Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea’s regime afloat

> Hackers then send the ether to “mixers”—crypto platforms that co-mingle tokens from various users, obscuring their ownership. After that, the ether is swapped for bitcoin and then converted into tether, a token whose value is linked to the U.S. dollar.

Good timing for the US to lift sanctions on Tornado Cash [0].

Too many people think "lock them up" is the solution to crime, without considering that crime relies on certain types of infrastructure to remain in business. And that people who are "tough on crime" often have good reasons to keep operational the things that facilitate said crimes.

[0] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057

adding sanctions to a smart contract address that cannot appeal itself was not a winning position in the US courts

and determing that a smart contract deployment was a "foreign asset" was also not a winning position in the US courts, as its not clear if it was deployed on a node outside of the US to begin with, or if the person that actually sent the deployment transaction was a non-US citizen

The Treasury with its new head just short circuited that challenge and stopped wasting taxpayer money on this

yeah, stick with prosecuting the actual crime instead of the laziest approach of calling everyone a criminal for using a sanctioned smart contract

North Korea launders its stolen cryptocurrency through every available means. Including Tornado Cash, quite aggressively, which is why they were sanctioned. It is very hard to understand why the Trump administration would reverse those sanctions unless they are trying to aid this kind of money laundering.

Because code had never been sanctioned before, and it's a clear freedom of speech issue?

The current actions very much suggest otherwise that this administration cares about the first amendment.