Tornado Cash Sanctions Overturned By US Appeals Court (coindesk.com) 8
A U.S. federal appeals court ruled that sanctions against Tornado Cash, a crypto transaction anonymization service, must be abandoned, stating that its immutable smart contracts do not constitute "property" under U.S. law and that the Treasury overstepped its authority. The ruling is available here (PDF). CoinDesk reports: The decision answers a controversial privacy debate on whether the government -- via a sanctions list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department -- has a right to target the technology because it's associated with criminals. The ruling reversed a district court's August ruling that had sided with the government's pursuit of what it had characterized as a "notorious" crypto-mixing service.
OFAC had sanctioned Tornado Cash last year, contending that it was a vital tool used by bad actors including North Korea's Lazarus Group to launder crypto tokens pilfered from platforms and games such as Axie Infinity. Coinbase (COIN) and others had sued the government, claiming it had overreached. Paul Grewal, chief legal officer of crypto exchange Coinbase, cheered the ruling in a Tuesday post on X, calling it a "historic win for crypto." "These smart contracts must now be removed from the sanctions list and U.S. persons will once again be allowed to use this privacy-protecting protocol," Grewal wrote. "Put another way, the government's overreach will not stand." "We readily recognize the real-world downsides of certain uncontrollable technology falling outside of OFAC's sanctioning authority," the judges said, referencing the ineffectiveness of a law that was established well before the world moved online. "But we must uphold the statutory bargain struck (or mis-struck) by Congress, not tinker with it."
Tornado Cash's TORN token has since rallied 500%, passing the $20 mark.
OFAC had sanctioned Tornado Cash last year, contending that it was a vital tool used by bad actors including North Korea's Lazarus Group to launder crypto tokens pilfered from platforms and games such as Axie Infinity. Coinbase (COIN) and others had sued the government, claiming it had overreached. Paul Grewal, chief legal officer of crypto exchange Coinbase, cheered the ruling in a Tuesday post on X, calling it a "historic win for crypto." "These smart contracts must now be removed from the sanctions list and U.S. persons will once again be allowed to use this privacy-protecting protocol," Grewal wrote. "Put another way, the government's overreach will not stand." "We readily recognize the real-world downsides of certain uncontrollable technology falling outside of OFAC's sanctioning authority," the judges said, referencing the ineffectiveness of a law that was established well before the world moved online. "But we must uphold the statutory bargain struck (or mis-struck) by Congress, not tinker with it."
Tornado Cash's TORN token has since rallied 500%, passing the $20 mark.
Let's hear it progressives (Score:1)
Tell us all about how "privacy" means "protects criminal activity", and "progress" means "doing away with privacy".
rsilvergun, this is your chance to show everybody just how much more authoritarian you want the law to be.
Re: Let's hear it progressives (Score:1)
Let's hear it conservatives.
Tell us again how any fetters on the free market are communism and government's role is only to enact and enforce laws that favour robber barons.
Disclaimer: I don't side with either the right or the left. I'm merely providing an equal and opposite ridiculous retort here.
I think you're both a bunch of shitclowns.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that no one gets paid in shitcoins. You'll still ultimately have to deal with the traditional banking industry to move any money in and out of cryptocurrency. There's no way the average person gets any of that "privacy" you're talking about out of this.
If you want to prevent what happened in Canada with those truckers, you need laws to prevent it, not magic internet money that isn't even spendable until you first sell it to the next sucker. That's like for all Musk's yammering about cryptocurrency,
Andreessen talks about this on JRE (Score:2)
https://x.com/i/status/1861638... [x.com]
The government can ruin your life or business because you are competing with an existing, protected big financial institution.
Hell no to JRE! (Score:2)
You can take your Java Runtime Environment and shove it! If anything is ruining lives and businesses, it's Java! ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, it's more along the lines of that if you create something which facilities making crime profitable (or appears to facilitate making crime profitable), Uncle Sam might be less than pleased about it.
Also, actually competing with the established financial institutions would entail providing services which are functionally equivalent, which cryptocurrency is not. It's like how if you were going to start a fast food restaurant, you'd serve cooked ready-to-eat food, not inedible certificates that can only b
Money laundering (Score:2)
The only thing this does is put the onus on OFAC to place sanctions on all the exchanges that enable the use of this protocol. Money laundering as a protocol is still money laundering. This is a victory in name only and this could simply lead to a crackdown of all users of the protocol.