Tornado Cash: A Privacy Mixer on Ethereum?

[Kavelj22]

No i don't think moderators will delete posts here as it's opened for free discussions since a long time. At extreme cases they will lock it, but this is far to happen since the topic is opened for discussions and user zasad did a favor posting updates about the ongoing jusiciary case. Forum policy banned promotions for those services, but can't ban free discussions.

There is already another discussion topic about Tornado in the "Service discussion" child-board.

The mixer ban policy applies specifically to centralized services. We can still discuss Tornado Cash because it is decentralized. The mixer is still being actively used today despite the developers getting arrested. Not only does it demonstrate its decentralization, but also shows that charging the devs with operating an unlicensed money transmitter is based on a fallacy when they have no control over how their code is used.

But you, as a forum user, can't run advertisement campaign for Tornado Cash after the ban was applied by the administration. I didn't know if the ban is limited only to centralized services that to make exceptions with decentralized ones. According to this approach, if i can tomorrow create an automated decentralized protocol to run as a bitcoin mi xer, i will be able to promote it in bitcointalk forum? I thought even the services running Coinjoin stopped advertising here. I also remember many other services stopped their representations in bitcointalk because they allow anonymous swaps which can be described as a mi xing service.

[FinneysTrueVision]

But you, as a forum user, can't run advertisement campaign for Tornado Cash after the ban was applied by the administration. I didn't know if the ban is limited only to centralized services that to make exceptions with decentralized ones. According to this approach, if i can tomorrow create an automated decentralized protocol to run as a bitcoin mi xer, i will be able to promote it in bitcointalk forum? I thought even the services running Coinjoin stopped advertising here. I also remember many other services stopped their representations in bitcointalk because they allow anonymous swaps which can be described as a mi xing service.

Wasabi Wallet ran a campaign after the mixer ban. They stopped running campaigns due to zkSNACKs shutting down their coordinator. Independent coordinators could still run a campaign if they had the budget. Ginger Wallet also ran a campaign after the ban. I think they stopped because their revenue isn’t enough to do a campaign for a longer period.

As for Tornado Cash, based on what Theymos said, I believe if you created an open source client to access the service, and it could be verified that user funds couldn’t be stolen, that would be fine to advertise. If you created a website which doesn’t connect you directly to Tornado Cash, but uses their own unaudited router so they can collect a fee before forwarding your deposit to or from Tornado Cash, that would not be allowed to be advertised.

I'm not familiar enough with how Tornado Cash works/worked. It meets criteria 1 and 3, but for criteria 2:

 - If every member of the DAO turning evil would allow it to adjust the contract and steal BTC, then it's a banned mixer.
 - If going to the website and using the website directly to do the mixing would allow the deposit to be stolen, then at least the website would be a banned mixer. (Perhaps the contract itself wouldn't be.)
 - If neither of those are true, then maybe it's more like CoinJoin than a mixer, and it shouldn't be banned.

Based on vague knowledge which I have casually absorbed, I'd guess that both of the first two points above are true?