Troubling news on the crypto-privacy front

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

Winter is coming. But this is not just a seasonal change. It’s a psychic winter, a digital ice age creeping into every aspect of our lives. Most people, numbed by the system, their brains and souls already frozen, won’t even notice it.

But we schizo-cypherpunks feel it. A certain breeze. A shift in the air. A whisper, coming from the Netherlands and the United States.

I’m talking about the Tornado Cash case—an Ethereum mixer designed to break deterministic links between transactions, much like CoinJoin for Bitcoin, enhancing plausible deniability and financial privacy.

As journalists report: "On Wednesday, August 10, FIOD [the Netherlands’ financial crimes agency] arrested a 29-year-old in Amsterdam. He is suspected of facilitating money laundering through Tornado Cash, an Ethereum mixing service."

And the chain reaction began.

"The U.S. Treasury—our equivalent of the Ministry of Economy and Finance—blacklisted Tornado Cash, labeling it a tool of terrorists and petty criminals alike. The move triggered an immediate wave of censorship: USDC wallets interacting with Tornado Cash were frozen, services shut down, developers silenced."

As of now, the exact charges against the arrested developer remain unclear. But unless he was personally involved in illicit activities, this is a terrifying precedent.

Make no mistake—this isn’t random. It’s not an isolated arrest; a weird story. It’s the natural evolution of the war on privacy, a logical step in the battle that has been raging for decades.

There are multiple fronts in this war:

• Encryption (communication & transactions)

• Bitcoin and cash

• Privacy-enhancing technologies (P2P, CoinJoin, VPNs, decentralized identity)

What do these have in common? They create a barrier between individuals and the state. They might even disrupt the global order itself.

This is the start of another Crypto War, all over again. It’s accelerating. Expect more arrests, more restrictions, more demonization of the tools that give people autonomy.