The thing is, most people do not know who operates these mixer services... it might just be the government.
..... like they are running exit nodes on the Tor network.
If the US government isn't running a mixer service, they will be soon. The Hansa market honeypot makes very clear what direction things are going. Going forward, no centralized services can be trusted--assume any centralized service potentially logging your activities (or at least your metadata) is a honeypot and act accordingly. I'm amazed at the level of funds people put at risk on the darknet markets.
They dont have to run their own mixing service but what they can do is compromise multiple mixing service just like what they allegedly did to bitmixer.io.
Did you all read that funny final message from the owner? It almost looked like he was trying to discredit himself to make the community think something is really wrong.
Mixers are not run by any government, but BitMixer doesn`t exist, they shut down the service and here its why:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-lagest-bitcoin-mixer-is-about-to-stop-working-2042470`When we started this service I was convinced that any Bitcoin user has a natural right to privacy. I was totally wrong. Now I grasped that Bitcoin is transparent non-anonymous system by design. Blockchain is a great open book. I believe that Bitcoin will have a great future without dark market transactions.`
Transactions can be followed no matter how small or big transactions are, you use service (mixer or tumbler) to hide where your transactions is going, cause you send it to service and then service mix/tumble all transactions and only then send. But service knows where your transaction is going, so if they are not protected well enough someone can hack them and see all transactions, of course service can decide to keep logs for some time or delete it after transaction.
I agree with BitMixer opinion `Very soon this kind of activity will be considered as illegal in most of countries. `, and this is right, bitcoin will not be anonymous and law enforcement agencies will be able to keep track of all bitcoin transactions.