The phrase 'according to the treasury' and Ctrl-V are doing a lot of work there. The government says a lot of things. The other day the Secretary of State claimed Tornado Cash was a DPRK sponsored hacking group before deleting the tweet. Not everyone in authority has a real great understanding of the technology involved.
> We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to...(AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly.
The Tornado Cash mixer contracts have been immutable since May 2020. It's a dumb piece of software that can't be modified or upgraded. Its authors have no control over who uses it on the blockchain.
It's kind of a strange accusation to say that someone has 'willingly and repeatedly' neglected to comply with legal obligations by failing to do something that's technically impossible to accomplish. All the GitHub users did was write code, and simply writing code, while not executing it to do something illegal, seems like it would be pretty well protected by the First Amendment, since code is speech. Turning people's lives to shit over what a software tool they invented gets used for later, after it's completely out of their hands, is pretty wild.
You copied and pasted Brian E. Nelson's complaint:
> Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks.
But what Nelson fails to mention is that a) everyone involved has failed to impose 'effective' controls because it's physically impossible for anyone to, and b) basic measures to block sanctioned entities were actually implemented by the operators of the Tornado Cash website (which just got added to the SDN list anyway). So the complaint is that the control measure in place isn't an 'effective' control measure against entities that don't use the website.
And not that the exact number matters, but the Treasury is alleging an obviously maximally exaggerated amount of money laundering. $7 billion is the total value of deposits into Tornado Cash over all time. For that to be $7 billion laundered, 100% of all deposits, ever, put into the mixer would have to have come from illegal sources, which is obviously false. Depositing legally earned money into a privacy smart contract isn't money laundering. A sizeable portion of deposits are illicit, but far from a majority.
>Since becoming active in August 2019, Tornado Cash has received over $7.6 billion worth of Ethereum, a sizable portion of which have come from illicit or high-risk sources.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220808155413/https://twitter.c...
> We are talking about an entity that according to the treasury has laundered more than 7 Billion USD, assisted criminals and neglected complying to...(AML/CFT) obligations willingly and repeatedly.
The Tornado Cash mixer contracts have been immutable since May 2020. It's a dumb piece of software that can't be modified or upgraded. Its authors have no control over who uses it on the blockchain.
https://tornado-cash.medium.com/tornado-cash-is-finally-trus...
It's kind of a strange accusation to say that someone has 'willingly and repeatedly' neglected to comply with legal obligations by failing to do something that's technically impossible to accomplish. All the GitHub users did was write code, and simply writing code, while not executing it to do something illegal, seems like it would be pretty well protected by the First Amendment, since code is speech. Turning people's lives to shit over what a software tool they invented gets used for later, after it's completely out of their hands, is pretty wild.
You copied and pasted Brian E. Nelson's complaint:
> Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks.
But what Nelson fails to mention is that a) everyone involved has failed to impose 'effective' controls because it's physically impossible for anyone to, and b) basic measures to block sanctioned entities were actually implemented by the operators of the Tornado Cash website (which just got added to the SDN list anyway). So the complaint is that the control measure in place isn't an 'effective' control measure against entities that don't use the website.
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/04/15/tornado-cash-adds-c...
And not that the exact number matters, but the Treasury is alleging an obviously maximally exaggerated amount of money laundering. $7 billion is the total value of deposits into Tornado Cash over all time. For that to be $7 billion laundered, 100% of all deposits, ever, put into the mixer would have to have come from illegal sources, which is obviously false. Depositing legally earned money into a privacy smart contract isn't money laundering. A sizeable portion of deposits are illicit, but far from a majority.
>Since becoming active in August 2019, Tornado Cash has received over $7.6 billion worth of Ethereum, a sizable portion of which have come from illicit or high-risk sources.
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/tornado-cash-ofac-desig...