First, some context for the normies among us (
): with most cryptocurrencies, everything you do is public and has no privacy guarantees beyond pseudononymity, which is often easily broken. This is problematic for drug buyers, money launderers, and also anyone who doesn't want their purchases, political donations, and so on to be literally public information. One way to deal with this problem is to use a currency like XMR that was designed from the start to be private, but everyone else out there can get their privacy with sketchy and inconvenient services created after the fact, called "mixers." A mixer is essentially a laundering service: you and a bunch of other people put in money, it gets shuffled around a bunch, then it gets paid back out to your other addresses, theoretically, though not necessarily always actually, anonymized beyond any hope of tracing.
Recently, the Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US Treasury. Apparently, it has been used to launder over $500 million in fake internet coins, much of it by North Korea. This is big news in the crypto world, you can find articles about it everywhere from real news sites, not just crypto rags. It's not completely unprecedented, since the Bitcoin mixer Blender.io was also sanctioned a couple months ago, but it seems like nobody really cared about that one, it must not have been popular. Looks like it was only used to launder $20 million, that's chump change.
Since Tornado is now sanctioned, it has become illegal to do business with them, and coins currently held in their smart contract (the service) are effectively tainted. This is serious stuff so companies are cutting ties and covering their ass. Correspondingly, people on the World Wide Web are freaking out, mostly by making twitter posts, and by posting like 20 articles about it on HN.
The first interesting drama is with Github (HN, Twitter). After Tornado was sanctioned, Github deleted the Tornado code repositories hosted on their service (not found, despite archive) and went on to delete the Github accounts of several people who had contributed to the project, which seems a little ex post facto to me but 
. Opinions are divided! Many people are angry at the Treasury, some people are angry at github for covering their ass, but the prevailing attitude on HN is this one given by junon:
People on Twitter are either wilfully dumb or simply ignorant.
GitHub had to do this. It was required of them by law. Tornado was sanctioned.
These prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any blocked person and the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
This is, unambiguously, directed toward entities such as GitHub providing them service.
I'm not a fan of GH these days but they did the only thing they could do in this situation. You can be upset about it, but you can't be upset at GitHub about it.
One Twitter user, @rossdefi, asks [marsey added]:
Is it time for a decentralized github? Surely that must already be a thing?
I wonder if this person is aware of a decentralized tool called git. It even involves a blockchain, at least by a certain definition of the term.
However the more interesting, in my opinion, drama coming out of this is this "dusting" thing. It's illegal for U.S. persons to transact with Tornado, but the thing is that people can send you cryptocurrency without your consent. Normally free money is nothing to complain about, but in this case it is tainted by legal liability since it can be traced back to Tornado's mixing service. A chaosmaxxer cryptochad has therefore decided to make a point by sending out a bunch of his now-sanctioned Ethereum coins in 0.1 ETH bundles (about 170 freedombux) to random people in what is being called a "dusting" attack (HN, Etherscan). It seems some of those targeted are e-celebs including "Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, TV host Jimmy Fallon, clothing brand Puma and a wallet created for donations to Ukraine." (HN, Coindesk (warning js cancer website), Twitter)
You could try to ignore the coins and not spend them to keep liability away from yourself, but a user on HN, ArtTimeInvestor, explains a further issue:
Ethereum is very different in this regard than Bitcoin.
Ethereum has accounts. So when Ana sends coins to Berta, Berta has no way to leave those coins untouched. As they just raise the amount of coins she owns. So next time Berta sends coins to Charles, it is unclear which coins she sent and if those include Ana's coins.
Bitcoin on the other hand has no accounts. When Ana sends coins to Berta, she just marks those coins as "Can be spent by Berta in the future". Berta can decide to never touch them. When Berta sends coins to Charles, she decides which of her coins she sends.
What a pickle! You can't refuse to accept money with either currency, but with Bitcoin you can at least pretend like the tainted coins don't exist and never spend them. With Ethereum they're all combined so it's impossible to easily control your legal liability by not using them. It seems inevitable that tainted coins will slowly diffuse with normal ones, so the enforcement on these sanctions is surely going to be subjective and may bring future drama. Large-scale transactions of the tainted coins will probably be picked up, but they probably won't check every 0.1 ETH recipient -- yet if done on a large scale, sending these 0.1 ETH transactions becomes a way in itself to launder the tainted money a second time and untaint it!
Moral of the story: use 
to buy your darkweb meth and ignore all other forms of cryptocurrency.
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Absolute state of crypto, you can donate your legal liability to random celebs and they are technically incapable of turning you down. Surely this will obsolete the old legacy financial system any day now.
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This is the real-life equivalent of soaking pennies in drugs and leaving them in random peoples property.
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the interesting part imo is that the amount is such that if you do it enough times to your own accounts then you successfully launder the money again, so there is reason to investigate all the addresses if it happens at big enough scale. Also, the penny is not just put in their property but directly added to their coin jar without a possibility of telling it apart from the others once added.
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People being upset with GitHub deleting the accounts are r-slurred. If Uncle Sam decides leaving those accounts alone wasn’t in violation of the sanctions and GitHub got it wrong by deleting them, it doesn’t fricking matter at all to GitHub and they won’t be in any trouble beyond a few spergs bitching online. If Uncle Sam decides leaving those accounts alone was in violations of the sanctions and GitHub got it wrong by not deleting them, then GitHub would probably be in for a really bad time.
Erring on the side of getting fricked by the government for violating sanctions just so you can say that you didn’t delete the accounts of some users who contributed to a literal money laundering service is honestly so r-slurred that I can’t comprehend why anyone is questioning their decision.
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I agree, it's crazy to expect anything else. Flirting with liability over probably empty IP shit with youtube-dl is one thing, but sanctions, direct from the government? Nobody in their right mind would take the chance.
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where's the wojak? where's the trans lives matter? the cartoon cats?? OUT
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Here's some cartoon cat.
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me as big cat, u (slim trans twink) as small cat
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Seems like crypto has just been taking Ls nonstop for over a year now
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Once regulation inevitably becomes standard, watch the value of most "stable coins" fall through the floor. Once cartels and rogue states start to pull out of crypto at risk of being raided or carpet bombed, cryptocels are gonna be roping like Christmas tree decorations, not that that already happens.
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Is there way to bet on crypto falling like the stockbrokers did for GameStop, like “short trading” or whatever they call it?
Seems like a good way to earn some money
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Yes, you can short crypto.
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Two sideways buy options:
\ 1 \ Silver and Gold ⛏-maxx
\ 2 \ Other currencies 💵💴💶💷 (marginally more r-slurred than hiding multiple G’s of precious metals under your bed)
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stfu the Iraqi dinar is going to skyrocket in value after the storm
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The Iraqi dinar is a worthless currency that will never increase in value. It's only worth anything to fools who think they're going to make a quick buck off of it. So please, do us all a favor and shut the frick up about it.
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Absolutely, I'll walk you through it if you promise to post your bankruptcy lol.
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Does that really seem like a good investment to you?
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Smart contracts are the crypto killer ap, monero is good though.
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This is the most baffling thing humanity has ever created
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Looking forward to the seethe generated for when DeFi as a whole gets the regulation hammer.
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Regulating defy is literally impossible and r-slurred
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The point is you can use de-fi without anyone knowing who you are
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You aren't thinking this through all the way. When you buy the coins with fiat, they're tied to your name, or are at best pseudononymous but still tied together. With mixers banned, it becomes impossible to launder them without exposing yourself to liability right there (notwithstanding trading to xmr and back, but that could be treated as illegal too at some point), which means everything else you do with the coins including "defi" is tied to your name too.
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Yeah, but you cant actually ban mixers, you can at best make certain regulated wallets not do business with them but ita not like you can stop people from using forked foss wallets/wallets in some shady shithole. The only link in the chain(reddit tier pun) that is fricked os the transfer into and out of fiat but everything else can be anonymized fairly easily.
FWIW china and russia have been trying to "ban" crypto for like a decade. Now dont get me wrong, you can still denornmify/tank the value of crypto. But it was always an edgy agorist project
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Shitcoin users should have known the risk
Monerochads stay winning
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I used to mess around with crypto buying drugs. But honestly all the biggest online drug dealers just use cash app.
Secured my spot as a top 100 most memorable rdrama poster
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Why are they angry? They should know the trade off to money laundering is getting shut down and sent to jail. Why are they shocked?
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aiui/iirc mixing flat out doesn't work for BTC, and hasn't for some time now because chain analysis of BTC is quick/easy/cheap enough that even lower level law enforcementcels can have it done in short timeframes.
Only way to really hide anything is to convert it to a privacy coin and back.
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I've heard the same thing which makes me wonder a bit why it was even necessary to sanction this. Maybe ETH is harder to analyze? Or is it just that Tornado Cash was so big the anonymity properties became very strong with a bigger anonymity set? Or is it just punitive, or maybe a way to send a message (
)?
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Probably a combination of all 3. Tbh I don't know much about ethereum unfortunately. (
or bust)
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It's probably just easier to send a message that the currency run through it is "tainted" to keep other actors from touching it than it would be to give out specific and shifting addresses. "don't transact with any wallet linked to a tornado cash tx is a simple directive.
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Snapshots:
sanctioned:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Blender.io:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
sanctioned:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
HN:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Twitter:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
not found:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
archive:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
HN:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Etherscan:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
HN:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Coindesk:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Twitter:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
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I agree Snappy, this spider accurately depicts the venomous and predatory nature of many cryptocurrency products.
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It's funny to watch cryptocels sperg out like someone who's mad at a jannie but it's because the government is investigating them for making a program designed for the express purpose of money laundering.
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This is unironically good for crypto. Shows states are taking it seriously. Every time China """bans""" crypto it spikes like a month later.
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