[tedajax]

I'm going to imagine because when the government tells Spotify that people are laundering money through their platform they kill the account and hand over data to investigators?

They don't deliberately run a service explicitly built to enable money laundering.

Basic things you can think about if you try really.

[lesuorac]

You do notice in your example Spotify doesn't shut down? Afaik, nobody is allegeding that Tornado Cash maintained user accounts for money launderers.

It'd be more akin to if you had say McDonalds and people used your parking lot for Craigslist transactions (some of which were fradualent). Should you be required to close that McDonalds?

[jsnell]

Spotify doesn't shut down because they're primarily providing a legitimate service to legitimate people. The money laundering traffic there has to be absolutely miniscule compared to the legitimate traffic. It makes basically no sense as a money laundering avenue, and the only source for this (that I could find with quick Googling) is an "anonymous police officer" who just clainms that it's happening, but can't even put a number on the magnitude.

But if it really were happening at any kind of volume, it's obvious that Spotify would be quite willing to make their KYC requirements for artists stricter. Any payments they'd made would obviously be made through the banking system, and the law enforcement would be able to trace them to the next hop, which again would have done their KYC due diligence.

The crypto mixer, on the other hand, has no real use case except money laundering. They are also obviously unwilling to do any KYC, and unable to manage their system in a way that would prevent it from being used for money laundering. And it wasn't by accident. It was fully intentional and by design.

[zomglings]

Tornado Cash is permissionless. Any data the creator of Tornado Cash could hand over, the government would already have because Ethereum and EVM-based blockchains are public by default.

The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.

Also some things you can discover if you try, really.

[jsnell]

If you make a system that by design can't meet the legal requirements for preventing money laundering, that's not actually a good defense. It's the opposite.

[tedajax]

> The only service being run is a web client and relayers to permissionless smart contracts. I believe these are/were being run by a foundation.

They didn't build a service because it's "just" a web client and relayers is an interesting take but sadly, very stupid.

[rendaw]

There was nothing explicit in the linked court document AFAICT, and I sincerely hope the judge isn't making decisions based on gut feeling and "common sense".

[tedajax]

I don't think you understand how courts work