tornado.ws / is on Nostr

Tornado Cash contributors & maintainers. Our principle: everyone has a right to be left alone. 🌪️

🔗 Discussions: https://forum.tornado.ws

🔗 App: https://tornado.ws

Last Notes

2023-06-29 21:47:27

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I do want to emphasize that tradeoffs for this come with all of the economic considerations of PoS. This was just an advocate type reply to bring into context additional factors. People should think stuff deeply through and align themselves with what they most agree on. Most recently, Vitalik himself has said that he has no idea whether ETH will be around in 5 or 10 years. Do respect his honesty.

2023-06-29 21:44:40

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Yes, it is interesting, Ethereum has constant issuance which in combination with burn mechanisms will lead to an equillibrum. Also, when looking at PoS itself, it does make it easier for solo people to mine.
One bet that also exists is simply the following: besides the ideal case factor, realistic cases also exist. People die, and this means their belongigs get stolen / destroyed / pass on / get split up.
In a similar way, one could have analyzed the historical data of how Ethereum has been distributed, then draw conclusions based on that. Humans are not perfect.
Also to note is, in the case of BTC (not XMR (currently), which I prefer and consider superior, but possibly in some future), the problem also comes from the following: when it comes to hash power in comparison to held amounts of stake, it is easier for cartels to sustain high hash power, while it is harder to do this for solo miners.
Especially when considering state threats, mining is very obvious and makes you a target simply based on energy usage (at least if you are doing it for some decent profit, a small mining device won't help you).
When validating on ETH, your network traffic is more to blame, but unlike energy networks, internet traffic may be obfuscated, and at the same time, with very low energy usage miners, you can stake large amounts of ETH.
So for me it seems that it is probabilistic tradeoffs vs definite guarantees, and then whoever wins. Note that right now probably 16% as far as I've check ETH is staked. If it is to be assumed that the largest stakeholders are not staking right now, this helps the distribution.
This is one of the reasons while we'll also soon be adding LSD anonymity pools :]

2023-06-28 12:19:17

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I mean the competitation to Damus in this image:
1. Telegram: Honeypot which readily serves data to the Russian government (and probably others), see: https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
2. Snapchat & Instagram: Addictive app with main business model being collecting and selling your data.
3. Facebook: like 1. and 2. together.
4. TikTok: App which almost literally allows you to sell your soul to the Chinese government in exchange for popularity and/or money.
5. Twitter: Turn-a-blind-eye service that cooperates every time a Government demands it to (as far as we know).

2023-06-27 23:15:18

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Be it BTC ordinals or ERC721's, no matter what it is, ultimately you can't actually ensure some nonfungible asset not being copied, you can only ensure that your asset is going to be central in the sense of guaranteed data availability over a long span of time (or basically forever, for an ordinal as an example, or a fully onchain 721).
Otherwise for physical assets you need delivery or legally binding arrangements to guarantee some piece is yours. There is no way to not allow someone to relist a piece for now, although I could imagine that a mitigation strategy would be an AI trained to recognize and output an identifier for one nonfungible asset, and then compare on-chain whether that asset has been delivered already to someone or not.

2023-06-27 23:02:59

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Here, these pages will most of the info if you're out of the loop:
🔗 https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/tornado-cash-sanctions-challenges/
🔗 https://docs.tornado.ws/
Link 1 was a pretty big event, wondering that you didn't notice this. In any case we're not the original team but "formed" on the instances that a now inactive contributor was hosting.

2023-06-26 15:47:38

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👋 Guess who's here.

2023-06-25 22:33:57

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Let's financially diversify Nostr a little. 🤝

2023-06-25 22:31:56

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The users go where the builders / projects go.

2023-06-25 22:30:01

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Memeing into people's lives trustless financial privacy. So good the US doesn't like it. Our advice: 🌪️ Keep whirling. 🌪️

2023-06-22 21:32:50

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This is exactly one of those nightmares that motives our project. Furthermore, consider in addition the following dynamics:
If it becomes infeasible for providers to offer services legally and also for people to self-host, there is still going to be demand for different services, for example network traffic routing and obfuscation. Who is going to provide those services then?
Well, even right now besides morally acceptable solutions there are many (even clearnet) markets which are going to be offering VPNs, proxies, but which are not hosted in datacenter servers or self-hosted by the provider, but which have rather been set up on infected devices. In fact, these markets in general tend to specifically differentiate between datacenter hosted services and "residential ips", which are basically infected computers / routers, like the one you might have at home, as an example.
Specifically, you can imagine that residential ips are looked for by hackers, because these are likely not going to be blocked by providers like Cloudflare and so on.
You can see now where this is going. Would there be such a total dystopic effort at eliminating even these options which you have stated, then as a result of this you would see more & more innocents become the collateral victims of repression. Essentially, imagine police knocking on your door because some hacker orchestrated an attack over your network. Personally, no matter whether innocent or not, an accusation alone is a very defeating thing for any human being, since we are social creatures.
You can then also imagine, that in combination with this, that trust-based systems are both more mathematically but also probabilistically less resilient than distributed platforms. This means, there are innate vulnerabilities in them which endanger these same innocents.
So our advice, no matter what the situation, the dominant strategy will always be to self-host and use distributed platforms, and probably also have good iptables knowledge!

2023-06-22 00:20:37

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Fully agreed, in comparison to Mastodon as an example Nostr is clearly superior. The emphasis was on alternative services as a bridge that start the process, which is simply something that can been observed recently. Ultimately these services do not offer the resilience and flexibility for widespread usage.

2023-06-22 00:17:54

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Agreed.

2023-06-22 00:15:00

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Note that there is also alternative services to YT such as Odyssey. Otherwise LibreTube seems to use Piped API under the hood.

2023-06-21 23:59:25

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The post went a little off-topic as to what platforms doing this will be (still getting accustomed to the Nostr client being used), but in general this methodology may also count for any Nostr born platforms.

2023-06-21 23:56:29

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Initially you start with alternative services (like Invidious, Piped, and so on) and in general any services which help people preserve their privacy (if properly configured) while impacting their revenue model. Then, similarly to platforms such as Reddit, eventually the revenue impact is large enough to force a decision, such as their API price increases. This opportunity is then used to recruit people to alternative social networks, through all of the dynamics which have been visible in the "shutdown", as an example, (many people switching to Lemmy instances).
So, repeat this cycle often enough, and settle for a revenue distribution in which all systems are stable, meaning one in which one platform does not have an unsustainable-unless-violating-your-rights monopoly.

2023-06-21 23:41:22

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In general, people who haven't experienced any downsides of transparency when it comes to their financial holdings and activities, are likely going to trade their information for convenience and security. For this reason, it is hard to explain someone who hasn't felt any downsides of something, why they should limit themselves from enjoying more convenience.
This is why in the case of cryptocurrencies, as an example, the true benefits will only be felt when the downsides of traditional financial systems (and surveillance) reveal them.

2023-06-21 16:32:54

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A little late, but gm sir.