Topic: Bitcoin mixing is NOT money laundering, per se - page 2. (Read 3983 times)

How do you know that? Show me statistics that say that 60% of all coins that went through mixers were later used to hide from taxation. Most people don't have to mix coins to avoid taxes. They just need to exchange privately into cash and boom, nobody can prove that you bought something with your bitcoin. You can go to a post office, pay your bills with cash and there's no trace it came from bitcoin.

Even if you could prove that statement (which you can't) is avoiding taxes really a bad thing from the point of view of an average citizen? I always thought that if laws are unjust we shouldn't obey them.

That's what it looks like. Things happened so theymos decided to ban mixers because it's realistically going to damage the forum. I'm with UniJoin sig campaign so I'll be affected but if protecting the forum's rep is a priority for users it shouldn't be a problem when banning mixers from 1st Jan happens.

Mixers are usually used to avoid government taxes. Mixer allows you to trade your bitcoins in the most confidential manner. Since transactions are completed secretly through mixers even with official approval, it would not be wrong to consider it as illegal, but it cannot be compared to money laundering. We have learned several times how bad money laundering is. There's a good reason Mixer has been criticized so much lately because there have been several popular Mixer campaigns on this forum that ended up being scams. The forum may have decided not to allow any more mixer campaigns on this forum due to popular mixers being scams so as not to damage the forum's reputation.

That's true you're right theymos can't compromise his own freedom by refusing a subpoena or court order so it's users own actions which's protecting their privacy. If they're using tor there's less info stored in the forum server that's true. Every user should have attention to the info you've red highlighted.

You fail to understand that you are not the all seeing eye . That you or i don't know who satoshi is , doesn't mean that satoshi's identity isn't known to everyone . Who are the ones that know it ? If i had to guess , people close to him that are good in keeping secrets . Oh , and of course three letter agencies , if an order to find him was given at some point .

you "expect". again just because its a bitcoin forum dont expect anonymity by default. try reading a services terms and conditions.. businesses and services are not "bitcoin"

try reading the privacy link

it explicitly says  what i even quoted and red highlighted..
if you dont want your IP disclosed its upto YOU to use tor/proxy/vpn.. its not theymos's job to get fined and in trouble if subpoena'd, by refusing a court order
he is not going to put loyalty to you as some data guard above his own freedom. nor should he.

also its not just IP data.
if you write something in a PM to another user. expect the content of that to also be supplied if a court order asks for it
its up to you to not reveal secrets on the forum even in PM's.. if you dont want people to know it, dont say it

franky1 you're right it's a public forum so we don't have privacy but that's about public posting. There's actions which aren't public but gets collected by the site like email & ip addresses. We're expecting those info's going to be kept private but if we're going to protect our data we've got to follow steps limiting what we're giving away.

this is a PUBLIC forum. you have no sense of privacy in public unless you create it for yourself



too many people ignorantly think that just because bitcoin does not ask for ID. that businesses and services can bypass laws, sorry the real world doesnt work like that

people have to put their own effort into what information they give away and find ways to prevent the hidden metadata their own computers give away. its not upto a business to work for you, you have to work for yourself

If what you're saying's true it's eating at users privacy. You're saying you wouldn't be surprised if it happened that's better than saying it's definitely done. I don't know if theymos would give users info to govts before starting a thread explaining what he's doing but it's scary times.

This still doesn't answer my question regarding Satoshi's secret identity... I never said he used mixers or gmail/hotmail or his real IP (Tor exists for a reason).

default, zero effort anonymity online is a no go
people actually have to put in personal effort to disguise themselves. this includes learning what agencies look for to then know what to evade doing

EG
if they are now particularly interested in watching users of mixers.. dont use mixers, because using them you will be on a watch list

i would not be surprised if theymos had been contacted by monitoring services to pass them metadata* about forum users whom overtly advertise mixing

*ip addresses, geo locations, sign up email addresses, session data, etc
https://bitcointalk.org/privacy.php

Sure, it's not easy, but care to explain how Satoshi's identity still remains a secret 15+ years after BTC's announcement/whitepaper?

I think it's too easy to control pools and miners , especially with the current status . Most hashpower is based in US and China . Forcing big mining farms to commit their hashrate to specific pools will be the easiest part . Comply or go to jail , easy choice . And if you don't agree as a big mining farm , shut down your miners and move to another country by loosing a big portion of your profitability because in the meantime new gen machines might make your investment even more unprofitable . Most people haven't really understand how hard this is for a company that want's to make profit . And the fun part is that people that haven't even mine say that nonsense that miners will move to non regulated pools . They haven't understand how things work , technically and financially .  
As for the stratum v2 , i have explained here why it won't work https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63254857 .
As for the p2pool , can you guess why it's not still present ? Think of how decentralised mining would work , and you will see that there's not such think as the reason to mine is profit .

Full anonymity on the internet is a no go . If three letter agencies decide to track you down , you are doomed .

I can't imagine how governments will be able to pull this off (controlling the mining pools), especially when miners can decide to move to another pool that doesn't promote censorship. With a new mining protocol underway (Stratum V2), it's expected mining to become less-centralized in the future. I've read somewhere there was a decentralized mining pool called "P2Pool" (not to be confused with Monero's P2Pool.to mining pool). Whenever it will take off in popularity or remain a niche, it's yet to be seen.

Regarding putting devs behind bars, I'd say governments are going to have a hard time doing this especially if the developer is anonymous. Just like Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto. New protocols and/or privacy techniques need to be developed in an anonymous way to avoid government prosecution. If the developer reveals his identity (like Vitalik Buterin and others), he would be nothing more than stupid. I know the excuse is that investors will think a project is a scam without publicly-known developers, but this is the way to go if we want to preserve decentralization/privacy/censorship-resistance. With centralized mixers on the brink of extinction, Bitcoiners will have to use decentralized alternatives for true financial privacy. Hopefully, non-custodial mixers and privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies will survive for generations. As long as we defend our right to privacy, there should be nothing to worry about.

and they (using regulated services) get services to look for illegal acts using mixers.. by monitoring and trying to identify all mixer users.. thus making mixer users exposed to monitoring.. thus defeating the purpose of mixing (for users that dont want to be monitored)

for services that monitor particular transactions with more scrutiny. using a mixer makes users on that particular list of extra scrutiny of following their spending paths.

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as for running a mixer just developing or running one is not illegal. no one has been charged purely for developing/running a mixer. however if the operator directly involved with facilitating criminally sourced funds transfer, and takes a fee/commission for processing it.. then they are charged

a few years ago, when the bitlincence was new for NYC . financial enforcement agents in NY actually registered with services their home personal address and seen if the service(not regulated) accepted them as customers. purely to honeypot trap them and charge them as running a unregistered money service in NY or for NY customers, without a bitlicence

there are delegates in sanctioned countries that will register their address in sanctioned countries to see if they can move funds through services to see which ones ignore the sanctions

they even have court warranted agents that are allowed to sign up and deal on darkmarket sites and use known darkmarket tainted coins that are on watch lists to move funds through services to see which services allow funds to flow.

It recently happened with Foundry:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ofac-sanctioned-transactions-being-censored-5475157.  But then Stratum V2 was announced:  https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/demand-launches-worlds-first-stratum-v2-bitcoin-mining-pool.  I do not believe that the community will turn into a censorship playground. 

you do realise that governments are already defining services that perform subnetwork channel routing as money service businesses.


blockchains and smart contracts dont ask for ID. but when you start promoting yourself publicly and advertising.. guess what. thats how the cross hairs of a target start pointing at you

if you think a subnetwork is private. just check out the "gossip" database of a certain subnetwork, it lists all channel ID, (it maps the network)
heck check out 1ml.com and see how it tags all funding locks to services/names

governments can even hire  analysis sites to set up honeypot's
https://www.fatf-gafi.org/content/dam/fatf-gafi/guidance/Updated-Guidance-VA-VASP.pdf

How about freezing addresses at a pool level ? Forcing big mining farms to point their hashrate to specific pools that obey court  or state orders ? Forcing pools to reject blocks that contain transactions from banned addresses ? Putting devs behind bars like the tornado cash dev ? And much more that are not as obvious right now ? 

If the government has a backdoor on either a non-custodial wallet or a cryptocurrency's node software (with the help of developers), then yes, it will be impossible to have financial privacy against said entity. But code is readily available online (open source), so it will be easy enough to detect the backdoor. Decentralization must be preserved to render governments' efforts to destroy or minimize crypto useless. Centralized mixers will be shut down for good. But not decentralized or non-custodial ones. Tornado.Cash mixer is still running despite the sanctions, as well as, its forks.

With Bitcoin getting smart contract features via the use of sidechains, it's possible to build a decentralized/non-custodial mixer that would live on the Blockchain forever (immutable). I wonder what new tactics will governments come up with to prevent people from obfuscating their BTC transactions in the long run?

What will you do once you need to consolidate them?  Or is that not a possibility?