[zomglings]

Tornado Cash is permissionless. Any data the creator of Tornado Cash could hand over, the government would already have because Ethereum and EVM-based blockchains are public by default.

The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.

Also some things you can discover if you try, really.

[jsnell]

If you make a system that by design can't meet the legal requirements for preventing money laundering, that's not actually a good defense. It's the opposite.

[zomglings]

How can conceiving of such a system and building it be a crime? It's like labelling thought a crime.

I would accept that operating such a system is indefensible.

But it's not as if the creator of Tornado Cash was solely maintaining servers that made this possible. Everyone running an Ethereum node (even if they aren't mining) is running the infrastructure that Tornado Cash runs on.

So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?

[jsnell]

That's a great idea! I'd be totally up for prosecuting anyone running a Ethereum node used for laundering money too. At this point they really have no excuse; they know what they're doing is illegal, and are still continuing to execute the smart contracts.

> So why is the guy who quite brilliantly conceived and executed this idea being punished like this?

I mean, you say it yourself. They're the ones who actually executed on the idea. They didn't write a paper on this being theoretically possible. They wrote the code. They deployed the code. They marketed it. They continued operating the system for years, and profited monetarily from it.

That there are other people who are also culpable for other things related to the mixers doesn't remove the culpability of the original creators.

And again: if you implement a system that's doing something illegal, and by design you make it impossible to turn that system off, that's not a defense.

[fallingsquirrel]

Should we also shut down the internet backbone because people are committing crimes with it? At this point they really have no excuse, we know the internet is used for illegal activity, yet they still continue to route packets.

Should we jail Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman because their work is used to encrypt illegal data? They wrote the paper. They published it. It's impossible to turn that system off, and as you said, that's not a defense.

[eropple]

There are legal uses of "the internet backbone" that greatly outweigh the illegal ones.

Non-KYC money transfer systems do not have such a raison d'etre.

[zomglings]

There is no difference between mathematics and code.

Certainly via a slippery slope argument there is no difference between mathematics and code.

I think we are at a point where we just have such different world views that we are unable to communicate meaningfully about this. Any society that decides to adopt your view is a society that would imprison me for simply operating a node.

Anyway, I enjoyed Linjat.

[tedajax]

> The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.

They didn't build a service because it's "just" a web client and relayers is an interesting take but sadly, very stupid.