-On August 8th, 2022, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
-sanctioned the smart contracts associated with Tornado Cash on the terms
- of facilitating money laundering. This influenced widespread acts of
-censorship on Ethereum to inhibit the usage of the protocol and
-ultimately labels all active users for seeking individual anonymity
-on-chain, as criminals. The public nature of accounting on distributed
-ledgers is a flaw, not a benefit. It's the act of substantiation and
-non-repudiation that gives this enabling technology its true value.
+Welcome to tornado.ws: a community dedicated to maintaining
+the original Tornado Cash protocol and building on top of it!
-The sanctimonious ideology that privacy should be only for the selected
-"faithful" few has huge implications for discrimination enacted through
-censorship, privacy is an individual right that everyone should be
-entitled to. The ongoing acts of surveillance authored by "the state"
-not only put individual sovereignty at risk but individuals' well-being.
- This is apparent in the recent travel rule legislation regarding
-digital currencies, as seen in the European Commission's recent Transfer
- of Funds Regulation (TFR) amendment. European law is puppeteered by the
- Financial Action Task Force (FATF) through what is called "directives".
- The FATF, in turn, is an overarching branch of the American government
-that has legal immunity, and no oversight although having global
-influence in regulation. These legislations not only create honeypots of
- individuals' financial data but set out to blacklist privacy-preserving
- technologies like Tornado, declaring a war on privacy.
+We hold to the principle that surveillance is dangerous
+and violent, and that wanting secrecy is something natural
+to all human beings on this planet.
-These are the same figures that have failed to regulate private equity's
- additional attacks on individual privacy, by accommodating the
-solicitation and commoditization of individuals' sensitive data. These
-people are not set out for your best interest, time and time again they
-have failed the common people. On the profiteering of individuals' data,
- Joseph Lubin - the man behind ConsenSyS - holds the power to
-de-anonymize almost every single Ethereum transaction. Given the
-notoriety and popularity of the infrastructure that he ultimately
-controls, as the majority shareholder of Infura and MetaMask. To no
-surprise, Infura and other RPC service providers like Alchemy were the
-first entities to censor relays to the Tornado contracts. Let us remind
-you, that these entities are actively profiling your transactional
-footprints, for reasons for solicitation and cooperation with
-authoritative figures to void your economic rights.
+If you click the button below, you will find access links to the application,
+otherwise, in the top right, you will find social and repository
+links tied to this community.
-The ripple effects of the sanctions also resonated with "decentralized"
-or, should we say, pseudo-decentralized protocols. Pocket Network, which
- solicits itself as a permissionless RPC relay protocol. Undertook
-efforts to censor all relays, the sheer misleading marketing should
-remind everyone not to trust venture-capital backed entities at face
-value. Who ultimately want to profit off individuals and will even lie
-to do such as that. Another notable accolade for these unjust acts of
-censorship goes to Flashbots, an MEV-specific Ethereum client for
-capitalizing on financial inefficiencies on-chain. Given that
-approximately 80% of Ethereum's hashrate uses their client this has
-immense implications and let us remind you, it is also a venture-backed
-entity. Last we save a special homage to TRM labs, which is a digital
-asset compliance firm to assist with the prevention of potential legal
-contingencies. Not only are this firm's tactics completely
-overamplifying cautionary measures but it is backed by entities that
-have clear conflicts of interest with the nature of the industry.
-Clients of theirs integrated frontend restrictions on addresses that
-have ever transacted with Tornado, either directly through multiple
-degrees of separation. Essentially restricting and mislabelling the
-large majority of Ethereum addresses. Here's a special shout-out to out
-to the servile TRM Labs customer base that is dYdX, Uniswap, AAVE,
-Balancer, Ren Protocol, and MakerDAO, all of which are funded by Silicon
- Valley vulture capital.
-
-
-
-Lest we forget, we saw 5 years of publicly funded and collective work of
- open-source software censored overnight. Microsoft - the corporate
-behemoth that tainted Github, once an open collaboration tool for
-publishing software - purged all repositories of the official Tornado
-Cash organization and even went so far as to censor all core
-contributor's personal accounts. This heinous overreach drastically
-stifles the education and innovation of zero-knowledge cryptography.
-Countless individuals referenced the source code for student curricula
-and experimentation, as officially stated by Johns Hopkins University
-professor Matthew D. Green through the advocating support of the
-Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This is not the first time we've
-seen censorship of open source software, which in itself is a violation
-of free speech.
-
-
-
-The basis of which the sanctions concerning the protocol as a mixer are
-groundless, because of the presence of zero-knowledge cryptography in
-its systematic design. This guarantees, that only the original deposited
- assets that have been committed can only be redeemed, and not
-commingled funds. Peter Van Valkenburgh, a representative of Coin Center
- portrays this logic through the precise analogy of safety deposit
-boxes. It is evident, that the policymakers behind the sanctions do not
-understand the subject they are attempting to regulate. We'd like to
-thank both Coin Center and the EFF as the only organizations to advocate
- and take formal action against this totalitarianism.
-
-
-
-It is apparent that the true colors of actors and organizations reveal
-themselves in a time of crisis, and we encourage everyone who believes
-in freedoms to boycott and scrutinize the entities that have
-over-willingly aided the infringement of digital rights. As a group of
-dedicated contributors to Tornado, old, new, and future. We pledge an
-allegiance to circumvent these acts of censorship. Privacy is an
-individual right that is open to everyone. Community resources to
-archive and accelerate the development and education of the source code
-have been deployed, alongside a Telegram server to align community.
-Active research priorities have revealed themselves at the birth of the
-crisis for the organization going forward. A privacy-preserving,
-censorship-resistant, and network-agonistic RPC solution will be
-actively developed to ensure the accessibility of the protocol.
-Additionally, the legacy infrastructure of the internet is not a
-suitable place for the freedom of expression under the reign of ICANN.
-Thus, efforts will be undertaken to re-empower the original premise of
-the world wide web.
-
-
-
-Join the fight against the surveillance state.
-
-- Tornado Cash Community
+Join us!
-