On May 14, Alexey Pertsev, one of the lead developers of Tornado Cash (TC), was found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch court and sentenced to sixty-four months in prison. TC is a privacy-preserving protocol developed for the Ethereum blockchain: it allows users to deposit funds in a TC pool and withdraw them to a different address, thus making it impossible for external observers to track financial activity. TC is completely noncustodial, meaning that users are in control of their own money at every step of the process. In other words, developers do not have any technical means to control how individuals interact with the TC smart contracts.Because of its privacy-preserving features, TC was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control in August 2022:

On April 24, two lead developers of Samourai Wallet (SW), the most-advanced privacy-centric wallet in the bitcoin ecosystem, were arrested and charged with money laundering and money transmitters offenses by order of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). This is just the latest assault of an escalating war waged by US regulators on financial privacy and freedom.Other examples are the arrest of Tornado Cash developers—a privacy protocol developed for Ethereum and other blockchains—and the pressure exerted by three-letter agencies on centralized exchanges to delist privacy-centric cryptocurrencies such as monero. Regulation by arrest and intimidation is the strategy deployed by the US government to drain liquidity from privacy-preserving money, which is

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became effective in 2016, is one of the most detailed legislative schemes in the field of data protection. This article discusses two libertarian-minded objections to its approach. First, I argue that the notion of “right” adopted in the GDPR is flawed. Second, it shows that the GDPR doesn’t protect individuals from data-hungry governments and corporations. In the end, data protection legislation makes people strong in theory but weak in practice, while making powerful private and public entities weak in theory but strong in practice.
A Flawed Notion of “Right”
The GDPR seeks to protect fundamental individual rights relating to the collection and processing of personal data. These include the