The U.S. government banning the ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash and the enforcement that has followed has the crypto community in an uproar about the event. A large number of crypto and privacy advocates have spoken out against the actions the government has taken so far, and the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future calls the ban “a threat to the future of financial privacy.”
Advocacy Group Fight for the Future Says US Government Threatens Financial Privacy — ‘There Are Many Legitimate Reasons to Seek Anonymity in Financial Transactions’
On August 8, 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash. The U.S. government claims that the application was used to allegedly “launder more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019.” Following the ban, Github contributors were suspended from the software repository platform and on August 12, the Tornado Cash Discord server was deleted.
We can add @discord to the shame list too since apparently they decided to go *far* above and beyond and ban the community run/operated discord server. God forbid people even *discuss* the thing that was unjustly sanctioned…
— Micah Zoltu (@MicahZoltu) August 12, 2022
The same day, Dutch law enforcement revealed that the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) arrested a 29-year-old unidentified person that is accused of developing Tornado Cash. A report stemming from The Block Crypto’s Yogita Khatri says that the unknown developer is Alexey Pertsev, according to statements his wife made after the arrest. “My husband didn’t do anything illegal,” the suspect’s wife told the reporter on Friday. Meanwhile, the entire crypto community and privacy advocates are upset with the U.S. government’s actions.
“Welcome to the war on code,” podcast host Cobie said on Friday.
The nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future published a statement about the U.S. government’s actions against Tornado Cash. “Already, the Internet is feeling the chilling effects of this choice: the open source code used to run Tornado.cash has been taken down from Github. And unfortunately, it seems that such an effect is exactly what the U.S. government was seeking,” Fight for the Future’s blog post about the subject explains. Fight for the Future adds:
Anonymity is not a crime, and there are many legitimate reasons to seek…
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