Close down until you figured out a way to react. Money laundering is serious crime, helping North Korea is as well. Tornado cash did apparently both, and authorities gave them a heads up. If it was me, I would close my shop down.
It cannot be shut down. The contract is immutable. It's still live, and it will still be live for decades to come, with new duplicates of the contract being published every day.
> It cannot be shut down. The contract is immutable.
If that’s truly the case, shut down as in stop developing it and advise users to stop using it. Then the addresses get sanctioned and nobody is surprised.
The part where Tornado Cash as an exchange couldn't shut down for a while. And the fact that those, well, "contracts" cannot be nullified like literally any other contract signed in any jurisdiction is troublesome in itself.
Lucky for Elon that he didn't use one of those contracts to buy Twitter.
Don't get confused by the terminology and don't get into word-thinking. A "contract" on the blockchain is nothing like a "contract" in the legal sense. Even if I get your signature on a blockchain saying that you are transferring your assets to me, there won't be any court willing to uphold this. In the same vein, it's not because that people talk about TC as a smart contract that gives it legal backing or makes it subject to the legalities of a "real world" contract.
You could call it "stored procedures" if you prefer, but at the end of the day outlawing tornado cash based on its code is as ridiculous as outlawing RSA.
What you describe, person A agreeing to sell over something to person B, even if just verbally, is a legal contract. Verbal contracts are perfectly legally binding, if somewhat hard to enforce for lack of proof. The lack of proof part is not a problem when it comes to blockchains, is it?
Just because it is virtual doesn't mean real world laws don't apply. What gave you that idea?
> person A agreeing to sell over something to person B, even if just verbally, is a legal contract.
This is not at all what I am saying. What I am saying is that a contract is the definition of terms of a transaction, while a smart contract is the execution of a transaction.
A "contract" defines what parties are supposed to do and the courts use to determine the legal process in case of disputes. Enforcement is not part of the contract.
A "smart contract" is just about enforcement. It makes no sense to talk about the "smart contract" being legally binding or not, much like it makes no sense to talk about "running computer code" or "firing a gun" being legally binding. Sure, you can discuss if the actions resulting from someone running a program to be legal or not, but this has nothing to do with those actions where established in a "legally bound contract" or not.
To put a proxy contract means that there will be an admin able to make contract upgrades. IOW, you need to have offchain trust in the contract deployer. This is widely regarded as a measure that defeats the purpose of decentralization.
So, yes, you could have an upgraded version of TC, but if you want to go that route you might simply use a centralized exchange as a mixer.
Sure, you are partially correct in your understanding.
I was only responding to some one who doesn't understand the ETH tech stack who said it was impossible. It most certainly isn't impossible and proxy contracts are how we deal with things like this in ETH.
You can't reasonably expect a random commenter to have full insight into their legal situation. They should have talked to their lawyers and found options. There is a chance that their financial service is incompatible with the laws in some jurisdictions, and so they might not be able to do business in those jurisdictions. Financial services are heavily regulated...
I think you’re confused about the facts of the situation here. There was no financial service being operated. There was no ongoing business. There was open source code that was thrown over the wall and was locked on the blockchain and immutable.
