I have no evidence to support this, but there is always the potential that CM is being run by a government in order to track the flow of coin. Even if this is not the case, there is always the potential that the government will take over CM (by using force), and will not make this public, at least at first.
Alex Jones, is that you with news conspiracy theories?
To be fair, it could happen to CM like it could be the case with any other mixer. But CM is operating for many years now, if an agency was behind, they would have already finished doing what they wanted to do. Or they are very bad to track the flow of bitcoins.
We would also have seen news such as ABCD was arrested, we managed to track the funds that flowed here and there.
Also, with the various attacks that CM has undergone since,...
Taking over a mixer could also be possible. It happened with Bestmixer with the servers infected for many months. After "spying" enough, they decided to close the domain under seizure. If CM was in a case similar, the service would be closed since
Unless the agency wants to play the very long term but I can't imagine them running a mixer for years.
I could be naive this said.
You make a fair point in that if CM was in fact operated by a law enforcement agency, it would likely be discovered by now, as it is likely that
some of the coin they mix is associated with criminal activity. I might counter this argument by saying that law enforcement could know that Alice is engaging in something illegal after tracing money flows through CM, and would then look at Alice specifically to try to find other evidence linking her to crimes. It is also possible that CM is being run by an intelligence agency that doesn't care about most crimes, and is trying to track money flows to/from enemy states, such as North Korea, Iran, Russia, etc.
On net, after considering your point, I think it is unlikely that CM was created by a law enforcement agency. Although there is always the potential that CM was taken over by a law enforcement agency "yesterday".
@PrimeNumber7: true... But in my particular usecase, i would care less that the government knows how much funds i hold (i'm not saying i wouldn't care at all, it's just not my primary objective to hide my funds from the government). My biggest concern is criminals (and beggars). I'm not doing anything illegal, best case scenario the mixer is run by an honest company and nobody knows how much funds i hold, if it's run by a 3 letter agency i would be dissapointed, but i'm pretty sure a 3 letter agency will not come to my front door with a shotgun or a crowbar to threaten my family and steal my funds.
But once again, that's my usecase... It doesn't have to map with the usecase of other users.
I am willing to speculate that most people who value their privacy are in a similar situation as what you describe and use CM (and other mixers/mixing technology) accordingly. In fact, some people may not even have substantial amounts of money to hide from criminals/beggars, but do not want to tip off said criminals if they were to become more successful and start using mixing technology.