(Tornado cash, like most mixers, leaves too many loopholes in its contract to be proof against a concerted attack in typical practical applications - they usually leak too much partial information.)
Unless you prove it is, it's not. It's not encoded in the UN's human rights charter, nor in pretty much any legal system out there.
Governments should protect you from other individuals accessing your financials except the government itself, but that's it.
> Cryptography allows individuals to use the force of mathematical law, superior to all other law, to enforce their privacy rights.
I am absolutely against the use of "cryptography" (which by the way any transaction system uses) and cryptocurrencies as there is one and only one purpose for such a thing: tax evasion and money laundering. There's literally no other purpose except far fetched arguments.
I think the concept is at least useful if you want to protect a right. Without it, in practice, it would be much more difficult to defend against the controlling capacity of raw force.
This is a baseless, so I think you're making a bad assumption. Finance is opaque at a low level because of arbitrage and physical trade, but it's the belief that the physical world dictates social rights (which are moral at the core, so let me know if you want to jump to morality?) is simply incorrect.
What's more, I think that the default position that finance should be private actively hurts society in innumerable ways. Unfortunately, without it, capitalism immediately breaks down into monopolies. So we live in the happy middle, as with many things, suffering the inevitable (corruption, blackmail, etc).
There's a point at which if you undermine law enforcement enough there's no point in continuing to try to enforce laws, which means there's no point in having laws at all. The hype mob either doesn't see this or doesn't care, which is incredibly naive either way.
Sure. That’s not what’s happening.
Tornado was used illegally. Its leadership kept developing it, kept getting paid, and made no apparent course corrections. This wasn’t simply a GitHub repo; it was a remunerated enterprise.
When I’ve brought up the legal issues around mixers, a common response involves the impossibility of governments to enforce their Will on blockchains. If these guys messaged similarly they’re justifiably boned.
Do we have such a money supply? If not, do we have international trade? Is the world not multipolar?
This claim fails on face value. Most of history was multipolar, international trading and reliant on money states de facto controlled. (You’re not moving tonnes of gold without the state’s permission and not being chased by them.)
An argument could be made that the US stopped being the arbiter of last resort wrt the medium of trade since the Ukraine war, but before that point, it was certainly not multipolar. There was one political entity that, along with its allies, controlled the value of money, and they were disincentivised from cheating too hard by the fact that they could dictate terms to the rest of the world if it was important enough to them.
But I grant you, heavily-guarded ships full of physical gold would still work today. If that's a future you're on board with you may want an answer for how the piracy problem will evolve if trends around the cost of kinetic weaponry continue.
I'm rejecting the premise that we need a neutral money supply. (I reject the notion such a thing can exist. Money--monetary value, even--are social constructs.)
International trade in a multipolar world with sovereign currencies and commodities works. It has since at least the Bronze Age. So yes, if someone wants to cart around gold or use crypto, that's fine. But it doesn't magically exempt them from the law. A Dutchman committed crimes under Dutch law. They were arrested in the Netherlands. This isn't some Kim Dotcom bullshit. It's the law being applied plainly.
Since 1971? Yes. That is a very brief experiment in monetary history, and quite Lindy. It can be validly estimated to have 51 years of life left in it (albeit with vast error bars, difficult to calculate).
"Neutral money" has no meaning in an era when information travels at the same speed as trade. (It arguably lacks any meaning today.)
Bronze Age civilizations didn't have the surplus labor to haul around gold. (Nor to test it.) Though they didn't have coins, they used token money--from engraved clay and stone markers to shells and beads. Commodity money was traded in representative form locally and physically over long distances. Commodities, not bullion, were used because they preserved value over distance--a Hittite trader couldn't know what a gold bullion would exchange for in Hispania or Egypt when they got there.
Just-so stories based on implausible premises -”didnt have surplus labor" lol- are conspicuously unpersuasive.
Versus stories about neutral money?
Insufficient labor is a hypothesis. The archaeological evidence is engraved clay and stone markers. Long-distance trades settled with commodities. Bullion being traded between kings and kingdoms, seldom by merchants, and abandoned stores of value holding jewelry, precious stones and spices.
International trade in multipolar worlds does fine without a "neutral" money.
The posts keep shifting for what governments cannot enforce. I suppose this is a natural endgame; crypto enthusiasts setting precedents for, and giving popular cause to, state expansion.
AML has never been even close to perfect. But it's enforced. Hopefully, the Monero community learns from Tornado. Instead of thumbing its nose at the law, it could try to not encourage illicit transfers in the name of some convoluted (if entirely unoriginal) interpretation of financial privacy. Then it could survive and become something novel, like Bitcoin.
Moreover the kind of financial privacy you think of is from other citizens to not know your financial movements, it doesn't apply to nation states for obvious tax reasons and money laundering purposes.