The bigger conclusion one could make beyond the government wanting to make sure they’re able to surveil financial transactions, is to protect the OCGFC bankers and their business of laundering money for organized crime through the actual banks and financial institutions. And he makes the point in the video, that even when they get caught, they pay fines and no executives get arrested. It’s all really just dishonest, and they use AML laws to justify surveillance on us who should have a reasonable expectation of privacy unless we do something to justify a warrant. But if you spend over a certain amount, the financial institutions report it to the government by regulation. And if you try to resist their surveillance, they want to cage you even though you didn’t do anything actually criminal. And worth pointing out, there are so many federal laws which are burdensome for legal teams to keep track of, they can usually find something you ran afoul of.
Tornado Cash (also stylized as TornadoCash) is an open source, non-custodial, fully decentralized cryptocurrency tumbler that runs on Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks. It offers a service that mixes potentially identifiable or “tainted” cryptocurrency funds with others, so as to obscure the trail back to the fund’s original source. This is a privacy tool used in EVM networks where all transactions are public by default.[1]
In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury blacklisted the protocol, making it illegal for US citizens, residents and companies to use it. The project’s web domain and GitHub accounts were also shut down, and one of the developers of the software was arrested. On November 26, 2024 a US Federal Appeals court overturned an earlier ruling stating that the law could not sanction a protocol.
The project is governed through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and uses the $TORN token as a voting system for protocol updates.[2]
And for a background on just how bad things really are regarding financial privacy.