado are fine.

[devwastaken]

This is why eth/bitcoin are not suitable crypto. There should be no address trail, same as cash.

[happymellon]

Wouldn't the ledger dictate that there is a trail?

[Semaphor]

I’m assuming they mean something like Monero (maybe also ZK-something). I don’t understand how it works, but enough people say they are anonymous, that I believe them ;)

[happymellon]

When the IRS is offering $100k bounties to break the anonymous features, it sounds pretty secure. Although if there is enough interest in breaking the obfuscation, these things normally end up finding the hole.

Only time will tell.

[thelittleone]

If I wanted people to think I hadn't cracked the anonymous features, I would post a $100k bounty to break it.

[caiomassan]

if u use it with people that also accepts eth as a form of payment, there is no need to convert anything.

[chaosbolt]

As opposite to the clean money banks like HSBC put in circulation right? Money is like genetics, follow the thread long enough and you'll find a rapist, a cartel drug lord, etc.

[kube-system]

HSBC ain't a story about a bank moving dirty money without consequence. https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hsbc-admits-anti-money-lau...

[55555]

That's not the whole story though. HSBC was literally founded so that the brits could bank the cash they were making by smuggling opium into China illegally. They're still net positive from banking drug money.

[kube-system]

That's more a story about sovereignty and not about AML evasion.

[calcifer]

The consequence by law was the revocation of their banking license. But because they are "too big to fail", they got away with a slap on the wrist instead.

[kube-system]

The appropriate degree of the consequence is debatable, I'm just saying, ~$2 billion of fines/penalties does not equal "clean".

[calcifer]

The fine was less than 20% of their annual income, for a crime committed over decades. Compared to what the law says, they got away completely clean. The punishment was barely more than a sternly worded letter.

[prvit]

>There’s just so much of it that can’t be laundered

How come? What money can't be laundered?

[svnpenn]

when you launder money, it has to be in a way that's actually plausible to the IRS. So if you have a small bookstore making 1 million per year, it might look suspicious.

[IshKebab]

Isn't that what NFCs are for?

[scrollaway]

NFC is near-field communication, a system your bank cards and modern smartphones use for transmitting data over very short distances.

Maybe you’re thinking of NFS? ;)

[kube-system]

NFS is network file system, a system for computers to access files from other computers over a network.

Maybe you're thinking of NFL?

[endofreach]

NFL is the national football league. They play a game called football even though they seem to be carrying the ball with their hands, most of the time. Seems important in the US…

Maybe you're thinking of NFV?

[pbhjpbhj]

Non-Fungible Crap^hTokens

[nerf0]

Pardon my ignorance: what does IRS have to do with money laundering?

[simiones]

The IRS is responsible for checking if you are paying the correct amount of taxes, and a component of that is knowing what income you have and where it comes from - since tax depends on the source of income typically (you have to pay different amounts of tax on money you got by selling shares versus money you stole from a shop).

[eurasiantiger]

This is how they managed to finally bust Al Capone, and probably other untouchables.

[martin_a]

They'll obviously look into how your business has developed over the past years, compare expenses and income, also to other businesses from the same field, and see if something seems odd.

So, starting to book lots of income without scaling expenses etc. will likely raise suspicion and lead to further investigation which can then be passed to law enforcement.

[kadoban]

Money laundering can be seen as spending a lot of effort to pay tax on your criminal earnings.

If you managed to launder it in a way that the IRS will accept it and the cops don't notice, you've succeeded and now have spendable money.

[kube-system]

Someone who launders money has two ways of handling that on their taxes:

1. lie about it, and commit tax fraud

2. tell the truth about it, and document their laundered money

[pixl97]

https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/how-cr...

[prvit]

So? You can just invest more into the laundering infrastructure.