Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg I Heart podcast,
Speaker 1: and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News. It's Monday, September twelve. What happens if you
Speaker 1: put a whole bunch of crypto transactions into a metaphorical blender,
Speaker 1: and then you lock them up in a black box,
Speaker 1: and then you shake that black box up, put that
Speaker 1: box back in the blender, shake it up some more,
Speaker 1: and then spit it out the other side. What do
Speaker 1: you get? Something that feels kind of similar to the
Speaker 1: experience of using a decentralized app called Tornado Cash. Tornado
Speaker 1: Cash is something known as a mixer, which is a
Speaker 1: service that allows people to obfuscate both the origin and
Speaker 1: the output of certain kinds of crypto transactions. It helps
Speaker 1: with privacy and with anonymity, But federal regulators say cyber criminals,
Speaker 1: of course used services like Tornado Cash for money laundering purposes,
Speaker 1: and as a result, Tornado Cash was recently hits with
Speaker 1: sanctions by the US Department of Treasury. Now, privacy is
Speaker 1: a key objective of many crypto proponents. It's one of
Speaker 1: the things that's really important and often makes the asset
Speaker 1: class attractive to certain kinds of investors. If this principle
Speaker 1: can't be guaranteed, then crypto's utility for folks who care
Speaker 1: about privacy becomes more questionable. Today I'm joined by Bloomberg
Speaker 1: crypto blogger Emilina Cole. There's no real regulatory o of
Speaker 1: a sight yet of what's happening on these exchanges, and
Speaker 1: we'll discuss whether or not the centralized service can truly
Speaker 1: be regulated and what the issues are surrounding crypto and privacy. So,
Speaker 1: tornado Cash, this is a this centralized protocol that allows
Speaker 1: transaction mixing. There's a lot of attention on it right now.
Speaker 1: Let's start by explaining all three of those things. What
Speaker 1: is tornado Cash, what is mixing in crypto, and why
Speaker 1: are folks currently talking about it. So tornado Cash is
Speaker 1: a platform that runs mostly on the ethereum blockchain. What
Speaker 1: it does is it allows users to send their ethereum
Speaker 1: tokens to tornado cash, and while they belong to tornado cash,
Speaker 1: theory and a kind of part where it's mixing it
Speaker 1: around and jumbling it up with all the other ethereum
Speaker 1: tokens that have incentive Tornado and then eventually we know
Speaker 1: once you take them back out again. It helps to
Speaker 1: obfuscate the transaction history of those tokens. So if you
Speaker 1: were somebody who's particularly concerned about financial privacy, you might
Speaker 1: find Tornado Cash a really great to all for that
Speaker 1: because it helps to obscure the public nature of the blockchain.
Speaker 1: But if you were also somebody who might have gotten
Speaker 1: those tokens through illicit means, shall we say, um, it
Speaker 1: helps cover your tracks there as well. It sounds like
Speaker 1: this is one of those classic situations in crypto where
Speaker 1: the thing that makes it useful, interesting, attractive, especially to
Speaker 1: privacy proponents, also makes it useful, interesting, attractive to people
Speaker 1: who might be accused of criminal or otherwise nefurious behavior.
Speaker 1: Is that kind of a reasonable assessment of the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much, and it's it's one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: we're talking about it today, right. So the US imposed
Speaker 1: sanctions on Tornado Cash in August, and the reason for
Speaker 1: that was that some of the activity that had been
Speaker 1: happening on Tornado Cash had been illicit, and they'd had
Speaker 1: evidence that hackers in North Korea had been using it
Speaker 1: to launder their stolen cryptocurrency in a way that was
Speaker 1: made it more difficult for investigators to track them, and
Speaker 1: because of that North Korean link in particular, that made
Speaker 1: it not just you know, like an illegality target for
Speaker 1: US authorities, but also a political one. When we generally
Speaker 1: talk about the US or other government sanctioning somebody, and
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of sanctions to go around since
Speaker 1: Russia invaded Ukraine, it tends to be against like knowable
Speaker 1: named legal entities, a person, an organization, a company. Tornado
Speaker 1: Cash is a software protocol, like what in what has
Speaker 1: it meant to sanction a piece of software in practice
Speaker 1: and what are some of the issues that have arisen
Speaker 1: as a result. So back in March, my colleague and
Speaker 1: fellow reports and she interviewed the founders of Tornado Cash,
Speaker 1: and at the time they said, it's not technically possible
Speaker 1: to sanction a blockchain protocol like Tornado because technically it's
Speaker 1: a piece of technology and being in blockchain, not one
Speaker 1: person controls it. There is you know, a direct company
Speaker 1: that you can say they're in charge, they're operating it,
Speaker 1: they're the ones responsible for everything that happens on it.
Speaker 1: It's built through open source code, which means multiple developers
Speaker 1: are contributing to it, and supposedly, according to the founders,
Speaker 1: community of people are the ones running it and operating it.
Speaker 1: So just because a group of people built it in
Speaker 1: the first place, that doesn't necessarily mean you can point
Speaker 1: the finger at them and say they're the ones responsible
Speaker 1: for it. Um But as things have gone on, the
Speaker 1: reasons why these sanctions were able to be enforced is
Speaker 1: because eventually what happened is that other providers who serviced
Speaker 1: Tornado in different ways that weren't to do with the
Speaker 1: blockchain's day to day operations. So you know, the email
Speaker 1: addresses of people who worked on it, or the website
Speaker 1: that you would visit to go to Tornado Cash, these
Speaker 1: were things that were run by centralized providers US companies
Speaker 1: that had rules and laws that they have to abide by,
Speaker 1: and so Tornado is a sanctioned entity, they can no
Speaker 1: longer do business with them. Those services went down, and
Speaker 1: therefore Tornado became effectively sanctioned. Well, it wasn't only the
Speaker 1: services went down, was that those providers kicked Tornado and
Speaker 1: any individual founders developers that they could identify off of
Speaker 1: those services. Right, So it's the way that these actions work.
Speaker 1: It's not that there's like a magic button that the
Speaker 1: US or other government can press and these things happen.
Speaker 1: It's the organizations involved have to take active steps, and
Speaker 1: they absolutely did those things. So, you know, tornado Cash.
Speaker 1: You can no longer find the server for tornado cash
Speaker 1: on discord, which is kind of like a chat platform.
Speaker 1: You can no longer find, as you said, their code
Speaker 1: hosted on services like GitHub. You can still find their
Speaker 1: code hosted in other places by other people, which I
Speaker 1: think speaks to what you were alluding to in terms
Speaker 1: of the decentralization of the thing itself, even if its
Speaker 1: services were centralized. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why,
Speaker 1: even in the immediate aftermath the sanctions, everyone was wondering, why,
Speaker 1: you know, if we can't look at the code on
Speaker 1: something like get hub, how will we find out who
Speaker 1: might have actually been in charge of this, or whether
Speaker 1: the found this could have profited from Tornado Cash and
Speaker 1: therefore have some responsibility for its ongoing maintenance. But thankfully,
Speaker 1: I guess for US authorities, those things were uploaded elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And it's part of the narrative around crypto is that
Speaker 1: if one thing is built somewhere and it's not controlled
Speaker 1: by any particular ensity. What's to stop that being replicated?
Speaker 1: What's to stop someone building that Tornado cash again under
Speaker 1: a different name for everybody to use. Crypto loves acronyms,
Speaker 1: And there's one that I encountered fairly recently, which is
Speaker 1: dino or d I n O, which is decentralized in
Speaker 1: name only, which is kind of an increasing criticism of
Speaker 1: so much of the fundamental infrastructure of crypto. You know,
Speaker 1: it's applied to everything from the folks who are like
Speaker 1: Web three is great, and then you you know, poke
Speaker 1: a little bit harder, and it's just a bunch of
Speaker 1: Web two companies that have like Web three skins. It's
Speaker 1: things like Tornado cash, where even if as we've said,
Speaker 1: this protocol could be hosted in lots of other places
Speaker 1: that really relied on a centralized infrastructure for every from
Speaker 1: its email hosting two, it's actually called repository. What are
Speaker 1: the alternatives here? Right? If if you are a person
Speaker 1: who is serious about maintaining your privacy, having some degree
Speaker 1: of freedom from government interference or resistance to censorship, what
Speaker 1: does the presence and the future potentially look like for you?
Speaker 1: So Tornado wasn't the only crypto mixing tool out there,
Speaker 1: and there are others um So, so that's like an
Speaker 1: immediate one. But if we're thinking about ways that you
Speaker 1: can kind of step further away from the centralization and
Speaker 1: step further towards something that possibly couldn't be sanctioned or
Speaker 1: would have more difficulty in it anyway and being taken down,
Speaker 1: the first thing is privacy coins. So there are cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: like z cash, if you'll excuse my British accment with
Speaker 1: the zed um and minero um, which are slightly different
Speaker 1: to other tokens, and that they helped to obscure that
Speaker 1: pathway a little bit more. The only thing is with
Speaker 1: those cryptocurrencies is that are not widely accepted. You're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to do as much with a
Speaker 1: token night minero or zaid cash as you would be
Speaker 1: with an ether token, so you're a little bit more
Speaker 1: limited in that way. Coming up more from my conversations
Speaker 1: with Emily Nicole about how the wider crypto community has
Speaker 1: responded to the sanctions against tornado Cash, one follow up
Speaker 1: question for you, Emily is, and I'm just going to
Speaker 1: say this thing that I say all the time, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, everything old is new and crypto and one
Speaker 1: of the oldest tensions is this tension between this idea
Speaker 1: of if you want perfect privacy protections, you have to
Speaker 1: allow a certain amount of criminality right where it's like,
Speaker 1: if something is really good at protecting your privacy, then
Speaker 1: it's definitely going to be used by criminals. That is,
Speaker 1: you could argue a dramatic oversimplification, but in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, that's also the conversation that folks are having
Speaker 1: in crypto right now. Where are people landing on either
Speaker 1: side of this question? If you think about what the
Speaker 1: broader financial world looks like, there's an element of criminality
Speaker 1: and all of it, right, so be naive to think
Speaker 1: that you could feasibly remove criminality from every aspect of it.
Speaker 1: But what concerns people the most is that there's no
Speaker 1: real regulatory oversight yet of what's happening on these exchanges
Speaker 1: or on these platforms, particularly ones like Tornado Cash, which
Speaker 1: don't really have like you know, a jurisdiction or a
Speaker 1: company office that you can point to and a CEO
Speaker 1: that you can bring in front of the Senate. And
Speaker 1: so that's one of the concerns is that like, if
Speaker 1: you can't have any oversight at all or have anybody
Speaker 1: that you can point to as responsible with figure than
Speaker 1: than what roots are left to you in order to
Speaker 1: be able to shut those things down. Right, So this
Speaker 1: is essentially the argument that in order to have privacy,
Speaker 1: you actually need some amount of centralization, Like somebody has
Speaker 1: got to take one for the team and you know,
Speaker 1: be the entity that could get in trouble if you know,
Speaker 1: bad things are happening and regulators or other enforcement agencies
Speaker 1: are trying to crack down on those bad things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're seeing it more and more now that
Speaker 1: crypto people who have espoused the benefits of decentralization to
Speaker 1: like the nth degree and now starting to say things like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll never be able to have full decentralization.
Speaker 1: We have to aim for the best amount that we
Speaker 1: can possibly get because we're never going to be able
Speaker 1: to do the actual full thing. And you'll even see
Speaker 1: CEOs of major crypto exchanges say this now, whereas you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a few years ago you might have seen the
Speaker 1: full like Bitcoin rally wammy of centralization is dead and
Speaker 1: everything is is defy in future, and so as that
Speaker 1: kind of narrative changes and people have to start thinking
Speaker 1: about this differently, it will be interesting to see what
Speaker 1: tools the crypto enruy tries to come up with to
Speaker 1: get around these centralization risks. In the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: Tornydo cash sanction and the subsequent arrest of this developer
Speaker 1: outside of the United States, a lot of the conversation
Speaker 1: took on kind of a very you know, first they
Speaker 1: came for Tornydo cash kind of till own. And there's
Speaker 1: this real kind of contrast between the well, I guess
Speaker 1: we've got we have to give up some freedoms to
Speaker 1: have some freedom's conversation and the folks who are you know,
Speaker 1: kind of fighting the fight that any slope is too slippery, right,
Speaker 1: that you have to have this really aggressive, assertive, fundamental
Speaker 1: approach to defending against this. What recourse do those folks
Speaker 1: really have if they're attempting to kind of go up
Speaker 1: against governments, Whether or not it's possible for you, no
Speaker 1: crypto person to see something like the Department of Justice
Speaker 1: if they felt like they're being treated unfairly, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know better than I If there have been any
Speaker 1: successful examples of that, and I've bet there are a few,
Speaker 1: but there is definitely a thinking at least among the
Speaker 1: crypto cognizanti that anything is possible. That's the dream of bitcoin,
Speaker 1: right The dream of crypto is that you can do
Speaker 1: anything if you put your mind to it, and that
Speaker 1: includes evading total government sanction or oversight. And if you
Speaker 1: live in the web long enough that maybe there'll be
Speaker 1: a way that your hoping could become completely out of
Speaker 1: sight and out of mind if the government were to
Speaker 1: come knocking. They're always going to be people who are
Speaker 1: trying to outrun the attempts of people in positions of power, governments,
Speaker 1: state actors, non state actors, and then those governments, state actors,
Speaker 1: non state actors are going to be throwing often billions
Speaker 1: of dollars of the problem of keeping up with the
Speaker 1: people who are trying to outrun them, and there's definitely
Speaker 1: a feeling that that is starting to emerge in crypto
Speaker 1: right now. The challenges the sums involved on the part
Speaker 1: of you know, the folks in crypto who really care
Speaker 1: about these are like they have way fewer resources than
Speaker 1: the governments who are equally keen to crack down. But
Speaker 1: then the governments themselves are also slightly on the back foot, right.
Speaker 1: It's always a you regulate out of existence rather than
Speaker 1: into existence, is one of the former UK regulators likes
Speaker 1: to tell me every time I ask him about crypto.
Speaker 1: Um so, what they'll be thinking is like, you know,
Speaker 1: how can we regulate the bad stuff out of crypto
Speaker 1: rather than how can we regulate the good stuff in?
Speaker 1: Got it? Well, Emily, thank you as always for being
Speaker 1: on the show. You can find more of Emily's reporting
Speaker 1: on the Bloomberg terminal on Bloomberg dot com or follow
Speaker 1: her on Twitter. She's at Emily J. Nicole. That's E
Speaker 1: M I L Y G N I C O L
Speaker 1: L E. On the next episode of Bloomberg Crypto, El
Speaker 1: Salvador is a year into its great Bitcoin experiment. On
Speaker 1: September seven, it became the first country in the world
Speaker 1: to accept the token as legal tender. What's happened since, Well,
Speaker 1: it's been a ride. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily
Speaker 1: podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows
Speaker 1: from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Send us
Speaker 1: your comments, questions or suggestions for the show to Crypto
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net or find us on Twitter. We're
Speaker 1: at Crypto. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky Verglina.
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed
Speaker 1: Farup and Sharon Barrio. Hilda Garcia is our engineer. Original
Speaker 1: music by Leo Sidrn. I'm Stacy, Marie Ishmael. We'll be
Speaker 1: back tomorrow. D