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if true, this thread has scary implications for anyone who contributes to open source privacy software. basically you can be arrested if criminals use it and the authorities can’t figure out who else to arrest.

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Petr Korolev

@skywinder

Aug 19

4/ That triggered investigations in the USA and Europe. And it appears that the investigators had no idea how to deal with the situation, no idea how open-source software development works, and just hit a developer with numerous commits and a real name on GitHub.

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It seems that this could potentially be legally complicated, a lot depending on Dutch law. Running a full on anonymized service would likely violate laws, unclear what writing software would imply and what’s the specific suspected crime here

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Tornado Cash is a smart contract which had approval for updates, etc. delegated to a community via a DAO. It's not a service they ran. The people running the code are Ethereum miners and people running other validating Ethereum nodes. The developers didn't host it as a service.

11:26 PM · Aug 23, 2022Twitter Web App

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I still think it's completely functional but the DAO supposedly killed itself to an extent by wiping the multisig keys, etc. and it's probably not possible for it to be updated / improved anymore without making a new smart contract and starting over again as a fork of it.

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I'm not sure "the DAO members aren't the ones guilty of the crimes committed by the code, everyone running Ethereum nodes are the ones guilty" is the winning position you think it is...

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Ethereum miners are the ones who can choose to omit transactions. One of the mining pools stopped including Tornado Cash transactions after the sanctions. They're the ones processing the transactions. It's legal for them to do that if they follow regulations placed on them.

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