Privacy, human rights, and Tornado Cash - Molly White \ stacker news ~privacy

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Privacy, human rights, and Tornado Cash - Molly White www.citationneeded.news/tornado-cash/

5371 sats \ 12 comments \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 23 May privacy

Subtitle: I am more worried about privacy than crypto crime.

Molly White is notoriously not a fan of crypto or Bitcoin (and like most nocoiners, uses the former term). I've always found her a compelling writer and thinker regardless of where my opinions differ from hers. In many ways, this long essay is the mirror of this post from @siggy47, but instead of a Bitcoin advocate like Lyn bemoaning the lack of privacy urgency, it's a BTC critic the same issue on her "side" of things. It's a good, deep essay (complete with twelve footnotes and some references). Here's her intro:

Alexey Pertsev, one of the developers and operators of the Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixing service, has been sentenced to 64 months (over five years) in prison in the Netherlands. The service he helped to create enabled criminals to launder billions of dollars in illicit funds connected to massive hacks perpetrated by sophisticated cybercrime groups, ransomware operations that have decimated businesses, and pig butchering schemes that have ruined people. As someone who rails against the abuses by the cryptocurrency industry, why then am I so worried about his conviction, and about the parallel case in the United States against two Tornado Cash co-founders?

Some who know me as a cryptocurrency critic may find these opinions surprising coming from me. But if you are surprised, I have failed. And I think I have, because I think some of you will be.

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264 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 23 May

What few people seem to realize is that when you have core principles, it means you will defend people that you disagree with from time to time. This is very rare to see these days. It is disappointing that bitcoiners are often guilty of this as well. The divide and conquer strategy works on far to many. Tribalism isn't all bad but in situations where we can find common ground it makes way more sense to do so.

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 23 May

Very true. I try to read folks who disagree with me on some issues specifically to make sure I'm not falling into that trap, but man is there sometimes pressure to avoid any nuance.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @vigilantcitizen 23 May

I believe where Molly goes astray is in saying that she has a solution. But her link is to the E-Cash act (https://ecashact.us/), which promises, with a wink and a smile, privacy-preserving electronic cash, with "government-approved" hardware.

Look, we all build on American Internet rails, cryptography rails etc. But this is a step too close to the sun for me, personally.

While I appreciate that the Mastodon crowd have an interest in end-to-end encryption and open source, I do think that it will take a few years of seriously adversarial government for them to understand how they should update their threat model - something that people who protested against pandemic restrictions and people in more adversarial jurisdictions like Myanmar/Hong Kong/Russia/Ukraine have experienced firsthand and know.

It is bizarre to see such a split in the FOSS community. But I believe it stems from some FOSS people believing the collective good is better than private profit - yet it also, I think, stems from some FOSS people never having lived the hard reality of a truly determined adversary, one that doesn't shrink away from imprisonment for code/speech or debanking/going after people's livelihoods. I actually hope for all of our sakes that this doesn't come to pass in our lifetimes, but in say, a war between the major poles, I think we are going to quickly figure out that you can't have "social goods" and your cake ("trust in government") and eat it too.

131 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 23 May

Tornado Cash and other cryptocurrency mixers generally work by allowing a person to send cryptocurrency in chunks of preset sizesa into a large pool of assets. In exchange, that person receives a “private note”, which is sort of like an IOU to allow them to withdraw from the pool the same amount of crypto they put in.

For some reason only after reading this I realized that this is very similar to how ecash works.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 24 May

I never dabbled with tornado. I was not sure what its value proposition was

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 24 May

I think if she stopped conflating bitcoin and crypto she would get it. Everything she says about crypto is pretty spot on. But at this point I think she is too perversely incentivized to not get bitcoin.

That being said good to see her putting her bias aside to advocate for privacy.

11 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 24 May

Bitcoiners are often mistaken for criminals only because they advocate a new world. A world where freedom of using their own money differs from the principles of governing states. However this notion is changing but it needs to speed up or we will find ourselves with more Molly Whites.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @softglitter2d 24 May

Some thoughts about this case is also related to what we experienced with Samourai. For instance, when the bitcoin community heard about it, the first step was to enhace privacy and address this as a matter of concern. The loudest expression of it was the Silent Payment.

On the other hand, since Tornado Cash's indictment and also OFAC implementations, their community didn't address this issue as much as important it is. So, my two cents here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Sirkay 24 May

As long as change remain the only constant thing in life there will be need for one to constantly recheck the principles in which one stand so as to provide basis where needed when circumstances seems to challenge the principles