This should elicit a response from every one who believes in Constitutional rights and internet freedoms. It is now illegal to send transactions to a particular smart contract. Sending a transaction is an act of publishing information, so this means publishing certain information is illegal for Americans.
Moreover, the sanctions law empowers the USG to sanction people, and the entities they run, but with this measure, is being misappropriated to prohibit Americans from using neutral privacy tools that no one runs. This marks a significant expansion in the scope of discretionary power wielded by the state, without any legislation authorizing this escalation in powers.
Finally, in reaction to the sanctioning of a smart contract address, Github has now removed all code for the Tornado Cash smart contract, and banned any user who has contributed code to it, which further reinforces the argument that this measure is an assault on free speech.
> Sending a transaction is an act of publishing information, so this means publishing certain information is illegal for Americans.
Try sending money to Al Qaeda and you'll find out this not exactly a new thing.
The argument you're making is that the laws made by a democratic government should not apply to a part of the world, because it uses fancy language like "smart contract". That's an extraordinary claim.
The idea that "no-one runs" them is also bogus: every Ethereum node runs them. Having a public-access virtual machine becomes a weird legal matter once the North Koreans start using that for proliferation.
>>Try sending money to Al Qaeda and you'll find out this not exactly a new thing.
Sending money to al-Qaeda involves the intent to aid al-Qaeda. Increasing the anonymity set of cash, by using cash, or the anonymity set of tornado cash, by using tornado cash, and inadvertedly helping a select group of criminals avoid financial surveillance (among a huge number of inadvertent effects), is not in the same category of actions as acting with the intent of helping a criminal.
>>The argument you're making is that the laws made by a democratic government should not apply to a part of the world,
The argument I'm making is that the laws violate human rights, because privacy is a human right, even if the CCP or the US Treasury disagrees. Something being a law does not automatically make it just.
Moreover, there is no law prohibiting the use of privacy technology. All the privacy violating laws were designed around the reliance of people on financial intermediaries, which don't exist on a public ledger with direct write access for end-users. The current US Treasury measure is a misapplication of the sanctions laws. The law wasn't designed to allow software to be sanctioned.
>>The idea that "no-one runs" them is also bogus: every Ethereum node runs them.
We may as well act as if "no one runs it" for the purposes of deciding on the appropriate legal treatment of privacy protected transactions, since the idea of forcing every one in the world to not run some popular node software, or creating an American firewall to prevent people in the US from connecting to those nodes, is such an affront to liberal democratic principles - including the right to use strong encryption - that it's not even worth addressing.
Moreover, the sanctions law empowers the USG to sanction people, and the entities they run, but with this measure, is being misappropriated to prohibit Americans from using neutral privacy tools that no one runs. This marks a significant expansion in the scope of discretionary power wielded by the state, without any legislation authorizing this escalation in powers.
Finally, in reaction to the sanctioning of a smart contract address, Github has now removed all code for the Tornado Cash smart contract, and banned any user who has contributed code to it, which further reinforces the argument that this measure is an assault on free speech.