On Tuesday a Dutch court sentenced the programmer Alexey Pertsev to five years in prison. The court found him guilty of money laundering because the "Tornado Cash" software he developed enables criminals to carry out completely anonymous and untraceable crypto transactions (so-called "crypto mixer")
If he had provided the same mixing service using cash, what reasoning could they convict him on?
They specifically state that the privacy that the service provides was the issue, not the service itself. However, this level of privacy is a given whan using cash no?
If you do the same thing with cash, put people’s money in a huge stack, never ask for ID, don’t have any account system and just provide people a slip they can trade back for cash when they’re ready to withdraw funds (so possibly some of the same bills but statistically improbable that they would all be the same), then you can get convicted for the same thing, it’s much different from making a deposit at the bank and withdrawing later.
Criminals do get tracked using bank note serial numbers you know, offering to mix their bills so it’s impossible to tell who was the original “owner” is money laundering facilitation.
If he had provided the same mixing service using cash, what reasoning could they convict him on? They specifically state that the privacy that the service provides was the issue, not the service itself. However, this level of privacy is a given whan using cash no?
If you do the same thing with cash, put people’s money in a huge stack, never ask for ID, don’t have any account system and just provide people a slip they can trade back for cash when they’re ready to withdraw funds (so possibly some of the same bills but statistically improbable that they would all be the same), then you can get convicted for the same thing, it’s much different from making a deposit at the bank and withdrawing later.
Criminals do get tracked using bank note serial numbers you know, offering to mix their bills so it’s impossible to tell who was the original “owner” is money laundering facilitation.