Dutch authorities arrest 29-year-old dev with suspected ties to Tornado Cash Dutch authorities have arrested a software developer suspected of working with Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service that only two days earlier was sanctioned by the US government for allegedly laundering money for ransomware operators and other cybercriminals. The 29-year-old man is accused of being part of the …
When I said the people behind Tornado Cash should be up on charges https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/08/08/treasury_sanctions_tornado_cash_korea, I got down voted by the crypto-shills, luckily no one was listening to them.
First, I am a crypto Hodler via a publicly traded coin trust regulated by the SEC.
Second, major investors buy crypto for a number of reasons. Some of these are nefarious (like buying illegal goods) but most aren't.
Third, users of tumblers, OTOH, are almost all nefarious. Why else accept the significant discount you pay when switching coins? It's the difference between people who use a pawn shop and those who use a fence.
Coincidently, Gizmodo was looking at news they have covered through the years and commented on the Bitcoin Manifesto, calling it "the pipiest of pipe dreams.”
I mildly disagree with that statement. According to the dictionary, investment is: "the action or process of investing money for profit or material result."
You can invest in collectible plastic figurines. You can invest in tulip bulbs. You can invest in crypto. Let's leave it to those with too much money in their pockets to decide whether crypto is a worthwhile investment. We can then have a good laugh in 10 to 20 years' time.
Tumblers seem to be a solution in search of a problem. Clearly those who play on the blockchain knew what they were signing up for, an indelible ledger system.
Or wait a minute... perhaps blockchain currency users are trying to invent a new anonymous method of currency transactions? But that problem has been solved for centuries with the physical transfer of fiat currency and/or fungible metals. I'm so confused now.
Blockchain "currencies" seems to be experiencing its penet remailer period.
QUOTE: trying to invent a new anonymous method of currency transactions? But that problem has been solved for centuries with the physical transfer of fiat currency and/or fungible metals
No, Mr. You cannot make an anonymous transaction with a person you do not know, in the other side of the globe, and probably in a sanctioned country, using old bills or fungible metals. You can do that with cryptocurrency. You will stay anonymous. If you are intelligent enough, no 3-letter agency will ever touch you or extradite you - maximum they can do is to put 24/7 surveillance on your computer and house, make some jokes with you, nothing more than that. You will still take everything you earned with you.
Enough said.
How many transactions have you concluded in any currency, real or virtual with an unknown entity on the other side of the world in a sanctioned country?
I can't think of a single instance in all my years where I have done that or believed it was necessary to do so.
Also, I'm not sure on what you mean by "person you do not know". Know in what sense of the word? I mean, I'd have to "know" the person's wallet address in order to send BTC. I'd also have to "know" the person or entity well enough to trust that I will receive value for the currency I transfer.
Furthermore, if the entity on the other end of that transaction resides (your example) in a sanctioned country, that transaction is illegal, period. Whether that transaction is concluded in BTC, dollars, bars of gold or crates of seashells matters not.
I'm tired of these strange hypothetical use-cases for cryptocurrencies. No one regularly sends funds in any form to individuals or businesses in sanctioned countries on the other side of the globe, except to pay for a decryption key if they got crypto'd and didn't have backups or have them sufficiently air-gapped.
Not that having a mind of your own is a good thing or a virtue in Brussels... but isn't it getting a bit over the top that everything the US WANTS the DUTCH roll over like a robot Vichy?
One day it is EUV the next it is Crypto, What tomorrow... a ban on Ham? Are you concealing ham in that sandwich? You're coming with us...
They have themselves so much to hide.
After all the Netherlands are the European gate for everything drugs. The country is probably a money laundering state in itself.
Plus, if any European leader tries to oppose the US, he gets destroyed.
In 2003, Jacques Chirac was the President of France and De Villepin the Minister of Foreign Affairs. They opposed the US on the war on Iraq. De Villepin was very famous and popular in France. A few years later they were both destroyed and facing prison. They were later cleared but it took years during which they were the plaque. Chirac's career was done but it was even more dramatic for De Villepin who was seen as the future president and became the one person to avoid.
I don't understand the double standard that I see commonly on the reg with privacy and decentralization when it comes to cryptocurrency. There are lots of comments and articles giving praise to decentralized or federated software, and there is an even bigger amount of concern towards privacy, with many upset about governments trying to regulate or shut down e2ee (among other things). For some reason, whenever this concern about privacy and centralization reaches cryptocurrency, most reg users call it money laundering. Only with crypto do they claim that if someone has something to hide, then they must be up to no good. With tor and e2ee, you can get up to arguably more nefarious things, but I see very few people who are arguing strongly against them.
Many also call crypto a fool's stock market, but the truth is that those who see it as a stock market in the first place are being foolish, because the purpose of crypto was never to create a stock market, the purpose is to create open sourced, decentralized, and more recently, private currency (like monero).
I'm not sure why fans of decentralized, open source, and privacy enhancing software are so quick to say 'good. they deserved it.' when someone (who we don't know much about) gets arrested for working on a project to try and patch in privacy to a popular currency.
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