Chainalysis research reveals: only a small percentage of mixed coins are illegal - page 2.

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legendary

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Quote from: 1miau on August 27, 2019, 07:00:26 PM

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funny that when I clicked on the news link, I saw it:

Quote from: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/chainalysis-most-mixed-bitcoin-not-used-for-illicit-purposes

If Chainalysis is right, only a small fraction of coins sent to and from bitcoin mixers are used for illicit purposes.

It sounds as if the author of the news had many doubts that Chainalysis's analysis was not very reliable. It's good to do such analyzes and come to the conclusion that mixers are not as bad as some people think. This brings a good image to the mixers, everyone has a right to privacy and mixers do a good job

AdolfinWolf

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Quote from: hugeblack on August 28, 2019, 02:58:01 AM

The strange thing is the proportion of mixing coins that comes from gambling.

Yeah, i for sure thought that would be higher considering Coinbase et al don't seem to accept coins from certain gambling sites, or so have i read, while they don't have a problem with mixers.
You'd think more people would mix their coins coming from gambling sites.

But perhaps it's a very niche market and they don't take up a big % as a whole either.

Quote from: PrimeNumber7 on August 28, 2019, 01:11:43 AM

I would be curious to know where the mixed coins end up, specifically the percentage of mixed coins that end up at DNMs. The article briefly touched on this, but it doesn't appear to be addressed in the chart; I would also like to know the percentage of mixed coin that is proceeds from ransomware.

I know there was a website which displayed all of Chipmixer's outputs. Combine that with some wallet identifiers (Walletexplorer etc) and i'm pretty sure someone could make a nice statistic. I'm quite curious too, but i don't think it'll be much different from the graph linked in the OP (minus the illicit and illegal markets) => mainly exchanges probably.

hugeblack

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It is limited to how the word is defined as illegal, most of the mixing services are used for tax evasion, money laundering and other activities that cannot be analyzed accurately so I don't think the word illegal is appropriate for this article.

Also, the definition of stolen currencies is inaccurate as some platforms report their currencies as stolen in order to steal depositors' coins.

The strange thing is the proportion of mixing coins that comes from gambling.
And how do you trust the central platforms mixing service? I don't think they would use services like Chipmixer/bestmixer without getting enough guarantees.

PrimeNumber7

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I would be curious to know where the mixed coins end up, specifically the percentage of mixed coins that end up at DNMs. The article briefly touched on this, but it doesn't appear to be addressed in the chart; I would also like to know the percentage of mixed coin that is proceeds from ransomware.

jseverson

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Another thing to note is that mixers might not even be the biggest enablers when it comes to criminal activity, contrary to popular belief:

Quote from: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/10/10/bitcoin-money-laundering/

CipherTrace found criminals have laundered approximately 380,000 BTC ($2.5 billion), and 97 percent of the Bitcoin criminals send for laundering is to unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges.

I hope these enlighten those who somehow don't believe that mixers have legitimate uses just because a random mixer got shut down.

LeGaulois

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For once Chainalysis doesn't publish something to say bad things about mixers...

We can see that there are many different user types that use mixers, (and some use multiple mixers to mix their bitcoin, for obvious reasons) but I would have thought the gambling rate would be much more significant. Knowing that exchanges platforms do not accept TXs coming from betting sites & co, I wonder how gamblers deal with it (or they all lose their money on betting, the house always win, it's true lol)

1miau

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Chainalysis has done some research about the origin of mixed coins:

Source

Only 11% of the mixed coins are illegal funds (8.1% stolen funds, 2.7% from the darknet market, whereby the 26.8% from mixing probably also contain some illegal funds so I guess it's around 14% overall). Most mixed coins are coming from centralized exchanges (around 40%).

Finally, it's a good sign to have an official confirmation that mixers are indeed widely used for privacy reasons to anonymize Bitcoins and only a small fraction is used for illegal purposes. So, the arguments against Bitcoin mixing seem not as valid as often claimed that mixing is mainly used for criminal activities...

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