What can we learn from the Tornado Cash debacle

It's big news in the cryptocurrency world but in case you're unaware, the US Treasury has sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses including the contract address. The Dutch government has arrested the developer who maintained the Tornado Cash codebase. Circle has locked up significant amounts of capital.

So what are the lessons to learn from all of this? Most of us don't want to launder money, but most of us want our privacy.

• Be anonymous if you contribute open source code. If a project has a CoC that prevents that, don't contribute. It's understandable if you use your identity for your business, but something decentralized, there's no reason anyone needs to know who you are. If it is not something you can control after you release it in the wild you should not attach your identity to it. Similarly, if a codebase has it's contributor's full legal name alongside a nice passport photo of themselves, it's probably not a project worth messing with.

• A project with some entity in god mode like USDC is not worth a damn. Don't use crap like that. I know nobody is going to listen, but it still must be said. The whole point of all this is financial sovereignty.

• Use Monero. Don't use financial tools that intermingle your money with criminals as a stopgap measure to make up for underperforming against the real thing. Mixing your money around with crooks does nothing to protect your privacy. Using something that is actually private does.

I can't think of everything, so I'm hoping to spur an interesting discussion. I'd love to hear what sorts of lessons other people glean from this occurrence.