Cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash has come under the hammer of United States authorities. The United States Treasury Department has sanctioned the mixing service and banned Americans from using it.
The service pulls together large volumes of transactions, mixing them and preventing their tracking on the blockchain. Given its power of anonymity, some dark actors and hackers have been able to use it to obfuscate stolen funds.
The ban has provoked a semblance of a storm online
On social media, the responses to the ban have been mixed. Some social media users welcomed it, noting banning the popular coin-mixing service was a step in the right direction as it would frustrate the activities of grifters and dark actors on the web.
Some condemned the ban, noting that legit users would be the most affected by it because criminals would always find a way to launder their funds – and have been doing so – long before the emergence of the mixing.
And some, who compared code to speech, wondered if the ban wasn’t a violation of the rights of those who created the mixer via an open-source code.
Interestingly, amid the engulfing storm, the Tornado Cash website has mysteriously gone offline. It was unavailable at the time of writing.
