Opinion: The Tornado Cash case cannot be applied to Bitcoin mixers
In April 2023, Dutch authorities placed Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, the Ethereum mixer, under house arrest. Despite the community’s pleas, the U.S. Treasury has not removed the project from the sanctions lists.
According to Mixer.money, such measures cannot be applied to Bitcoin mixers.
Authorities’ allegations against Tornado Cash rest on data alleging $7 billion laundered in crypto. However, according to Mixer.money, such services cannot filter incoming transactions in principle:
«AML-scoring runs counter to the aim of mixers — ensuring user anonymity. Moreover, no service can reverse incoming transactions — the risk of dirty cryptocurrency remains. And most of such coins are not sent by hackers, but by people who bought coins at unscrupulous exchanges».
Blocking Tornado Cash uses several kinds of sanctions: restricting access to the site, adding smart-contract addresses to the SDN list, freezing issuer addresses and removing repositories from GitHub.
«Removing code from GitHub is the most interesting sanction. Regulators apparently tried to prevent the creation of analogues. But within two weeks other users re-uploaded the code to the service», noted by Mixer.money.
Representatives of the service emphasise that neither this nor other measures affect Bitcoin-mixing services:
«The SDN blacklist works only for Ethereum-based smart-contract mixers. Bitcoin-mixer services often generate new addresses for each transaction, which cannot be entered into any registry. Blocking the site risks losing the interface for working with a Bitcoin mixer, but the latter can provide it through alternative means. For example, we launched a Telegram bot and a Tor mirror» in the network. Account freezes are not applicable to Bitcoin — a network without centralized coin issuers».
In Mixer.money, the only real threat is the centralisation of the Bitcoin network, which could lead to on-chain censorship:
«U.S.-based validators account for more than 50% of Ethereum staking, and if representatives from Uncle Sam’s offices come to their premises, decentralisation and anonymity will immediately end. In Bitcoin, the situation is different — Americans control only a third of the network’s hashrate, so attempts to block will only increase the time it takes to confirm sanctioned transactions».
According to the team, the community should reject sanction support and promote decentralisation of networks and projects:
«Decentralisation is the most effective security measure for both blockchains and individual services. We have already done everything possible to distribute and duplicate our services so that, even in the event of a block, users can recover their funds».
Mixer.money — a service for laundering Bitcoin and anonymising wallets, which uses major crypto exchanges as a source of clean cryptocurrency.
Earlier, Coinbase supported a lawsuit to overturn the sanctions imposed on the Tornado Cash mixer.
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