There are people operating on blockchains in which transaction parameters are a matter of public record who: 1. May not want individual amounts and recipients to be publicly inspectable. 2. And are not criminals.
It may not be a right, but Tornado Cash is absolutely a tool to increase privacy. It is not solely for criminals to liquidate blockchain assets.
Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
And taxes are kind of proof that the government has a right to see ones personal transactions. You can't have income taxes without verifiable income requirements and reporting.
>Now if you don't think banks should be required to report suspicious transactions, get that law changed. But circumventing the law with crypto isn't the solution.
The issue is due to FATCA as a US citizen I have no exit valve to simply leave and seek residence elsewhere because leaving the country still makes me a US person reportable to IRS by worldwide banks (and in fact also by legal self reporting requirements) and the US charges a oft prohibitive multi-thousand dollar exit tax renounce. If we're going to put these kind of imposition on people we should at least streamline renouncing and make the payment to leave the gang something almost as cheap as the walk to Mexico.
You could want to use Tornado Cash for other forms of privacy, while still respecting your obligations to governments.
For example, suppose you are a company that pays salaries in tokens on the Ethereum blockchain but you want to do this without disclosing each employee's salary to the rest of their peers. You could fund a bunch of fresh accounts through Tornado Cash and distribute private keys to your employees off chain so they could access their funds.
Everyone involved could be completely respectful of taxes, etc. but they would still benefit from the privacy offered by Tornado Cash.
Maybe you don't, but that's what happens by default when using cash
If tornado cash were just obscuring transactions that could have conceivably been finalized with cash by private parties (~<$10K USD), I guarantee that no one in authority would give a shit.
A 200 euro banknote's dimensions are about 153x77x0.113 mm, if we consider double that thickness (because unless they're brand new, banknotes tend to crumple) we get that 2,253,400 euros will have a volume of 30 liters, which should fit in a backpack. If you wanted to use the more common 50 euro banknote you could fit 615,650 € in 30 liters.
The 500 euro note, which would allow you to carry an even larger sum in the same 30 liters, was discontinued because European authorities were concerned about how much the note was being used to facilitate illegal activity: https://www.bis.org/review/r160211e.htm . In the US, all bills with a face value greater than $100 were recalled in 1969 for similar reasons.
You can transport a greater dollar value in the same volume using diamonds or gold, but again, the amount one person can carry is not unlimited.
Now, it's true that these things are hard to enforce, or even impossible for small enough sums. But people systematically flaunting the rules for large sums of money will get arrested, even with cash.
I'm pretty sure that's legally required even when buying with crypto
Until you can face what it really is, you aren't going to come to terms with what's happening.
This is like making unlicensed guns that don't follow safety or tracking regulations, then complaining "but I'm not the burglar, I didn't kill anyone" when you get shut down.
This is and always has been the obvious explicit purpose of this code. This has nothing to do with "privacy" and you don't actually legally have the right to hide your financial transactions besides.