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Dutch court convicts engineer to 5 years for maintaining crypto mixer Tornado Cash
(www.patrick-breyer.de)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Privacy
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But in essence, they are punishing this guy for writing code. And at least in the United States, code is considered speech. And this is a very bad precedent. I know that this is a Dutch court, but still that is not a good thing.
He can write the code. He can release the source. Nothing is illegal until he takes currency.
And see, there's where the problem comes in. He never actually took the currency from the smart contract itself. In fact, it is still online and being used as of this day. And he is getting none of the currency just like he got none of the currency before. What they are going after him for is creating a front-end user interface to access the contract. I believe they did take a fee from that user interface since it made it simpler than interacting with the contract directly. The problem is that they are saying that by taking fees from that user interface, he is money laundering, but not everybody who used that user interface was using it for money laundering. A famous example is the creator of Ethereum used it to donate to Ukraine.
He's taking a fee in order to launder your money.
Even had the front end website not been running, that money would have still been laundered. I heard an explanation of it earlier that was saying something to the effect of, imagine a door at the edge of a field. There is no walls, there is no nothing else, just a door at the edge of a field. Anybody can come into that field and use it whenever they wish. Putting a lock on the door will not keep people out of the field. They can just walk in wherever the door isn't.
I feel like this would be better if the field was surrounded by a 1 foot moat, and there was a bridge.
It would take some amount of effort to step over the moat and not trip, vs just walking over the bridge.
The bridge has a small toll to help maintain it.
But bridge or no bridge you're getting into the field.
Lol, i like it
It's continental system. Precedents don't have as much power as in English system. And Netherlands are in ECHR jurisdiction, so it's likely to be ~~overturned~~ found contradicting European Convention on Human Rights.