Reflexer Finance - An Update on the Tornado Case

I think these are the right slides uh I had this when I went to Germany yeah this is it uh so this was the presented at eth Berlin uh I'll give a update about the tornado cash case and uh stuff why why do I have a picture of this this this General on the screen this this guy Tren Fang uh how many of you guys read the German military Doctrine for fun one one guy Everybody follow that guy around uh why why the German military Doctrine um it's actually pretty interesting the first line in the whole Doctrine is this line it says the conduct of war is an art depending upon free creative activity scientifically grounded it makes the highest demands on the personality uh German military Doctrine is unique because it actually uh promoted the you know use of uh like intents actually uh you you're supposed to communicate your intention and then your subordinate officers would carry it out uh and it actually became the template for almost all military doctrines to date and the interesting thing about the guy who wrote it is that he also tried to assassinate Hitler and died trying the movie Valkyrie is roughly based on this and why am I putting this up is because sometimes the people who care about their countries and their people the most are also the people who take matters into their own hands and try to fix the problems that they observe themselves and we should think about this and so privacy is because privacy is normal uh full surveillance cbdcs are coming governments abuse their power all the time this is a little quote tweet from somebody who talked about how uh and and I I've given this talk in Amsterdam uh the Dutch the place that Alexis's trial was conducted were historically had the highest casualty rate during the Holocaust because they were really good at kyc during World War II so the Germans when they took over the Dutch kyc systems were thrilled to discover that they could figure out where all the Jews were really easily and then go hunt them all down and so we don't often think about how our systems are going to get abused by people who might not have the best intentions at heart when we design them crypto people try and think about this and I think we should continue to keep thinking about this this is going to be bridged a bridged version of this talk because this is a 25 minute talk it's not going to get through all of it um the important parts are that you know raise your hand if you know how tornado cach what tornado cach is let me get a sense of this raise your hand if you know about the legal action against tornado cache keep your hand up okay raise your hand if you know about the case in the Netherlands yeah so most of you guys are on on the same page um so what happened with Alexi the update here is that uh he was found guilty and he got 64 months uh minus the time that he is already served and so now there is an appeal process that we are filing with lawyers and brought on additional legal counsel to help him uh try to get out of this sentence we don't believe that the sentence was uh Justified some of the things that the prosecution brought up in court was they said that they acknowledged that he couldn't have stopped anything they said due to the virtue of how the system works it's impossible to make the user interface accessible yes we agree made the same point uh they also acknowledged that they didn't have any power over the funds it's non-custodial system they can't freeze anybody's funds they can't prevent anybody from using it but they also claimed that they should have known better and that if it was conceivable at the outset that it could have potentially been used for Crime then they shouldn't have built it in the first place and so they they they said this if they if the defendant had wanted to have the possibility to take action against abuse then he should have built it in but he did not and therefore he was responsible for all of the criminal use of the protocol most reasonable people find this somewhat absurd they're like I made a hammer somebody bashed someone in the head with it clearly not the intended use of the hammer but because I could have conceived somebody bashing somebody in the head with it and I didn't you you get where I'm going with this many people came out and protested this they said it they thought it was not didn't make sense to them um yeah this is this is them saying that they they could have you know prevented it they should have known better Taylor Monahan same thing these are people who came out and protest uh in support of Alexi which I'm really happy about maybe somebody's hear from that uh one of you know these signs say open source is not a crime privacy is not a crime one of the says would you arrest a gun manufacturer gun maker for facilitating public shooting it's not the best argument that I really want to lean on uh but it does make the point that the liability of producing weapons even Ones based for self-defense uh they're not liable for the downstream uses of of those weapon for self-defense and so why did tornado cach exist it was for personal privacy and people abused it and the government threw the devs in jail so uh this is just a funny thing I threw in there there's people actually helping Isis that got less time than Alexi did uh absurd so what's going on with Alexi we're negotiating the bail amount we've submitted the appeal and pending a successful appeal we will uh argue the case again in court um Roman Storm's case is still ongoing uh it's still scheduled for September uh well this is what you know this is explaining what happened to Roman which is he was arrested at his house at gunpoint uh which is you know the director said we should remind criminal organizations everywhere that they are neither Unstoppable nor Anonymous blah blah blah it's like Roman storm was cooperating with the investigation is the most silly part of this you could have just called him and be like hello please come to the police station he would have continued to cooperate with the investigation but yeah he's charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering violate us sanctions operate unlicensed money transmitter total charges can add up to 20 45 years in prison he uh was released on bail pled not guilty his trial is on September 23rd so Edward Snowden was kind enough to share our uh oh this is Peter wenberg sorry Peter venberg uh at least has a ray of Hope here and the Ray of Hope is that maybe some of the charges against Alexi and the way that the court in the Netherlands went along with it in terms of uh having negligence be the standard for what the uh you know determines liability doesn't necessarily apply in the United States which is beneficial for for Roman um there's amicus briefs that were fi filed uh on behalf of the cases one was filed by coin Center um they're talking about the Constitutional limitations to the sanctions laws uh another one is f filed by the blockchain Association this one talks about um pleading the facts and the Money Services uh business bus charge another one is by the defi education fund fortunately they all tackle the different charges that Roman storm was accused of violating and so we can try to educate The Regulators through this means grateful for all those orgs um yeah the Department of Justice said uh they basically ignored the finen guidance that says that you have to accept and transmit money which implies custody and they said these guys uh help launder funds and so we don't care about fen's guidance we're going to accuse them anyway of operating un unlicensed money transmitter so um if you have the means and you're inclined to do so uh we're still collecting money to uh pay for their legal defenses we emptied mik Dow several other Dows have donated nosis donated metac cartel donated noun Dow donated a lot um so check it out on uh the Twitter is free Alexi Roman and there's a juice boox uh fundraiser as well where they were selling NFS and this is a list of some of the donors matter Labs nouns Dow alchemix Dow medic cartel Jess po talic kouman you know 800 people donated we're grateful for everybody who did um there's a section I have 20 seconds left so I'm going to skip through some of this this is why they deserve our support and there's a couple reasons uh they built the compliance tool themselves that St Louis Federal Reserve Bank actually recommended to be used uh they couldn't have stopped anything the the eth and tornado cach went up after they're all in prison it's kind of silly I'm going to die this thing is still going to work um and then uh this is like basically every other time that this kind of thing happens the government just finds the banks and in our case they crucified the devs it's not really fair um so yeah HSBC money launders for the cartels nothing happens to anybody you know uh there's a Manifesto here for nouns da but I'm out of time so I'm just going to skip forward uh this is how you know privacy pools works but I'm going to skip ahead of this we're trying to build a narrative of keeping the terrorists out of privacy so that we can demonstrate that there is such thing as privacy for the good guys uh because the court the judges in the Netherlands and as part of the verdict of Alexi's case said there's no legitimate use for tornado cash I think that's completely absurd because I was using it for payroll vitalic using it to donate to Ukraine so the Russians wouldn't figure out how much money he's donating Ukraine these are all good use cases as far as I'm concerned so I think that people should be allowed to do this and we can iterate basically on the compliance tool that the tornado cach team built themselves in order to publicly prove that we're not the terrorists when we use it and that's the goal of privacy pools check our our company uh Zer expo.io uh new protocol coming soon but um long story short uh skip through this stuff Prometheus so the the zero knowledge proof system that the tornado cache team built and shipped on ethereum was the second ever deployment of zero knowledge proofs in history uh and so I think putting the devs and chains for eternity feeling their feeding their guts the Eagles will not put out the fire of zero knowledge proofs uh the future that we all want depends on zero knowledge proofs for things like privacy we want freedom from Central Bank digital currencies for example that have a giant Honeypot of everybody's financial data and make money that expires and crazy things like that we want blockchain democracy you know Andrew Yang like four years ago e Denver was like we're going to put voting on The blockchain and everybody who knew what they were talking about was like no definitely don't do that but actually using zero knowledge proofs in ways of allowing people to vote that protects their privacy could be a better system than we have today for digital democracy I think that's important uh and things like tornado cash are just like the Prototype of all of these systems so uh in this you know in the mythology the Prometheus is actually saved by Hercules and so maybe we can all be Hercules and save our friends who shipped the zero knowledge proofs so uh please uh if you have the means follow free Alexi Roman and donate to their uh legal defense fund thank you all for your time