Glad to see this silly crypto fad fade away. 0% utility, waste of energy, and has no possibility of every being used as a currency for anything. People will look back on this era and wonder what the heck people were thinking.
This is like the 900th time I have seen this. Crypto doesn't seem to be able to 'fade away 100% completely' does it? So I think that it is here to stay on the condition that there are a compliant few cryptocurrencies and projects after clearer regulations, indicating that not all of them will survive.
But the whole point of this is that Mailchimp and Intuit are responsible for this data breach and suspending a wave of accounts without warning doesn't solve anything.
Considering they still make up a significant portion of Ethereum’s daily activity, I would say pretty well! The NFTs are “here to stay” as long as Ethereum continues to fill blocks, which might be years or decades.
FWIW, “a significant portion of Ethereum’s daily activity” doesn’t sound nearly as impressive to people outside the crypto bubble as you seem to think it does, especially those who are aware of the extent to which unregulated wash trading dominates NFT markets, rendering most of this activity imaginary at best and fraudulent at worst.
This is a very common trend I see when speaking with cryptocurrency advocates. When asked to point to success stories or real world use cases, 9/10 times the answer is related to some other cryptocurrency scheme: a swaps smart contract or a decentralized market maker, wallet software, etc. It seems like most of the use cases for cryptocurrencies are just more examples of the snake eating its own tail.
If you view all crypto activity as only imaginary or fraudulent, I doubt either of us will be able to change each other’s minds.
The NFTs that artists minted in the boom in early 2021 are still being traded across different platforms, curated in physical exhibitions, indexed and hosted by multiple competing companies, and talked about in online magazines and podcasts. Sales on OpenSea and other platforms continue to pay royalties back to creators and sometimes non profit charities that they set in splits. Hundred-year-old art auction houses are now in competition with open source platforms that take nearly a hundred percent less commission on sales, have a lower barrier to entry, and provide higher artist royalties.
Blockchain hasn’t given us flying cars or replaced corporations or whatever boosters say, but it has given us some new tools to imagine transactions and ownership differently than just whatever Stripe is doing.
>>>especially those who are aware of the extent to which unregulated wash trading dominates NFT markets, rendering most of this activity imaginary at best and fraudulent at worst.
Thank you for your response. I agree that the art market deserves much more scorn than it receives.
Regarding your friend, I’m curious to know how competitive crypto is for your use case. Western union charges about 2% to transfer $5000 from the US to the Philippines and can deposit directly in a bank account. I understand that international wire transfers are comparable. Services like remitly appear to be even cheaper. How does crypto compare in price and convenience?
>>>Western union charges about 2% to transfer $5000
That is absolute extortion. I sent ~0.05 BTC in May and the transaction fee was 0.067%. Eyeballing the transaction screenshot she sent, she wasn't getting hammered on the exchange rate to pesos either (via coins.ph). There was some KYC involved (sender name/address required to release the funds on her end) that slowed us down a little. It wasn't a requirement several years ago. I bet we could have fed the form fake info but didn't want to risk the funds being frozen, she needed cash in hand in less than 24hrs to purchase new inventory.
Pretty good, according to my own suggestions and predictions on crypto and NFTs months ago [0] [1].
I have already said that 90% of NFTs will fail and not all of them will survive many times before [2], and only a certain few crypto projects will survive, even past regulations.
The 'people' you are referring to were expecting all 20,000+ crypto or NFT projects to survive this crash which is just delusional as expecting all internet startups created during the dotcom boom to survive after the collapse in 2000. As you can see what I said months before in [0], [1] and [2] tells you that I am not part of the 'people' you speak of.
As always, I expect only a few crypto projects to survive this crash and regulatory clarity.
Kind of like most people understand that nuclear powered rockets and planes are a bad idea?
I have a hard time seeing how crypto-commodity projects, with their near the extreme libertarian beliefs, will jive with society's expectations around money and assets. That being said, there will be a few things that come out of the space, like formal verification, that will be incorporated into other software.
I don’t. Mass exploitation of such planes would be a problem, but a few high-powered rockets would be extremely useful and safe enough. Nuclear is just another technology.
I use crypto every day and I'll continue using it for the years to come. That is, until it's completely banned along with cash, and the totalitarian surveillance dystopia of the future has a complete grip on citizens everywhere.
Then we will look back on this era and wonder what the heck people were thinking.
Yes, crypto is heavily used by the Ukrainian national defense effort, including in other ways that I can't clarify at the unclassified level.
What always amazes me is the crypto-haters who speak so authoritatively about how crypto is bad/useless, while being borderline clueless about how it's used in the real world.
^This will have to suffice. I've read juicier reports but they are SECRET//NOFORN. You'll have to take my word for it that the Ukrainians are using web3 payments for some...surprising activities.
I live in an authoritarian thirld world country and I can say it's a godsend.
But yes, it's only a temporary workaround and I'm seeing the trainwreck in slow motion.
The original Monero was shown to be flawed in this respect, maybe they have gotten better since then (in theory)? I'd expect chains like Monero and Zcash to fall into the same camp as Tornado Cash, just a matter of time
CBDCs will become the norm, the vast majority won't notice the change from what they do today. China is already blazing this trail though I expect the western version to be much different, more of a public/private partnership and a rise of thin banks.
This is why Tornado Cash was built, to provide privacy. But oops, government does not want you to have that freedom. Users are now forced to mix with a centralized service at cost of giving up privacy to them.
Freedom is not free, nor are you free to do whatever you want. We have rules and expectations as society, we elect officials to codify these into law. Most of us do not want anonymous money because of the downsides. It's not so dissimilar from seatbelt or smoking laws.
Tornado was shutdown because they were knowingly supporting sanction violations. The developer was arrested in a country that does not have the same freedom of speech we do in USA
The crypto commodity community will have to learn that they are part of the larger society and accept that they will not always get things their way. If you want things to change, you'll have to adjust how you approach these differences, and more than likely give up some of the absolutist views to meet in the middle.
Code is free speech though. The rules and expectations the western world has set around speech doesn’t align with sanctions that target code and open source software. The sanctions are not against an individual person, and it isn’t clear yet why the developer was arrested. If it was for knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary.
You do not seem to be up to date with the details. The developer was arrested for running a money laundering service, not because of the code they wrote, but because of the money transfer service they ran, which happened to use the code they also wrote. The developer helped sanctioned entities bypass restrictions.
The code was taken down by a private company, freedom of speech is not protected on GitHub or Twitter. Additionally, American laws do not extend to other countries. It was the Dutch who arrested him.
You should start by understanding the basic facts and relations and not engage in hyperbole like "knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary" because this is not at all what happened here.
Very familiar with the situation, the tornado cash code, and the details of the case that are public so far.
I appreciate your optimism about freedom of speech being unaffected but this is not as cut and dry as an individual running a money laundering business, if that is what you think Tornado Cash is. We do not hold Tor exit nodes responsible for the illicit activity on the dark web and we definitely do not hold Tor developers responsible.
that source is quite biased, do you have any links to content which is not in the crypto camp?
He's actually wrong in that it executes on the ethereum blockchain. It actually executes on Optimism, a layer-2 solution, and they are quite concerned for their own situation.
He also says that there aren't people tied to it, but who was collecting the contract fees (beyond gas)?
Huh? It does execute on Ethereum, and the contracts are still accessible at the same addresses if you run your own node. This is where it was first deployed. It also runs on other EVM chains and L2s including Optimism, Avalanche and others.
The first reports on this situation originated from non-crypto sources so it should be easy to find them. A lot of the more in depth discussion is coming from crypto camp because it negatively affects all those users and their privacy.
Eventually, the crypto community will have to step back from their extreme positions.
A human paid to deploy these contracts, a human keeps the fees. This is not a "fully autonomous" contract. It is not an attack open source. There is a difference between writing code and running code, or making it runnable. Blockchain creates new scenarios we hadn't considered before, but common sense can still be applied.
The sanctions are not targeting a human or a group of humans, they target an open source project and its autonomous smart contracts. Look up the sanctions and project source code yourself.
The only fees taken are relay fees, which can be anybody - not necessarily the developers. The conversation steers back to whether it is illegal to run a Tor exit node and whether it is illegal to develop Tor the open source project. Tornado Cash can be republished without relay fees, with zero governance, no token, would that be acceptable?
To a reasonable person, Tornado Cash is not acceptable, which is something the crypto commodity space will have to accept. Technical details do not matter, Tor has nothing to do with it. The sanctions impact people and their financial transactions, even if there is some code in there. Sure they listed addresses, it's not the first time, and it will be people who get in trouble for interacting with these addresses. That there is "autonomous" code is besides the point, most code is autonomous anyway.
If you support evil, there will be repercussions. Your participation in the pool is sufficient material support. We have laws, adjust to obey them or risk getting in trouble.
Sad and troubling that so many people hearing this will equate privacy with evil and illegal behavior. This is why I am pointing out Tor, because there are many licit users of it.
Tornado wouldn't be needed if Blockchain wasn't so flawed to begin with. Bunch of techno utopians thinking their way is better for everyone and don't want to hear any criticism or that their ideas aren't actually good... smh
What is sad is that you use and reuse hyperbole as a talking point
Legally yes, with legal precedent set in court. Morally depends on your perspective. Some people advocate for privacy, others advocate for surveillance.
Typically this is followed up with a misunderstanding of the DVD-CSS decision, or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech, but I'll bite. What precedent do you imagine holds that code is somehow free speech?
Please understand that I'm going to look it up and I'm going to push back.
The debate is pretty settled that code and language should be protected by 1st amendment as free speech. Based on this precedent, we should not be cheering on the barring of the open source project and it’s developers.
It is less clear if the execution and use of code should be free speech, and how to regulate code and language when the sole goal is illicit. Like anarchist cookbook, 3D printed guns. But to argue this, you will have to argue the sole goal of Tornado Cash is to aid in illicit behavior. There are many licit users of the protocol, like with Tor, who just want to seek privacy in their online communication.
The issue comes down to whether sending and receiving private keys in an encrypted way over the internet should be protected or not.
The code was taken down by a private company, where your free speech does not apply. This is closer to the debate about content moderation on social media, because after all, github is more like a social media site than most realize. GitHub suspended the developer accounts of their own accord, likely to cover their ass.
The Tornado Cash case is all about money laundering, the fact that there was code to automate the process is besides the point.
The bigger problem is whether republishing the source code would make you a target of the sanctions. If a user republishes the source code on Ethereum, pirate bay, Gitlab, or another host then it is reasonable to assume their actions might be interpreted as “supporting the Tornado Cash project” which makes them a target of the sanctions. If a user modifies the code and republishes it probably will fall under same risks.
US sanctioning an Ethereum contract address and unrelated source control providers deleting user accounts and repositories is a good example of chilling effect in action. The individual developers are not in scope of the sanctions, and are not sanctioned entities. Not even the source code or its many individual repositories are directly sanctioned, but chilling effect is leading hosting services to erase it all as a precaution.
> Bernstein v. the U.S. Department of State, landmark legal decision (1996) that set two important precedents in the field of digital technology. First, it ruled that U.S. government regulations that barred the export of encryption software were unconstitutionally restrictive; second, it declared that software source code can be a form of protected free speech.
> The district court found that the Source Code was speech protected by the First Amendment, see Bernstein v. Department of State, 922 F. Supp. 1426 (N.D. Cal. 1996) ("Bernstein I")
I suggest you stop reading conspiracy books. Crypto isn't failing (and has no future) because of some shady conspiracy. It's failing because it's a bad idea that wastes energy. It's usage as a currency will never, ever happen. It's just fundamentally flawed.
I don't know what the fuck it is, I just know I use it.
Many of non techie friends do too. That's what happens when you live under a corrupt latin american govt that steals half of your money.
Cry me a river. The intersection between people who are operating in the few ethical areas of cryptocurrency and those that need an email marketing service is basically empty. If you are promoting your cryptocurrency project via email there is a very good chance that you are part of the problem.
So this seems like a manifestly reasonable action that is hard to criticize. All these crypto-libertarians seem to love the free market until it makes a decision they disagree with, I wonder why?
Again, it doesn't matter. No serious provider will ban customers without a fair warning. Same as Namecheap when it ended services for Russian customers with a 6-day notice.
“It doesn’t matter” is what Mailchimp would say to former customers who are unhappy that they have been deprived of a vector to perpetuate Ponzi schemes.
And to the tiny fraction of crypto businesses that can’t be fairly described this way, I’m sure it’s not the first time that being part of a largely criminal and fraudulent sector has had this sort of consequence.
They had plenty of warning, their businesses have been prohibited by Mailchimp since at least early 2018. Expecting a company to give notice before enforcing its long-established policy is not realistic.
> Some industries have higher-than-average abuse complaints, which can jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. Nothing personal, but in order to maintain the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we can’t allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:
>
>[...]
>
> Also, we cannot allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities.
The article mentioned Edge Wallet and Messari, those are very professional and ethical companies. I’m sure they can find other legitimate mail providers, but it’s a shame that Mailchimp decided to blanket-ban a whole industry.
Here is a tweet [1] on the topic from the founder of Messari:
> Dear @Mailchimp,
>
> Thank you for deplatforming some of crypto’s most reputable brands in the past 48 hours, including @MessariCrypto and @decryptmedia.
>
> You’re proving our point.
>
> Mailchimp - and all speech censors - must be destroyed.
A call for a former business partner to be destroyed on the basis that they have declined to continue that business relationship is remarkably unprofessional behavior, especially given that their business has been prohibited by the plain terms of Mailchimp’s AUP (with a very reasonable justification) for the entire time that Messari has been a customer [2], meaning that they have been knowingly violating the policy or have not bothered to check.
Even so-called ethical and professional crypto-adjacent companies always seem to be anything but after even cursory research.
Being one step removed from a crime doesn’t give you clean hands. Selling shovels in a Ponzi gold rush is just as suspect as directly engaging in fraud.
64 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThis is like the 900th time I have seen this. Crypto doesn't seem to be able to 'fade away 100% completely' does it? So I think that it is here to stay on the condition that there are a compliant few cryptocurrencies and projects after clearer regulations, indicating that not all of them will survive.
But the whole point of this is that Mailchimp and Intuit are responsible for this data breach and suspending a wave of accounts without warning doesn't solve anything.
This is a very common trend I see when speaking with cryptocurrency advocates. When asked to point to success stories or real world use cases, 9/10 times the answer is related to some other cryptocurrency scheme: a swaps smart contract or a decentralized market maker, wallet software, etc. It seems like most of the use cases for cryptocurrencies are just more examples of the snake eating its own tail.
The NFTs that artists minted in the boom in early 2021 are still being traded across different platforms, curated in physical exhibitions, indexed and hosted by multiple competing companies, and talked about in online magazines and podcasts. Sales on OpenSea and other platforms continue to pay royalties back to creators and sometimes non profit charities that they set in splits. Hundred-year-old art auction houses are now in competition with open source platforms that take nearly a hundred percent less commission on sales, have a lower barrier to entry, and provide higher artist royalties.
Blockchain hasn’t given us flying cars or replaced corporations or whatever boosters say, but it has given us some new tools to imagine transactions and ownership differently than just whatever Stripe is doing.
NFTs are basically a digital variation of the physical art market....with all that that implies, such as money laundering and wash trading: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/29/business/art-money-launde...
While some view the art world with scorn on HN, I don't think it attracts anywhere near as much derision as crypto and NFTs.
>>>When asked to point to success stories or real world use cases
I use crypto to make micro-loans to a friend in the Philippines, who occasionally runs into cashflow problems with her small used goods business.
Regarding your friend, I’m curious to know how competitive crypto is for your use case. Western union charges about 2% to transfer $5000 from the US to the Philippines and can deposit directly in a bank account. I understand that international wire transfers are comparable. Services like remitly appear to be even cheaper. How does crypto compare in price and convenience?
That is absolute extortion. I sent ~0.05 BTC in May and the transaction fee was 0.067%. Eyeballing the transaction screenshot she sent, she wasn't getting hammered on the exchange rate to pesos either (via coins.ph). There was some KYC involved (sender name/address required to release the funds on her end) that slowed us down a little. It wasn't a requirement several years ago. I bet we could have fed the form fake info but didn't want to risk the funds being frozen, she needed cash in hand in less than 24hrs to purchase new inventory.
I have already said that 90% of NFTs will fail and not all of them will survive many times before [2], and only a certain few crypto projects will survive, even past regulations.
The 'people' you are referring to were expecting all 20,000+ crypto or NFT projects to survive this crash which is just delusional as expecting all internet startups created during the dotcom boom to survive after the collapse in 2000. As you can see what I said months before in [0], [1] and [2] tells you that I am not part of the 'people' you speak of.
As always, I expect only a few crypto projects to survive this crash and regulatory clarity.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28912714
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29875658
They are still here and doing fine? I'm afraid dubious media reporting and wishful thinking has given you the wrong idea of what is going on.
I have a hard time seeing how crypto-commodity projects, with their near the extreme libertarian beliefs, will jive with society's expectations around money and assets. That being said, there will be a few things that come out of the space, like formal verification, that will be incorporated into other software.
Then we will look back on this era and wonder what the heck people were thinking.
What always amazes me is the crypto-haters who speak so authoritatively about how crypto is bad/useless, while being borderline clueless about how it's used in the real world.
^This will have to suffice. I've read juicier reports but they are SECRET//NOFORN. You'll have to take my word for it that the Ukrainians are using web3 payments for some...surprising activities.
Are you aware of this? If not, you might consider googling "molly white blockchain abuse"
Sad that Bitcoin didn't start with the Monero obfuscation/fungibility technologies.
Tornado was shutdown because they were knowingly supporting sanction violations. The developer was arrested in a country that does not have the same freedom of speech we do in USA
The crypto commodity community will have to learn that they are part of the larger society and accept that they will not always get things their way. If you want things to change, you'll have to adjust how you approach these differences, and more than likely give up some of the absolutist views to meet in the middle.
The code was taken down by a private company, freedom of speech is not protected on GitHub or Twitter. Additionally, American laws do not extend to other countries. It was the Dutch who arrested him.
You should start by understanding the basic facts and relations and not engage in hyperbole like "knowingly publishing open source software, that would be scary" because this is not at all what happened here.
I appreciate your optimism about freedom of speech being unaffected but this is not as cut and dry as an individual running a money laundering business, if that is what you think Tornado Cash is. We do not hold Tor exit nodes responsible for the illicit activity on the dark web and we definitely do not hold Tor developers responsible.
Some talking points raised here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpTrCA3tEKM
He's actually wrong in that it executes on the ethereum blockchain. It actually executes on Optimism, a layer-2 solution, and they are quite concerned for their own situation.
He also says that there aren't people tied to it, but who was collecting the contract fees (beyond gas)?
The first reports on this situation originated from non-crypto sources so it should be easy to find them. A lot of the more in depth discussion is coming from crypto camp because it negatively affects all those users and their privacy.
A human paid to deploy these contracts, a human keeps the fees. This is not a "fully autonomous" contract. It is not an attack open source. There is a difference between writing code and running code, or making it runnable. Blockchain creates new scenarios we hadn't considered before, but common sense can still be applied.
A more reasonable assessment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8slTX2tyE
The only fees taken are relay fees, which can be anybody - not necessarily the developers. The conversation steers back to whether it is illegal to run a Tor exit node and whether it is illegal to develop Tor the open source project. Tornado Cash can be republished without relay fees, with zero governance, no token, would that be acceptable?
If you support evil, there will be repercussions. Your participation in the pool is sufficient material support. We have laws, adjust to obey them or risk getting in trouble.
What is sad is that you use and reuse hyperbole as a talking point
not morally, ethically, or legally
Typically this is followed up with a misunderstanding of the DVD-CSS decision, or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech, but I'll bite. What precedent do you imagine holds that code is somehow free speech?
Please understand that I'm going to look it up and I'm going to push back.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
The debate is pretty settled that code and language should be protected by 1st amendment as free speech. Based on this precedent, we should not be cheering on the barring of the open source project and it’s developers.
It is less clear if the execution and use of code should be free speech, and how to regulate code and language when the sole goal is illicit. Like anarchist cookbook, 3D printed guns. But to argue this, you will have to argue the sole goal of Tornado Cash is to aid in illicit behavior. There are many licit users of the protocol, like with Tor, who just want to seek privacy in their online communication.
The issue comes down to whether sending and receiving private keys in an encrypted way over the internet should be protected or not.
The Tornado Cash case is all about money laundering, the fact that there was code to automate the process is besides the point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
The bigger problem is whether republishing the source code would make you a target of the sanctions. If a user republishes the source code on Ethereum, pirate bay, Gitlab, or another host then it is reasonable to assume their actions might be interpreted as “supporting the Tornado Cash project” which makes them a target of the sanctions. If a user modifies the code and republishes it probably will fall under same risks.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2020/02/the-establishment-claus...
> or a misrepresentation of Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech somehow means code is free speech
Predictably, you referenced Marilyn Hall's decision that code is speech, and misrepresented it as support that code is free speech
Literally exactly what I said you would do
Do you disagree with the widespread reporting on the outcome of this case?
https://www.britannica.com/event/Bernstein-vs-the-US-Departm...
> Bernstein v. the U.S. Department of State, landmark legal decision (1996) that set two important precedents in the field of digital technology. First, it ruled that U.S. government regulations that barred the export of encryption software were unconstitutionally restrictive; second, it declared that software source code can be a form of protected free speech.
and
https://casetext.com/case/bernstein-v-united-states-dept-of-...
> The district court found that the Source Code was speech protected by the First Amendment, see Bernstein v. Department of State, 922 F. Supp. 1426 (N.D. Cal. 1996) ("Bernstein I")
Eh... I use it every day. And I'll continue doing so.
Sounds fair.
If you’re going to offer a service to people, you have an ethical obligation to protect them from harm.
That looks different for different customers.
A downside of crypto is that nobody is ensuring you against losing the money. No FDIC or identity theft insurance.
Combine that with the supposed anonymity, and you have a major security risk.
The company is currently being sued by people affected by such a hack, so this isn’t hypothetical.
So this seems like a manifestly reasonable action that is hard to criticize. All these crypto-libertarians seem to love the free market until it makes a decision they disagree with, I wonder why?
I'm sure no serious customer is within this group as far as they're concerned
“It doesn’t matter” is what Mailchimp would say to former customers who are unhappy that they have been deprived of a vector to perpetuate Ponzi schemes.
And to the tiny fraction of crypto businesses that can’t be fairly described this way, I’m sure it’s not the first time that being part of a largely criminal and fraudulent sector has had this sort of consequence.
Even so-called ethical and professional crypto-adjacent companies always seem to be anything but after even cursory research.
Being one step removed from a crime doesn’t give you clean hands. Selling shovels in a Ponzi gold rush is just as suspect as directly engaging in fraud.
[1]: https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1557481836154175488
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180403195541/https://mailchimp...