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by lesuorac 758 days ago
You do notice in your example Spotify doesn't shut down? Afaik, nobody is allegeding that Tornado Cash maintained user accounts for money launderers.

It'd be more akin to if you had say McDonalds and people used your parking lot for Craigslist transactions (some of which were fradualent). Should you be required to close that McDonalds?
1 comments
jsnell 758 days ago
Spotify doesn't shut down because they're primarily providing a legitimate service to legitimate people. The money laundering traffic there has to be absolutely miniscule compared to the legitimate traffic. It makes basically no sense as a money laundering avenue, and the only source for this (that I could find with quick Googling) is an "anonymous police officer" who just clainms that it's happening, but can't even put a number on the magnitude.

But if it really were happening at any kind of volume, it's obvious that Spotify would be quite willing to make their KYC requirements for artists stricter. Any payments they'd made would obviously be made through the banking system, and the law enforcement would be able to trace them to the next hop, which again would have done their KYC due diligence.

The crypto mixer, on the other hand, has no real use case except money laundering. They are also obviously unwilling to do any KYC, and unable to manage their system in a way that would prevent it from being used for money laundering. And it wasn't by accident. It was fully intentional and by design.

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arunabha 758 days ago
> The crypto mixer, on the other hand, has no real use case except money laundering

Is that true though? What if I am in a country which disapproves of $activity that is legal in most of the world but not in my country. I might simply want anonymity in my Bitcoin transactions.

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BobaFloutist 758 days ago
So your argument is "What if I'm not money laundering, but simply breaking the law in some other way?"
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lesuorac 757 days ago
Yeah, they probably should've stopped mid sentence where you can argue "I just want to watch pornography".

It's a bit weird how much scrutiny there is over obscuring the transaction history for cyrpto. Like you money launder via houses you get a slap on the wrist first [1] but if you aren't actually directly involved in the transactions you get 5 years. The guy's not running a server; he published a contract that other people's computers are paid (by also other people) to run. Afaik, there wasn't even an allegation that he profited per transaction.

[1]: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/anti-money-laundering-agency-imposes-5...

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