Topic: First mixer sanctioned by US authorities (blender.io) (Read 560 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.

It's not certain that your coins will be held until you provide more info, neither that they won't be accepted because they're blacklisted, but is it worth it? I mean, you're mixing to get privacy, but you're going straight to those anti-private and ambiguously deceitful companies? That's like pulling the devil by the tail.

I'm in the favoring position to have never used any centralized exchange. I only exchange decentrally whenever I want, whatever I want, with whoever I want. I'm mixing, because I can; because it's primarily a smart decision. Using a centralized exchange, hoping that your coins will be approved means you're somewhat agreed with this "taint" rule, which is against the principles of bitcoin.

And that's just one of the many reasons you should avoid CEX.

I did sell at Binance coins mixed at Chipmixer in the past year. Nothing bad has happened, everything was processed just like other non-mixed coins.
So for now I think that the "fear" of mixing may be a bit exaggerated. Or maybe it depends on the exchange too.

Of course, reading TOS is a must. Of course, testing the waters may be useful. Of course, keeping too much money on centralized exchanges is (and was) never a good idea.

But, isn't this a problem since KYC became a thing? What's new now? Bitstamp, Binance, Coinbase etc., always treated bitcoin as non-fungible and enforced these arbitrary rules against mixing. You're not affected if you don't use centralized exchanges.

And, to be honest, I find it unreasonable to do such thing; you have obfuscated your outputs, made your activity hard to trace, enhanced your privacy and you'll end up handing out all of your personal info to some corrupted companies which will then sell it to politicians, private companies, the dark net etc.? Doesn't make sense. You either protect your privacy or not.

No one sells coins to ChipMixer. The chips they distribute are created from consolidated outputs from other users' deposits. For a large entity to "drain all the available chips", as you put it, they would first have to deposit at least as much bitcoin as the total value of all the chips. If they then drained all the available chips, then ChipMixer could simply recreate the same number of chips again from the deposit they received from said entity. There is no one selling coins to ChipMixer and so no one to track or monitor.

We already know that dozens of different government departments in the US alone spend tens of millions of dollars on the service of blockchain analysis firms. For example:

https://www.usaspending.gov/keyword_search/chainalysis
https://www.usaspending.gov/keyword_search/ciphertrace
https://www.usaspending.gov/keyword_search/coinbase
https://www.usaspending.gov/keyword_search/elliptic

Pure guesswork, and it highlights just how stupid taint and taint analysis is. Some exchanges might think coins are clean after 3 hops, some might think 7, some might want more. Completely arbitrary nonsense.

This is new to me, and I haven't seen anything about it being the first mixer sanctioned by the US. I think the people affected have been in the US, and they have a lot to fight for in that hack. There are a lot of people affected by the Axie Infinity hack. I didn't know that Blender was used to mix the funds etc.

My question would be is "Would this affect the different mixers as well?"

I cannot find the video, however, Charlie Lee said it would take at least 7 hops before an exchange will not mind where your coins came from anymore. The question however was only about avoiding problems on your account in Coinbase if your coins came from a gambling site. We cannot be quite certain if it would work if the source of your coins was from something more criminal.

I think this was done mostly because Blender is Russian based mixer, and with current situation everything that comes from that country is considered bad.
This world we live in today is starting to look more and more like one from George Orwell's book 1984, ''War is peace, Freedom is slavery Ignorance is strength''.
Now that people are fighting each other who is wrong and who is right, they can go ahead with their plans and control everything and everyone more than ever.

Best solution would be not to use centralized exchanges that can one day block your account or seize your coins just because of your haircut, way you walk, or because you speak anything against government.
Using decentralized exchanges and P2P trading is always possible and I know people are doing face to face trades more than ever, but using anything else you should be ready for anything to happen.
There are some tools we discussed before that can check if addresses are ''tainted'' and risky or not, but I think it's all bias and controlled by some central authority.
If you think this is bad, what if in near future we have CBDC crap that can be spent only for things that is allowed to be spent in specific time period and than it's gone, that is next level craziness and they are working on it.

I remember that last year one of the blenders was Sized in the Netherlands or one of the European countries on charges of money laundering, but I do not think that such blenders will ever operate in the United States.

if the United States wants to stop the activities of the mixers, they can do so easily if they have the resources and for a mixer like chipmixer will try to drain all the available chips, the site will provide new chips, they can monitor who sells it to Chipmixer and they will be able to reach the state or the party that runs the site, and so on for all blenders.

If blenders don't keep customer records, that's good news.

For the average user, most likely he will not have a problem using the blender, but he must be confident that these blenders do not provide 100% privacy.

3 hops for something like an exchange, and 5 hops for something like a government (since a government has more resources) That's what is supposed to be but generally, it's the opposite. Most governments have fewer resources than companies using blockchain forensic companies.

The number of hops was something Andreas was talking about in a video long ago, and he argumented. I'm too lazy to look what's the exact video but it should be a video about coinjoin or mixers

As for blender.io, I was smelling something like this the last month but since the proof is only what matters and I didn't have...
It won't be the last for sure but the persons running such service should anticipate before. It's all about being pro-active


I did it so many times before with ChipMixer and Kraken and never got a single problem (but yeah I admit bitstamp is the whore of the KYC). I have probably never used the Kraken account for something else other than CM. Account 100% chipmixed and kraken were happy with me

So far, no users posted complains regarding locked account/funds or whatsoever there on their ann. So it's good to assume that no users faced a problem there unlike bitblender, well, maybe in the next few months.

That's a big no for me. Even just gambling website funds to an exchange is risky, how much more from a mixer.

But if in any case that chain analysis can detect/linked the addresses of any mixer then its really fuck up.

As we speak, Blender.io and their wallet, Blenderwallet.io are offline.

At first, they said that blenderwallet was hacked in July last year - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.57299512

And then they announced that they are shutting down the wallet and mixer for "maintenance" on 5th April this year - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.59765651


Sincerely, which kind of service can shut down for over a month to carry out maintenance?

I think that was their exit plan, and they are not coming back. Perhaps they noticed they were being watched. Some of us remember how Bitblender left the scene?

I think that's the least of your worries if you're in the US.
Lately exchanges have increased their demands about the funds inch by inch, asking you when you get them, where you get them, proof on how you've got them, with what funds, probably ending with questions about the the pubic hair color of the dog of the cousin of the one that sold you the coins. So just obfuscating the chain of transactions won't help too much you in these cases.

That being said, I made once stupid mistake of sending coins mixed through CM directly to Bitstamp the mother and father of all KYC, nothing has happened yet, deposit and SEPA without a hiccup, so probably it's not yet such a big deal. Exchanges will try to delay any such actions as long as they can, they are losing money and volume, they might want to obey the law but not to the point when it strat costing them money.

I haven't seen a single mention about this on the forum.

U.S. Treasury Issues First-Ever Sanctions on a Virtual Currency Mixer, Targets DPRK Cyber Threats


This is a first, but the same could happen agaisn't Chipmixer and/or other mixers. Is anyone else worried about what may happen if you move funds from a mixer to big exchanges after this? Of course one could always do another hop to "unlink" a set of coins from a mixer, but how many would be enough?