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.
This is but one link in the chain of manipulative actions which serve
the goal of bringing into question, and thus attempting to also bring
into the context of legal frameworks, all the freedom-enabling elements
which define the life of an individual being. If it becomes necessary to assert
that privacy is a right, it is also clear that this concept has been opened up
to legal attacks and rhetorical hijacking by malicious actors. These are the malicious
actors who at the same time do not adhere to their own laws, the stripping away of personal
freedom is for them simply a means to an end, and regardless of their motivations, the exact
way by which evil perpetuates has exactly always been by enacting violence in the name of something
believed to be "Good", which is objectively violence regardless of whether a perpetrator
truly believes it to be "Good", and should thus be resisted via disobedience.
All of the formerly mentioned is not only apparent in OFAC's designation, but also numerous
proposed and/or accepted regulative frameworks regarding digital currencies, as an example
the European Commission's Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR) amendment, and the MiCA regulatory
framework. 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-enabling technologies like Tornado, declaring a war on privacy. Make no
mistake, any regulative framework introduced is a Trojan Horse which will be used
to only sell the story of adopting cryptocurrencies in markets, while in reality
destroying the safety guarantees of permissionlesss and/or anonymous money, with the
goal being protecting traditional permissioned financial systems which have historically
only served to exploit, deceive and manipulate the individual.
All of this is orchestrated by 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. Again, 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.
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. Another notable accolade for these unjust acts of censorship
goes to Flashbots, a MEV-specific Ethereum client for capitalizing on
financial inefficiencies on-chain. Given that a large percentage 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 Matrix 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.
