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...that enabled nefarious people to go about their deeds unpunished.



The nefarious people were probably on a unix system or a windows system. Should we go about and delete their contributors accounts as well?

I’m not at all pro crypto but this enforcement does seem extreme. I do understand that Microsoft is just following the sanctions.


This is disingenuous. It's like responding to someone arguing for gun control with "all the shooters drank water, should we ban that?".

We can argue about the legit/legal uses of Tornado Cash and whether it deserves to be sanctioned - but do so in good faith rather than pretending like it is equivalent to a general purpose tool like Microsoft Windows.


The tweet is very low information for me to comment. I can't tell whether these people contributed to Tornado cash before/after the sanctions were in place.

I think a fairer analogy would be, some devs contributed to signal, signal or a derivative of it got used by North Korea/Terrorist/current enemy of choice of the political class. Do we go around and delete the developers GitHub accounts?

Having never used tornado.cash or much of crypto (apart from making some money doing spot trades) I can't comment on what the good use cases are. Here's a sample thread of Vitalik claiming to use Tornado.cash to donate to people in Ukraine https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/155692560223356928.... I can find some other threads like this on Twitter.

This is just another case of Government choosing "security" over privacy and should be scary to folks on HN than be cheered upon.

As a side, I am not sure whether Tornado.cash was marketed specifically for "bad" use cases. In the example below I'd support the DoJ in fining & imprisoning a software engineer for his visit to Pyongyang https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizen-who-conspired-assi...


It's noone's responsibility not to make things that are helpful to criminals.


I know right! Just like the browser you are using to post this comment.


That's a false equivalence and you know it. A browser and a coin mixer have 2 very different core audiences, aiming to do very different things. I don't know anyone who has legitimate uses for a coin mixer other than laundering/covering their tracks.


> I don't know anyone who has legitimate uses for a coin mixer other than laundering/covering their tracks.

Thank you for writing "I don't know anyone" instead of a more typical "no one ever".




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