What if published a fork of it on Ethereum with a new multisig update system set up?
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If just as an act of protest without actually using it, probably legal and ethical. If for personal or affiliates' use to conduct transactions? Maybe not. And it would possibly take a court to determine which.
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None of the governments is claiming that using it is illegal. It's illegal for a criminal to use it to hide the proceeds of their crimes, and they're saying that making it available to criminals is itself illegal. I haven't seen any claim that using it for privacy is.
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They're saying that the illegal act is publishing it in a way that criminals can use it. The governments may not consider publishing it on GitHub to be enough to cross that line since there's more work required to publish it in a usable form on Ethereum where it can be run.
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If something is an extralegal unregulated bank that's violating KYC requirements a bank would have to follow facilitating large anonymous transfers of wealth, I don't really care if governments lack the technical expertise to describe what's illegal about it accurately...
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...as much as I care that they actually take action to shut it down. I do believe we should continue to fight for the distinctions where they matter, but not to defend the people trying to make it easier to secretly transfer huge amounts of money.
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There's not much secret about it because the transactions going in and out are both entirely public. It's only secret if you make transactions within it and there isn't enough liquidity to do that at any large scale. That's how they track money passing through it anyway.
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But if it achieved critical adoption mass there would be, right?
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Yes, but none of it can really be used at any serious scale while actually hiding stuff right now. North Korea didn't really succeed at doing much more than losing a fraction of the money they hacked from smart contracts to Tornado Cash fees which afaik are basically torched now.
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OFAC sanctioned it because of what North Korea did with it. I doubt it has to do with Russia because the sanctions aren't anywhere near strict enough that they'd need to do that. They can simply get money through EU banks and there are EU banks helping them bypass sanctions.
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They wouldn't usually care that criminals hacked a bunch of smart contracts and ran it through something like this. They care because North Korea did it. Scams and stolen money is the status quo for DeFi and the SEC doesn't care about that but North Korea made it OFAC's turf.
Yes I'm aware. And somewhat rightfully so since that asshat founder went and gave NK a training on flaunting sanctions with toy money.