TORNADO CASH sanctions and the arrest of the developer ALEX PERTSEV
Here are my thoughts on the Tornado Cash sanctions and the arrest of the developer Alex Pertsev.
WHAT HAPPENED?
On August 8th, the US Department of the Treasury announced controversial sanctions on the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash. The sanctions made it illegal for any US citizen to interact with the protocol.
The Treasury Department cited these links to criminal activity as the reason behind the sanctions, stating in their official press release that Tornado had been used to launder more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency since its creation in 2019, including over $450 million linked to North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus.
(Source: https://grandpascrypto.com/arrest-made-following-tornado-cash-sanctions/)
My Thoughts
So open source protocol that is used for preserving privacy on the blockchain is sanctioned because the Treasury Department believes that every transaction on it is used for criminal activity?
And we know by the fact that people like Vitalik Buterin used TC for staying anonymous while donating money to Ukraine. And there are probably many others like that. There are a lot of use cases that you would want to stay anonymous on the blockchain.
This is the first time that the Treasury has effectively sanctioned a tool, a piece of open-source code that exists on the Ethereum blockchain and can be used by anyone for any purpose, be it good or bad.
In the 1996 case, Bernstein vs the US Department of Justice established that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment. So with sanctioning this tool is Treasury saying that speech itself is illegal?
Do these sanctions stop those criminal activities?
Tornado Cash is open-source, you can still use those smart contracts, you can copy the code and make hundreds of Tornado Cash dApps… Will the Treasury sanction every instance of this app? are apps like Monero next? Will other apps (Aave, Uniswap) that are blacklisting addresses from Tornado Cash, blacklist addresses from all other apps as well? Probably not.
So what good does this sanction do?
This is a war on crypto privacy.
ARREST OF ALEX PERTSEV
After the US Treasury announced Sanctions on Tornado Cash, 29-year-old developer ALEX PERTSEV was arrested in the Netherlands and has remained imprisoned for ten days without charge.
Granted that we don’t know all the information regarding this arrest, BUT if he was arrested only for writing the code for Tornado Cash, then this is absurd. A developer has no control whatsoever over how their open-source code is subsequently used.
This would be like arresting the manufacturer of kitchen knives for domestic murders.
They put a man in jail because bad people used his open-source code. This cannot stand in any free society.
Therefore, the accusations against Alex threaten to kill the entire open-source software segment. No one will dare to write and publish open-source code, no one will invest in the segment if they could be made responsible for the use of the tool they created by other parties
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Here is more information about Alex Pertsev: https://setalexfree.nl/
