If so, that's just further evidence of how ridiculous the entire crypto currency concept is.

It's also kind of amusing that the very mechanism that would supposedly protect you from the extortion is the same mechanism that would allow the criminals to cover their tracks after stealing your crypto.

I am not 100% sure because I can't quite understand, but I think you've got this wrong.

> crypto-currency mixing is a real privacy concern that should exist.

This is the bit I don't understand. Do you mean, wallet addresses are identifiers that give up your privacy, and therefore mixers should exist? I would say that for BTC, yes they are pseudonymous not anonymous, and it's inherent in the design. It doesn't follow though that mixers "should" exist. If you care about privacy you can use a private crypto like monero. I'm not making an argument here that they should not exist, because other kinds of crypto exist that solve this, just that your assertion of the opposite isn't at all obvious and you need to back it up with a reason why privacy "should" be added to BTC. I don't know why anyone has a "right" to privacy with BTC. Why don't you have a "right" to privacy with credit cards or bank checks?

If you are a rich (or poor or whatever) m'fer you don't have a "right" to use BTC privately, even if your safety is at risk.

And you don't have a "right" to own a firearm anonymously either.

Now that said, I also am not sure how swapping serial numbers on guns amounts to authoring the code to mix BTC. In the Netherlands, the jurisdiction in question, firearm ownership is illegal period. In the US, serial swapping is what it is because it's regulated or legalized in that way. In the US, MetasploitaaS would be illegal, for sure. Serial number swapping illegal, for sure. This guy wasn't operating a service and the prosecutor admitted as much. They wrote the code and it was run by others. I am saying, this is like producing the guns (legal if you are registered) and not being liable for murder done by others. The developer wasn't running the tornado service and the prosecutor accepts that to be true. It apparently (excuse me, I'm no expert, just repeating from TFA) runs independently on the Ethereum network. Therefore anyone executing that code on their ethereum "node" or what-have-you, should be liable, not Pertsev.

Is Microsoft being held liable for writing the operating system which accountants can use to cook their books?

I understand there's a degree of intended use, but again to get back to guns, the intended use is clearly to kill, and we don't hold gun manufacturers liable.

I don't have a problem if they want to make the code illegal to write (well, speaking to the issue here, not in general of course -- this would be highly problematic) and in that case they can prosecute him based on writing illegal code. But the crime here is in operating the service.

And just so you understand my underlying feelings here, BTC IMHO is useless, contributes far too much to climate issues to be worth any value it might have, and facilitates crime far more than anything else. To the extent it facilitates so-called victimless crimes like in the older days, okay enough I guess, but it's gotten out of hand and anything and everything that can be done to squash it should be done. It's crooks all the way down. Now with that in mind, I still find this conviction very flawed.