Topic: ChipMixer.com has been seized. - page 2. (Read 1870 times)

That's why stay anonymous. I see members post their social profile, picture, phone number, website address and many more things that can lead to identify you easily. It's not just the government you need to do it for your own personal safety.

When you will be known to have Bitcoin in your procession, people will think you are reach no matter if you have even lass than 1 mBTC. If they identify you in real life then bad people will try to take advantage from it. Thing can end very bad.

Unless you are somehow privy to information the rest of us don't have access to, it's yet to be established that ChipMixer kept logs.  We know that data was seized, but people are merely speculating on what that data might be.  If you could try fo keep any accusations you might wish to make evidenced by verified information, that would be appreciated.

After a few controversies last year, when ChipMixer was abused by Hackers, it seemed already fishy to point at ChipMixer, a service which is now proven to be deeply involved in washing hacked, extorted and stolen coins and also Darknet markets.

Does nobody care how ChipMixer grossly violated written agreements? Agreements of it's foundation (Mixing reinventent for your Privacy?). ChipMixer boldly promised to delete all logs, don't keep confidential information and don't store private keys of payout Chips. It lied to everyone.  
But I just can read "dUh GovErnMenT baD" here, just because government stopped watching criminals obfuscating crime coins in ChipMixer, which is very harmful and resulting in scammers getting away. Luckily, it will lead to many criminals being caught now.
Even when your point of view is selfish and you don't care about criminals depositing coins in ShitMixer, you don't question how ShitMixer lied to everyone?
Basically, ShitMixer violated all good practices of privacy by storing logs, keys and more because it's a centralized shit service, which lied directly in our face because it could.
But very few criticism here against ShitMixer's lies.

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/minh-quoc-nguyen

I do not know why he would live in a country where authorities would get him anytime.

Agreed that we have different views and the government is more powerful. However, based on the argument, I am not implying to everyone that no one will get arrested. I am only saying that if someone developed a tool to use for privacy and it was used for criminality, it is not creator of the tool who should be liable. This very much similar to the arrest they did to developer of Tornado Cash.

Also, if the government tells you to stop using bitcoin because it is illegal according to their view, would sell all the bitcoins you have because of their power or will you fight for your right?

I don't think that the users have any threat from this unless someone has been using the service for mixing the Bitcoins they got from some illegal activity and even in that case, I don't really think it's possible for them to track anyone down, or can they? I'm not entirely sure about that. But as long as you haven't done anything wrong, you should be okay.

It's really unfortunate, to be honest. I've been seeing chip mixer for years on this forum, and though I never used their services it is still sad to read this news and to see their website being seized.

Well, views differ. Apparently, your view isn't shared by the government. It is unfortunate, however, that the government is the one that is more powerful than you. If you think that they don't have the right to do this and that, but they don't agree, they will prevail.

So whether you think the government does not have the right to arrest somebody who is just writing an open source code, Alexey Pertsev is in fact still in jail right now. Whether we believe that starting a marketplace is not a crime, Ross Ulbricht is actually rotting in jail until today. So while we all agree that providing the people the means to protect their privacy isn't a crime, this Nguyen could indeed end up in jail as well.

I saw his selfies and I truly wonder why was he shooting such a dumb selfies

iPhone has good selfie camera, that's the reason and this person is a selfie addict
Btw there is nothing wrong with it, he is a human and you know, no one can hide that much from this world. You have to go outside, sometimes you have to see friends, have some fun, maybe see a doctor, go to the gym, etc. I don't get the idea of life if you earn a lot of money and hide from everyone and everything.

I collected his quotes from press-release document and put all together:


His words definitely makes sense and makes someone very optimistic about people who are here to do something good for public. So, because of that, what amazes me is that he was holding 7 terabytes of data. Chipmixer logs alone would never take that much data, they wouldn't even take 1/1000 of it.
I'm afraid his only interest was money and was faking it by those beautiful words. While no one knows what's that 7 terabyte, I bet, he actually wasn't giving a f to users' privacy.

It is not a good security practice to transmit actual private keys between servers.

Notwithstanding the above, if someone can cause CM to belive that they have a chip, they effectively have access to the coin. So if someone were to trick CM into believing that coin was deposited, when in fact it was not, and they were able to do so in a way that CM could not differentiate from legitimate deposits, CM would need to either not honor all legitimate deposits, or ultimately honor the illegitimate deposits.
Over 7 TB of data was taken from CM. I would want to know what the other 99% of this data was.

Keeping funds offline would have been possible: once in a while, when they run out of chips, users could only get a voucher until new chips were created. In the same way funded keys could have been kept offline.
I think the backup-scenario sounds logical: 7 GB of data including several snapshots which includes some of the used private keys. I'm now curious if there's anyone left with (older) chips that haven't been emptied. I checked the changes here yesterday, I'll do the same to day to see if more keys got swept. If that happened, I assume it's their owner emptying them now.

Update:
1 mBTC chips: March 16: 373824 - March 17: 374196 - Difference: 372 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0.372 BTC.
2 mBTC chips: March 16: 79035 - March 17: 79117 - Difference: 82 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0.164 BTC.
4 mBTC chips: March 16: 30463 - March 17: 30546 - Difference: 83 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0.332 BTC.
8 mBTC chips: March 16: 13950 - March 17: 13958 - Difference: 8 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0.064 BTC.
17 mBTC chips: March 16: 5053 - March 17: 5051 - Difference: -2 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -0.034 BTC.
32 mBTC chips: March 16: 3452 - March 17: 3430 - Difference: -22 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -0.704 BTC.
64 mBTC chips: March 16: 1359 - March 17: 1343 - Difference: -16 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -1,024 BTC.
128 mBTC chips: March 16: 830 - March 17: 820 - Difference: -10 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -1,280 BTC.
256 mBTC chips: March 16: 392 - March 17: 371 - Difference: -21 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -5,376 BTC.
500 mBTC chips: March 16: 57411 - March 17: 57443 - Difference: 32 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 16 BTC.
512 mBTC chips: March 16: 277 - March 17: 276 - Difference: -1 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -0.512 BTC.
1000 mBTC chips: March 16: 96525 - March 17: 96558 - Difference: 33 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 33 BTC.
1024 mBTC chips: March 16: 267 - March 17: 256 - Difference: -11 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -11,264 BTC.
2000 mBTC chips: March 16: 19792 - March 17: 19801 - Difference: 9 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 180 BTC.
2048 mBTC chips: March 16: 57 - March 17: 55 - Difference: -2 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -4,096 BTC.
4000 mBTC chips: March 16: 4496 - March 17: 4486 - Difference: -10 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -40 BTC.
4096 mBTC chips: March 16: 114 - March 17: 114 - Difference: 0 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0 BTC.
8000 mBTC chips: March 16: 1284 - March 17: 1282 - Difference: -2 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: -16 BTC.
8192 mBTC chips: March 16: 15 - March 17: 15 - Difference: 0 funded addresses. Total balance sweeped: 0 BTC.

Based on this, I can't really tell if any more chips have been swept.

I don't think it is really possible for a mixer to not store all their coin in their hot wallet. If CM used cold wallets, moving coin to/from the cold wallet really couldn't be done on-chain, otherwise, it would be clear which groups of addresses belong to CM. Also, CM's operational model effectively put all their coin on a hot wallet, regardless of the location of it's private keys due to the fact that CM had such a low threshold for someone to get a "chip", which is effectively an IOU from CM to their customers -- all that is needed is a browser session.

Binance is doing the same thing too. All we know about Binance is CZ. It is like CZ is behind everything.   He is accepting deposits, he is approving withdrawals, he is processing KYC's, he is dealing with the FBI/CIA, he is dealing with the twitter folks, he is a one man army.

CZ!

CZ!!!

CZ!!!!

Without CZ, Binance wouldn't exist. God bless him.


What about CM storing keys though? If true, that's going to cause some serious trouble on its users and they openly said, they don't do it. People used CM to stay anonymous, if CM stored their users IP's, addresses etc... Wouldn't be that lying? Would it be better if they stayed in the business and kept logging their users? Grow the jackpot even bigger for the FEDs?

It seems to me, you just can't trust anybody or any service these theys. You just don't know who is a fucking badge.

However, the argument remains the same. The government does not have the right to arrest the creator of the knife if his creation was used to murder someone. The government should arrest the murderer. I am shaking my head why there are some people who argue that the arrest and detention is acceptable because it is not.

I thought about it too. I think it's quite common practice when business hire some random dude to be their public person. His name is used for things like hosting, bank payments, communication and etc, while real work is done by other people who remain behind the curtains.

I don't understand why Chipmixer gets a pass for storing our private keys and whatever other data they have despite constantly assuring us that keys are deleted and no data is logged. He literally committed the cardinal sin of privacy. What if that data is released during the court proceedings? Sure it sucks for drug dealers and hackers, whatever, but what pisses me off is all the people who used Chipmixer to protect their privacy for (what they believe are) morally good reasons. People in countries where Bitcoin is illegal, and the people who used Chipmixer to donate to organizations or causes that go against what their government supports.  

What comes to mind right now is what's going on in Ukraine (and set aside your views on that for a moment, this is just the example that comes to mind). Imagine a Russian citizen who donated funds to support Ukraine's defense and hid that transaction from the Russian government with Chipmixer. On the other hand, imagine a Ukrainian citizen who donated Bitcoin to practically any Russian company in the past year and hid that with Chipmixer. If this data leaks, both of those people are facing prison or death.

 Just look at this.



Chipmixer really scammed us. I was rooting for him at first when I learned he wasn't yet caught (see my post here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.61918045). But now that I've given it more thought and see how terribly he screwed his users over, I think he is far from a hero.

The problem here is that governments stopped going after the real scammers a long (decades) time ago, because they can't do that with the technical and social infrastructure they've got, but it's certainly possible. So they have resorted to criminalizing any service that is used by scammers, including legitimate ones, and destroying them, except for the services who retain a large enough legal team to wear down the government's in court - see FTX and Sam for an example of that.

Chipmix.io, a known scam clone, is still up by the way - and it's even on the first page of google, under a bunch of "governments shut down Chipmixer" news articles.

And you mention drug dealers - well let me ask you a question then. Do you think Ross Ulbricht deserves his double life sentence?

Miners are also aware that some of the transactions they mine come from scammers, and thus take a commission from illicit activity. Does that make them scammers? No.

The fact that you think a mixer is a scam, just because it uses scammers' funds, means you've misunderstood the definition of a "scam". Let me quote it:

ChipMixer, and every other similarly working mixer, is the complete opposite of scam. Ensuring privacy for everyone, and therefore for guilty people as well, is what a mixer all about.

To awear, or not to awear, that is the question

If a drug dealer is seized for pushing drugs and also at same time it was discovered that some Scammers give funds to him to run his business, what should happen to the scammers if found and could you say that the drug dealer was awear or not awear that the funds he is getting to run his business is from scammers?

So, what do we have?
A 49 year old Vietnamese who used gmail, protonmail, and so on, who had a lot of bitcoin, but was slowly exchanging it by offering to sell it to you $100 at a time if you send money to his paypal account?
I feel like this guy was the front man with the real coders working behind much thicker walls. They needed someone to be in contact with clients on bitcointalk and reddit, someone who'd pay the campaign manager, but I don't believe the same person did everything from answering questions on the forum, through managing all those domains to fixing bugs and trading bitcoin.

It looks like he was arrested in Germany but charged in Philadelphia? So a person who isn't a US citizen, who probably never went to the US, who lived in Europe, isn't going to be prosecuted and sentenced in Europe? It's funny that no matter where you are the USA is running the show and all governments bow down to the greatest bully.