Surveillance and spying on another level. We are turning this place into quite the police-state.
Lauda has always been a principled advocate of privacy; and given the odious trolling by an idiot with an axe to grind against ChipMixer, her concern is not uncalled for.
That said, I must observe that any stats being compiled by persons on this thread must have
already been subjected to much more sophisticated analysis by actual police-state mass surveillance entities. Outside
“Timelord’s” fantasy world, it is not as if government agencies are n00bs who will say, “
Wow, there is a forum thread listing people who are engaged in online commerce. Hurr durr, we had no idea!”
Amateur surveillance of publicly available OSINT data is of lesser concern to me here. But it is of concern; and I should hope that to protect themselves against anything from harassment by nosy trolls to
real-life Bitcoin armed robbery, anybody advertising ChipMixer should know privacy best practices: Register and post exclusively through Tor, avoid leaking personally identifiable information, and—
mix all payments received!For my part, if I were a ChipMixer campaign member
(which I am not), then
I would ask DarkStar_ if he would pay me directly in ChipMixer chips. A ChipMixer voucher code is effectually a quasi-banknote, payable to the bearer on demand. It could be immediately redeemed, merged with other voucher codes, held in the form of a new voucher code, and then later split and withdrawn. If this is done right, then both timing and subset sum analysis would be infeasible. Blockchain spies watching outputs from ChipMixer would have no way of knowing that a financial transaction occurred off-chain.
Yes, that is basically using ChipMixer as a quasi-bank. I don’t like trusting them or anybody else for privacy; but I do trust them to not steal money. I myself have trusted them with
much more than the amounts of campaign payments; and anyway, anybody who has a problem dogfooding ChipMixer should probably not be advertising their service. If (and only if) dealing with such a reputable party as DarkStar_, I would have no problem accepting payment in the form of a Chip voucher code sent to me by PGP-encrypted message. I
would immediately exchange it for a fresh voucher code.
Although such a form of payment may cause misplaced cries about “transparency”, I would also expect that of all people, ChipMixer advertisers (!) should be aware of why
blockchain transparency is not only overrated, but foolish. WTF kind of braindead drooling idiot considers it a
good thing to publish a business’ financial transaction records for the entire world!? Anybody making that stupid “transparency” argument is invited to publish his own bank and credit card statements online, in an immutable, append-only P2P-network database shared globally by anonymous parties. —Also invited to install a 24/7 public webcam in his own bedroom, just so we can all make sure that he had nothing to hide.
On the same grounds, plus to avoid on-chain transaction fees, I also suggest that campaign managers should consider using Lightning Network for payments.
