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Re:Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1B by JohnFen on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @06:52PM (#37242950)
The government is going to make the case not that a tool was made that could be used for money laundering, but that a tool was made to intentionally allow for money laundering. The former is not illegal, the latter is.

But regardless of intentions, not following KYC/AML rules is illegal.

Re:Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1B by mschuster91 on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:10PM (#37243113)
> But regardless of intentions, not following KYC/AML rules is illegal.

KYC/AML rules are of questionable legitimacy themselves, IMHO.

With less and less of society allowing to pay in anonymous currency (i.e. cold hard cash), either because it's dropped for "security" (i.e. shop owners don't want to pay for security to make sure the cash ain't stolen) or because of legal requirements (see e.g. Italy limiting cash transactions to 5.000€ in value, or Germany requiring a notification if you pay more than 10.000€ in value for a car), and many people moving to card payments due to convenience, there will be no way to escape the dragnet of governmental and private surveillance as all bank accounts are identifiable per KYC/AML regulations and virtually all banks report all account holders to Equifax and the other credit bureaus so to find out where a person banks is only a subpoena or a hack away. Oh, and completely forget about hiding legal but still sensitive payments: sex work of all kinds, political engagement, everything becomes yet another line in a trove of data lakes.

And that doesn't even touch the subject of card processing fees. Mastercard and Visa are rent-seekers of the worst kind, and no one seems to be willing to break them up or cap their fees, with PayPal close behind. Instead, everyone looks away when they cave to Evangelical pressure campaigns and drop sex workers left and right.

KYC/AML regulations deserve to be torn apart, and the people deserve privacy in their lives. Or, alternatively, we should force elected officials to open up their bank accounts to the public. If we can't have privacy, they certainly don't deserve it either.

Re:Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1B by JohnFen on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:15PM (#37243163)
You're making an argument about what the law should be. In many ways, I'm very sympathetic to those arguments.

But that's not what the law is, and law enforcement agencies as well as the court system only deal with what the law actually is.

You can (and should!) agitate and work towards changing the law to be more in line with what you think is right. That's the sort of change that is entirely possible in our system. But until then, the law is what the law is.