Topic: First mixer sanctioned by US authorities (blender.io) (Read 618 times)

This is hard to say. Although I strongly suspect that it is possible to trace the input/output pairs of coin going into/out of CM, to my knowledge, CM is the only mixer that researchers have not been able to publically prove this can be done with CM. If CM is not being run by a government, the operators likely have taken precautions to prevent law enforcement agencies from being able to seize (or more specifically) find their servers.

Given the climate and risk to the operators, I would suspect that CM will eventually shut down, either voluntarily or by force via a government seizing their servers. If I remember correctly, bitmixer voluntarily shut down, and they implied this was because they were afraid the government was going to (try to) seize their servers and put their customers' privacy/money at risk.

Yes, I like to have fun.
In this case, I think it is completely the fault of the author of the article. Journalists are sooo competent nowadays that even Instagram is considered a reliable source.

And no, not all other bitcoin mixers are a scam. There are a couple of them working legitimately and with awesome knowledge. Unfortunately, you have enough of your two hands to count them.

On the other hand, there are (or were) nearly 300 scams. Difficult to clean the industry, unless it becomes regulated.
But hey, who wants that

Obviously, the reason they are using similar domain names and even copy and paste website contents from chipmixer.com is nothing but malicious. if anyone behind the clone sites had any good intentions, they would have used different domain names and branding.

Checking if the clone sites can actually mix coins or not is also something hard to do. I have seen instances where they can trick a user who send in test amounts, and they actually mix the coins but once the user decides to send a huge amount, they get scammed.

I am sure you were kidding when you said that. 
It goes to show how unreliable Google is to provide proper search results. Whoever wrote that article wanted to link to ChipMixer. Since he didn't know the correct domain, he googled it and found the fake .xyz site because that one is still the first result if you do a search for "chipmixer".

Btw, does anyone know if any of the alternative Chipmixer sites are all scams that steal your coins or if any of them can be used to actually mix bitcoin? Not that it matters to me personally, just being curious.

Good point, but I don't think government regulators really care about this in the end.
I will give you one example with torrents that are also free, but regulators can take down websites that host them if they think something is illegal.
Heck, they would probably arrest me if I go in front of my house to give free lemonade for donations.  

Just reading how crypto.com sent one women $10.5 million instead of $100 return, and they noticed this error after seven months!  
So I am starting to think that all this crypto companies hired bunch of lousy developers and all have weak very security... they are indirectly calling scammers to hack them, especially this stupid bridges.

What the governments have proven many times is that if they want to put in the time / effort / money they can find tor sites and take them down.
So is chipmixer that good or are they just not going after them?

There is also the fact that at least 2 of the other services were actually saying, more or less not the exact words 'wash your dirty coins here' so there is that aspect too.
And..... it's a free service there is no charge. No different then asking a bank to give you 4 quarters for a dollar. Other others, if I am not mistaken were charging fees.

-Dave

The funny point: check in the article the link to ChipMixer. It's a link redirecting to chipmixer.xyz (instead .com)
Since .xyz is the culprit, so far so good  

One of the most important things in the mixer niche is to be proactive about security and anticipate what can happen (laws, hacks, or an arrest like Tornado).

I think @ChipMixer is smart enough to cover his ass. I hope so.
No doubt The U.S will chase the blenders like witches (The Netherlands seem to like hunting too)

Sor far;
Tornado dev. arrested
bestmixer sized
blender.io seized
Helix's owner arrested
Bitcoin Fog owner arrested

Fighting against BTC mixers is a waste of time to me because we will always see a new one popping online. Cash is still the most used, mixers represent a tiny percentage (very very small. Will they realize that? Not sure...

Came across this thread when looking for some other information on Google, but I'd say after this:

https://cryptoslate.com/ronin-bridge-hackers-used-chipmixer-to-launder-over-73m-of-stolen-funds/

its highly likely.

Nah, they don't really care, people who use mixers are such a small percentage of their business. Vast majority of users never take their coins off of the exchange and just trade back and forth, which is their bread and butter. Those that do are probably just buying jpegs or whatever. Most of the illegal activity nowadays has nothig to do with darknet markets or mixers and has all to do with ponzis, jpeg scams, altcoin scams, romance scams, etc.

Clearnet has a constant list of malicious clones that fight against Chipmixer. That goes from cloning the website and going good ranks in search results to reporting Chimpnixer itself (to Google) for copyright infringement and most probably also DDoS and such attacks.
That's not the government, I hope you can agree on that.

This is off-topic. The ChipMixer website has been removed from Google, as it was reported as copyright offender. The scammer with the .online domain had the cheek to do this, not some authority. There should be a press release if it did.

So I can't help but chuckle at the chipmixer sig posts, sorry! .... So guys.. Is chipmixer is next?  

"Due to recent events ChipMixer is available only on Tor network.
To access it you need following address:

chipmixorflykuxu56uxy7gf5o6ggig7xru7dnihc4fm4cxqsc63e6id.onion

It is impossible to remember - bookmark it. If you cannot then try to remember this:
chip mix or fly - our address starts with this
.onion - our address ends with this. Be aware .online looks almost same
if you use google to search for chipmixer - you will find scam sites
our announcements can be found at BitcoinTalk.org
it is better to bookmark our .onion address
To access Tor network you need Tor Browser:
You can download it here: https://www.torproject.org/download/
it is available for PC and mobile phones"

But don't governments merely employ commercial blockchain trackers in any case (unless it were something like the NSA who'd hire dozens of specialists to build their own tool)?

A tool from such an agency as the NSA would merely be used as surveilence, without making official memoranda to avoid giving away the existence of their tool.

But if a govt. merely wanted to track down a bunch of cyber thugs it is much easier for them to order a commercial entity like Chainalysis to do it (less legal paperwork and allowances required in that case).

I'm surprised a bitcoin evangelist like Andreas didn't say anything about the utter fatuity that is "tainted coins". The things he explained is what's a tainted coin and how to make them "clean" by doing K+1 hops, which is not the kind of behavior I'd expect from him. It'd be much more reasonable to say "Don't deal with folks who don't want your privacy", instead of "This is how you'll deal with folks who don't want your privacy".

So, what happens once exchanges begin requiring more stuff to mark your coins as "clean"? What if despite K+1 hops, they also want from your transactions to not be included into the same block(s), as that'd show you're cheating? What if they start asking you to tell them where did you find your coins? Et cetera.

You shouldn't try to make them "clean", but refuse to accept they're tainted, which means, to say no to the exchange.

I Believe this is the video you are talking about
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BILcJ3WtdLQ

There is no exact number of how many hops you need.
Antonopoulos says in the video that most of the coins have been in mixers in the past, and if they say they need a high number of hops they will find that most of the coins have been there.

---

I have been searching about how many coins have been through mixers and I found some interesting graphics.


https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/privacyweek/2022/01/25/how-popular-are-crypto-mixers-heres-what-the-data-tells-us/

The most interesting is this chart. Fresh coins are coins that have never been mixed before.




Those charts shows basically that near 70% of all mixed coins per month have never been through a mixer before.

So the number of "tainted" coins is growing day by day in a fast rate.

I don't want to be a politician but a government shouldn't use a 3rd party to run government activity because that's something that can become harmful to the country's interests. It's not specific to the crypto sphere but for almost anything. We can see the result in The U.S. with the health system or more recently with the war in Ukraine (yes I take examples that are extreme)... Or European data sent to US servers and fuck people's privacy...

Being too dependent on someone (person/company/country) can be detrimental to you and can even prevent your development.

On the other side, I do agree with your point about the cost. It's surely cheaper to outside the job but developing your own infrastructure from scratch and exactly tailored to your need in the long term can be more rewarding. They have rather chosen this approach in our country and started 2 years ago by recruiting all kinds of specialists. People with real crypto expertise are so rare and in-demand that as you can imagine, they are extremely well paid.


One of the problems now is that since taxes and regulations emerge, some citizens don't really have the choice to use a CEX otherwise you become a cheater (without really wanting to become one)

A precision about this news:

an authorization is issued  
Please Sir, can i mix my coins? Great project!

You have zero privacy when you use a CEX. Everyone knows that. So here's the way I see it:

Withdrawing coins from a CEX:
It makes sense to mix these coins. If you don't mix them, then the exchange in question will absolutely track everything you do with these coins, link that info to your real identity, and then share and sell this data. The only reason you might not want to mix your coins is if your only plan is to hold them in your own wallet and later transfer them back to the same exchange, although even then you probably want to mix them to prevent the exchange from tracking exactly how many coins you are holding and in which addresses you are holding them in.

Depositing coins to a CEX:
Mixing coins before you deposit them to a CEX will prevent the CEX from knowing where your coins came from. If the source of your coins is the same CEX, then mixing them achieves very little at this point. If the source is another CEX, then you may have a reason to mix them if you don't want one CEX to know about your activities at another CEX. If the source is somewhere else, then mixing them may very well be a good idea, for example if the CEX would otherwise refuse your coins since they came from a gambling site. Once the coins are on the CEX, though, then your privacy is zero.

A better option all round is, of course, to stop using services which spy on you and censor you.

Had to say I was had by the title (thinking, how on earth could they sanction Blender, did they buy them out?), then my "oh" moment came.

Could be the start, but you have to say sanctions against Bitcoin addresses haven't really worked out well for them -- and then there's the complex issue of taint as pointed out above, if someone were to want to sabotage a wallet, or taint spray attacks.

Great explanation from  o_e_l_e_o on ChipMixer and how unscientific any of the current analytics people are and how vulnerable they would be to a taint spray attack generating majority of false positives. Just thinking, even if they could find a link (track someone sending CM coins), they couldn't easily follow the path if they intended to since chips aren't even chronologically linked to the source inputs.

This is the distinction I'm talking about.

One may have 1000 BTC, another may not want to reveal he's the owner of a hundred UTXOs, another may not want to reveal he's mined a block himself, another may not want to reveal he was a user of another exchange before etc. But, that's a private matter.

The "taint" nonsense is a political matter. CEX's ask for KYC, sell info to basically everyone, mark some coins as "dirty", not because they will prevent money laundering, tax evasion etc., but to gain data, which is ultimately a weapon of control. If everyone abruptly refused to continue using Binance, because of this, be sure that they'd change their ToS before tomorrow morning.

Better late than never.

It doesn't have to be a mixed one. Your coins may be "tainted" and you may not have a clue. Just don't use a CEX, end of story.

Well, let's say somebody has 1000 BTC as a single input. Maybe he doesn't want to tell the CEX he has 1000 BTC and a mixer does that even if only 0.1 BTC is mixed and the rest is kept "clean".
It's not my case (I wouldn't have mind it was ), but privacy can go in various ways.


It's a smart decision indeed, and I think that you're one of the lucky few that could actually do that. I think that the majority just won't. Unfortunately.


True. But I don't think that they're keen to lose customers and get some drama instead.
Of course, if one sends 1 mixed BTC to CEX in one step, he's "asking for it".


What I've done was basically testing with rather small amounts.