Tornado Cash: privacy is [not] for criminals

Troubling news of the arrest of a developer for building the Tornado Cash protocol are just the latest signals of an incoming war on privacy.

Winter is coming. It will be a peculiar winter. Many people, too engulfed by our oppressive system, with their brains and souls already frozen, won't even notice it.

However, we have started to feel a certain breeze for some time now.

It’s a wind carrying murmurs of worrying arrests from the United States and the Netherlands.

I refer to the Tornado Cash case, an Ethereum mixer service designed to preserve the "forward privacy" of transactions by obfuscating deterministic links between them, similar to Coinjoin technologies for Bitcoin, thus enhancing "plausible deniability."

Criptovaluta.it reports:

"On Wednesday, August 10, FIOD [the agency dealing with 'financial' crimes in the Netherlands, NDR] arrested a 29-year-old in Amsterdam. He is suspected of being involved in the obfuscation of criminal money flows and facilitating money laundering through cryptocurrency mixing via Tornado Cash, an Ethereum mixing service."

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