Topic: Bitcoin mixing is NOT money laundering, per se - page 13. (Read 4155 times)

Just highlighting this as it is like clockwork that the only people who defend these mixers are on their payroll.  They will say stupid things like having financial freedom is the same thing as allowing third parties to engage in the facilitation of money laundering or that, "the practice of engaging in financial transactions to conceal the identity, source, or destination" of funds is not money laundering but just maintaining privacy.  On one hand they bash honest projects as scams and unleash their combined power to try and censor people's feedback in the trust network that are honest while claiming to fight scams, and on the other they want the scammers to be able to launder their funds so they can keep getting paid their cut for advertising mixers to them.  Not saying all those advertising mixers are evil.  Some of them just want an easy paycheck.  The ones who list me as untrusted for blowing the whistle about the coming government crackdown on ChipMixer BEFORE they acted are the ones who are literal pieces of shit this community would be 100 times better off without.

you nailed the whole point. this is the best explanation I have read so far. in short, you cannot achieve both privacy and reputation. as you've said if you are mixing your money, you are hiding what you wanted to hide by getting innocent people's money, in that statement alone you are already escaping something. therefore you can conclude that this person has a reputation and a bad one at that. IMO, they are not mixing their money, but they are mixing their reputation in order to escape those tails that are chasing them. for sure anyone who knows how the mixer will function will always be keeping an eye on those transactions before it goes inside that specific mixer.

If you want to hide your bitcoins from government then it is probably so. If you use mixers you draw more attention to yourself. Governments have enough analytics and computing power to trace mixed transactions. When we saw news about Chopmixer closure Europol said they already know who used this mixer, so they knew everything they need before they confiscateed servers.

But if don't want some exchange office to know how many coins do you have you can probably hide that information from them. I see no purpose to hide my transactions from gov as they'll find anything if they want, but I usually prefer not everyone knew about that I have... nothing on my account.

Do you think privacy coins are good while mixing is bad? Not sure what's the point while both serve the same purposes.
1. Mixer allows to have financial privacy, and so do the privacy coins.
2. Mixer helps with money laundering, and so do the privacy coins.

While I would say none of them have the goal to help criminals. Both are here to ensure financial privacy. If criminal takes advantage of that, it's not their fault directly, it's not the mixer's fault, not even the fault of privacy coins. Bitcoin has been used by so many criminals and that doesn't make Bitcoin bad.

But there would be money laundering. Isn't that what you're trying to prevent? Seriously now. Do you want to prevent money laundering or individuals having profit from money laundering? Because I'm personally in favor of the former.

Currency that enables financial privacy is actually currency that enables money laundering. You're somehow in the delusion that decentralized mixing is morally correct in comparison with centralized mixing, while the same (and even worse) criminal activity remains encouraged.

to add to ognasty post

REGULATORS DO list mixers as something to watch. though sponsored forum-bro's stroke readers to sleep pretending its not happening
but its not deniable.. they DO WATCH actions done by mixers.. they have reasons to

its because fungibility is not a true-false thing. its a risk % and mixers are not a 0% risk. they actually are advertising that they clean dirty money. thus they are waving a flag of servicing criminals.

mixers dont get automatically shut down just by being a mixer. they get shut down when criminals use them. but by advertising a service fit for criminals means regulators watch what goes through a mixer

using a mixer gets you watched more so than for instance buying a giftcard (hackers prefer giftcards) so when innocent people use mixers instead of giftcards. guess what.. innocent people get on watchlists more due to using mixers.

thus defeating the whole point of mixing..
.. mixing is not about privacy becasue your on a watch list. meaning the only real purpose of mixing is to clean dirty coins by passing the dirt to innocent people and take innocent peoples clean funds..

people that want privacy should think smarter and realise that advertising that you want privacy makes other people start to wonder why and start looking at you.
(if 2 people were standing in a street. one on the main sidewalk. and the other hiding behind a bush.. the guy behind the bush looks more suspicious and becomes watched more. .. but for that person hiding to then have a billboard to tell everyone he is hiding and where he goes to hide.. that just defeats the point of hiding)


the less you speak of it the more private you become. the less you make it obvious the more private you become. in short dont use things that make it obvious

Law enforcement has to follow the stolen funds and when they are being laundered through a mixing service it really isn’t a question of whether or not mixers enable money laundering. They do. When an individual is running a mixing service, then that person has enabled money laundering and will likely go to jail. If privacy was built into the Bitcoin protocol, then there would be no individual enabling money laundering, we would only have financial privacy.

Individuals laundering money for criminals = bad
Currency that enables financial privacy = good

Too many people are on the mixers payroll here to have a real discussion about it though.

Yes, mixers are a great tool for losing track of your utxos, but if they are not used by many at the same time, you risk not having enough utxos to mix, thus rendering the purpose for which they exist in vain.  But at the moment I prefer coinjoins to a mixer service even though they do a great job.

I agree that Bitcoin mixing is a way to keep your Bitcoin information private. But some people use it to hide their bad actions, like stealing or cheating. It depends on why someone is using it if it's okay or not.

It's not fair when people blame products for bad behavior when it's really the person's fault. Sometimes law enforcement only focuses on the product instead of the person using it.

That is very true. Bitcoin had been associated to drugs for a long time because of Silk road accepting bitcoin as a payment.
But things have changed now and people are using bitcoin for trading these days. Yet there are a lot of people who think it's illegal and some think its a scam/ponzi.
Its true that back in those days bitcoin mixers were being used at peak to launder the money used for illicit activities.
I guess bitcoin mixers are so good that government agencies find it really difficult to trace the coins back to the owner and hence they decided to ban mixers like Chipmixer.

funny part is im not the one waving my underwear around YOU ARE
you cry that you dont want people knowing your business but then go about promoting it..

i however for a decade have never advertised my stash or services i use nor promoted people to use the services i use.
no one knows my history pre-bitcoin nor my name

sooo angelo
are you as successful or unsuccessful at bitcoin as you were at scrap metal trading

Based on your reasoning, you shouldn't avoid KYC, because you're put on some watchlist.

Completely irrelevant the part where you're wanted by the authorities and the part where you're private. In fact, the former proves the latter. If you weren't private, the authorities wouldn't be anxious about mixers.

See, this is what I mean. You don't even understand what's privacy to begin with.

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Completely waste of time. Back to ignore.

blackhatcoiner

i do understand privacy far more then you. i also know to actually do research to know how to be most effective

if you read my posts i have never said everyone should KYC their life history. i have clarified that using mixers is not as private as you PROMOTE because your PROMOTIONS fail to inform people that they actually get watched when using services YOU PROMOTE

so its you that does not care about privacy you simply care about earning a commission from PROMOTING SOMETHING

if you actually bother to read my posts and then go do some research on what regulators look for and delegate money services to look for,... you could, if you actually read the stuff... then create a new service that avoids the flags becasue you understood the flags to know what to avoid.. where said new service as a unpromoted side effect does the purpose of privacy

the very fact you promote privacy gets you highlighted as someone that should be watched.

so learn from mistakes and stop repeating mistakes

oh and yea
if you dont want people knowing the colour of your underwear stop promoting, stop waving a flag that you wear pink thongs.. you are going to get noticed

EG
if you want to hide your shopping habits. dont put a bilboard up, of a map of where you shop and make payments and receive payments, telling people they should shop there too..

The coins of Canadian truckers were confiscated, because they used centralized exchanges and their government enacted the Emergencies Act to stop "freedom envoy". Bitcoin mixing has nothing to do with it.

I'm not questioning his intelligence; I'm just alerting for his intentions. He is clearly not in favor of privacy, pretty much the opposite.

bip 47 and their admirers are not going to talk about risk awareness/flaws.. you should know this.. proposers/promotors/advertisers never talk about flaws. they try to get flaws to be unspoken/removed/trampled out of a discussion. as you know

however when you learn how it works and realise whats involved hopefully you can ignore the proposers stroking your head to sleep and instead have a critical thinking cap on and think about how the features can be used against other users involved in the feature

the thing is. for ease of use a recipient wanting lots of payments over time shares a secret with one person. so that person can generate the same address lists as recipient so the sender can send funds over many addresses knowing it goes to the recipients wallets who has the secret, without sending funds to the same address or asking repeatedly for new addresses because they pre agreed on an address list creation method they both share

one utility is if a recipient does not want to set up multiple secrets to have a secret per sender. but instead creates a 'federation"/group who all share the secret making it easy to manage/monitor incoming payments

best practice would be a different secret per sender-receiver partnership. thus avoid the malicious user joining the federation. but some examples of bip47 are that the recipient sends out the same secret to his trusted allies/group/friends so that he has to only watch monitor one set

the flaw with the federation/group is that if alice uses index 2 so could dave. meaning address re-use still occurs

some discussion is that out of the range of index. the recipient says alice use 1-250 chris use 251-500 and so on so that there is no cross over. but the recipient then doesnt have to watch several secrets with thousands of potential addresses per secret. but instead a more manageable watchable amount

those involved in looking into bip 47 are tweaking their promotion/utility arguments. but from the earlier idea's there were many flaws

the end solution is new secret per partnership with no group federation sharing secret.
but in all cases it still involves sharing a secret.

...
i say all this because you used the freedom trucker donation gateway. whereby its lots of people making single payments. meaning a secret per user is meaningless. however the model of the donation gateway having multiple managers with the same secret and they then select individual addresses within the secret range so that funds appear to be going everywhere where reality is it goes to one wallet of the secret

a malicious user can become one of the managers of the secret that is also used for other users/managers

Honestly franky1, and before I ask some people who are smarter than me about BIP-47, is that how it truly works? Because I've read a few blogs/articles and I have never read/seen anything/any explanation about a "nefarious user" needing to be "in on the secret", and getting the capability to know the list of addresses.

payment codes is where there is a partnership involved.

all donators would have to be in on the secret to know whats the next address to use. and they would need to organise who sends to which address so they dont all just end up sending to the same next address,, and due to lots of different donators its hard to do because a honeypot can be done where the authorities become a partner(pretend to be a donator to get in the secret reveal club) and get the secret thus the honeypot then knows the list of addresses


also later(separate flaw) when its time to spend funds received. usually utxos are clumped together as multiple inputs, so unless spending each utxo individually by manually choosing utxo's for input to never co-mingling utxo's into one spend. those numerous addresses may end up being linked later

as for blackhat. he is the person that wants other peoples posts deleted and people banned and tries to tell people that they should not use bitcoin normally and promotes other networks and services that end up messing with people more. and he is in complete ignorant blindness of his actions. he prefers other networks so all insults he says to me apply to him 1000x

he doesnt want you to think for yourself or do your own research he just wants you to follow the group narrative you got recruited into by his forum wife.

even now in this topic he avoids the regulators guidance of how legit services should treat mixers.

for instance he only displays info that echos his preconceived confirmation bias (sounds like stuff he likes to hear). rather then things that are part of the real world. take the chain analysis stats. .. chain analysis only know of SOME criminal activity due to SOME poorly made privacy options. however there are many other better ones that chain analysis cant audit.
EG the police only know about the crimes that got reported. although there are xX more crimes that go unreported. thus crime stats are BS

I'm merely making a point of asking more about BIP-47, and its capabilities and application to make our onchain activities more anonymous. It would have made the difference between the success and the failure of using Bitcoin for the Canadian Truckers' donations in my opinion. franky1 is a smart person if he's not trolling.

Citation required. Chainanalysis suggests otherwise. Even from their recent report, which included Hydra marketplace and Lazarus group, they have concluded that only a 25% comes form illicit activity[1].

Just a tip: you're making a privacy-related question to a narcissistic, anti-privacy and anti-Bitcoin (altogether) forum user who believes that money had had never privacy to begin with. Very poor choice.

[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/crypto-mixer-criminal-volume-2022/

Yeah, I know that mixing/tumbling is different from BIP-47/Reusable Payment Codes, but can't BIP-47 help a little in making our onchain activities in Bitcoin more private? For example in the Trucker's Protest, I see it now as both a success and a failure, but if the truckers used a wallet that applied BIP-47, wouldn't the government have had a harder time to sanction the donations?