The very idea of cryptocurrency — of code that actively redefines reality so that human laws cannot contain it — is inherently risky to the continued existence of human society, because it undermines the human-to-human trust that society requires as a prerequisite.
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Cryptography *helps* people trust each other, but cryptocurrency *erodes* it. Precisely because it is immutable.
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What does that have to do with first amendment protections of open source development?
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Since when does the First Amendment come above the trust in the Constitution and laws that define it? If you create a "trustless" society -- the stated goal of cryptocurrency leaders -- then the First Amendment is just a piece of paper because it isn't a Solidity contract.
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At what point does it make sense to undermine the very legal framework that guarantees your freedom of speech?
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The First Amendment isn't a natural law or part of the cosmic order, it's a thingy written down by people 250 years ago that people could change if they liked.
Absolutist freedom of speech isn't a coherent ideology, because it condones its own destruction.
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It's hardly absolutist free speech to believe that publishing code to provide people with financial privacy is not violating any laws. Privacy itself is a right covered by multiple parts of the US constitution. Publicly publishing all your transactions is not a legal requirement.
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Doesn't make much sense to claim that when the topic is a port of the traditional Zcash technology to an Ethereum smart contract...
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The blockchain has a *PUBLIC* record of every transaction committed, of every Solidity contract executed.
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The topic is a port of the traditional Zcash technology to Ethereum. Tornado Cash was essentially a shielded pool on Ethereum. It's strange to call end-to-end encrypted data public. It was not some hosted mixing service or just obfuscation. They had to track it going to/from it.
You can't just say "ooh, encrypted black box, can't tell who's using it" when there's a public record of everyone who put money into the encrypted black box.
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