If Chipmixers were used for Money laundering then they should be shut down. I agreed with this. WHY? because if Crypto and blockchain technology are used for bad purposes then how can we expect governments to legalize it
Pretty sure those same authorities would describe all mixers as money launderers, including the one you're advertising in your sig. Governments perceive privacy as immoral because they want to know everything about you. Mixers make that difficult for them.
disagree with both of you
Europol or whoever else could target:
- city of london
- malta
- paris
- zurich
- frankfurt
- talinn
- copenhagen
- luxembourg
- amsterdam
...and probably several other money laundering centers if they really wanted to (maybe city of london and zurich might be technically less feasible, but w.e.)
the only difference is that money laundering taking place through banks in those financial districts will always be conducted by the politically well-connected, and organizations such as europol only exist to pretend to target high-level sophisticated criminals, not to actually do it.
All the charities, military/intelligence agencies, churches/mosques, NGOs, think-tanks and big corporates wash their dirty money through mainstream banks, the city of london and the various offshore tax havens across the world exist exactly to facilitate high level financial criminals
think about it. what industries, providing what goods or services, does the British pound actually even represent? there's been virtually nothing to speak of being exported from the UK for decades and decades now, the British government themselves would be the first to concede that "financial services" is all they really do (weapons are the only vaguely unique thing the Brits do, and it's inherently a very limited endeavor)
and so as an organization with alot of money, what possible reason would you ever have to do any business through London (or Luxembourg, lol), a financial services center that's sole business is it's own casino complex? crime is the only conceivable answer
This is also a good wakeup call for all the other centralized services and altcoins (eg. Tether, Ethereum, Ripple, BCash, ...). The governments could shut them down all the same and make the same exact claims they made here (used for illegal activities) and arrest the centralized authority of them (like arresting Butterin and seizing his tens of millions of premined ether).
maybe
it'd be interesting to see exactly who would get shut down from that bunch, supposedly Tether has some quite well connected (i.e. politically) people from the US involved
with Chipmixer, it seems quite likely to me that they've been doing increasingly less volume over the years, as Bitcoin adopters are likely to be getting gradually more risk-averse, are technically adept and fast learning. You'd be nuts to use mixer web sites at almost any time, the best you could hope for was to get scammed, because the other most likely outcome was that the websites were sucking as much information out of your mixing transactions as possible (and selling the data to whoever)
chipmixer getting busted this week is possibly even a case of "good day to bury bad news", what with all the bank busts (none other than Credit Suisse is apparently teetering on the precipice as we speak...). why that timing? if you want to get everyone to pay attention to bad bad crypto, you can pick a better week for it. they've had over 5 years to bust mixing websites, and they choose this specific week?
