Topic: Hackers and their use of mixing services (Read 683 times)

You started throwing numbers around you've lost count of what's more important comparing things that are related, not apple and oranges.
The average output value of all bitcoin transactions in a day is at around 200 million bitcoins.

So rather than 8.3% of the total supply is more like 1.5% of all transactions went to bitmixer.
That's what fun about statistics, you can take two accurate numbers that are both true but show a totally different picture.

LOL! No, I didn't meant that. It'll mean that I'm also one.


Interesting approach! Just that'll anger Big Brother and we're back to square one: the discussions about extinction 

Haha, that's a very diplomatic way of saying that I'm a cynical old fart.

I would hope that as and when it comes to that, the good mixers will be able to go the way of the good VPN providers, and prove to a court that they have no logs which they can hand over. Certainly any one which can do that is likely to see an increase in activity and volume. That's if blinded nearer certificates or some other untraceable mixing method doesn't become commonplace first.

I was talking about this:

But overall you're right. There's a high degree of uncertainty of what will politicians decide.
I won't continue on this direction since we are on the same page (with tiny bit different levels of "optimism") and I don't want to go too much off topic.

I can hope that mixers and privacy coins will not be harmed too soon.
At least the mixers can easily survive by handing over logs if asked with a warrant.

The last thing I read regarding facial recognition was this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html

I followed the story a bit more and ended up on this article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/facial-recognition-london-inaccurate-met-police-trials-a8898946.html

The TL;DR is that London Police are rolling out mass surveillance and facial recognition, despite it having a 96% false positive rate, and physically stopping and handing out fines to people who pull scarves or hoods over their face to avoid it.

And honestly, I wouldn't even care if the system had a 100% accuracy rate. You do not have the right to harvest the faces of innocent people without grounds or any reason to suspect them of a crime, add it to your database, link it to a bunch of other information you have "obtained" about them, all without their consent or probably even their knowledge.

This is not an isolated case. Facial recognition is being trialled/rolled out all over the world.

Tor is not illegal yet. There have been plenty of politicians and administrations who want to "ban encryption", or some other such nonsense, until someone who isn't a moron points out that doing so would break the entire internet. If we continue not caring about our privacy and electing these kinds of people, it will only be a matter of time.

From reading of this article: https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-hackers-bombard-chipmixer-to-launder-at-least-4-836-btc

According to that analyze (no one knows how fair it is but still...) only 10.8% of mixed funds are 100% linked to illicit activities (8.1% - stolen funds, 2.7% - darkn). If we consider that this numbers are true, then what do you think, would this number be lower or higher in 2016? I guess higher... Do you agree with me?
But still roughly take 10%, in 2016 bitmixer mixed 1 Million bitcoin, 10% of 1 Million is 100 000. How much bitcoin was in circulation in 2016? 16 million but at the same time 4 million is lost (according to 2017 statistics) so what numbers we got? 12 Million. 8.3% of overall bitcoins were mixed via bitmixer alone. At the same time there were very popular mixers like cryptomixer, bitblender. So a lot of bitcoins were mixed, right?
And what do you think, have people changed recently? Did they become more kind?

Great decision from owners:
That's why people prefer to use mixer, why to leave traces to those who are going to catch me? At least make it difficult and unworthy.

Yes, it's a very nice and common sense explanation he made, but most don't care / ignore it.
The Bitcoin-as-drug-money ad was trying to make people believe that buying drugs on darknet is the only use for Bitcoin.


That would be a sad future if it'll happen. I hope it won't ever happen.
The fact that they try to keep everything under surveillance is not new and the phenomenon is expanding at a very fast rate, although in some cases common sense starts to prevail (CMIIW, but I think that public face recognition postponed in Europe until the software gets more mature and harder to be abused).
ToR is not illegal. So I can hope that Monero will also not become illegal. It's just a clever software after all.

(There's also a very odd reverse-psychology explanation: they'll always allow into existence some tools that - among other features - allow illegal operations too to justify the existence of the law enforcement agencies and their funding  )

Not at the moment, but I can see a future where it is. Governments the world over are prying more and more in to the lives of their citizens. Wikileaks, Snowden, etc. have shown the world that mass surveillance is commonplace. William Barr and other high ranking officials keep pressuring companies like Facebook to build backdoors in to WhatsApp and similar apps to allow the government to snoop on encrypted messages. Governments regularly request data from Google, Apple, Microsoft, health insurance companies, etc., who hand it over in the vast majority of cases. Surveillance states are growing in both number and reach, and it won't be long before governments start using blockchain analysis to ascertain exactly how much bitcoin everyone is holding, if they haven't started already.

I've always been a fan of Andreas Antonopoulos' response to the argument that bitcoin is used to buy drugs, which is essentially along these lines: Drugs are the second most traded commodity in the world, after food. The entire definition of money is that it can be traded for goods and services. If you can't buy the second most widely traded good in the world, then what you have isn't actually money.

The fact they can do that will never imply that they will do that, indeed.


I use to believe that the community, this community, as a whole, knows better. And the fact that Yobit banners are usually not welcome is a result of many things, not only the way they are running their business (and sorry, but whoever still believes in ICO fairy tales may deserve their fate).
Since there's freedom of speech, users with those banners may be tolerated, but in some cases having that banner in the history may harm the reputation, no matter how they convince themselves it's ok to wear the culprit banners.


I am a fan of Monero, so I know very well what you mean. Some things can be used for illegal activities and will be used for illegal activities (and I keep telling that US dollar bills fall in the same category), but that doesn't make them automatically bad, illegal or fair to be presented as tools for criminals.
I don't like people to look into my pockets and Bitcoin allows that too easy. Mixers fix that. Monero also fixes that. Is that illegal, I don't feel so.
Could the mixers "behave" better? Maybe. It may also be up to the centralized exchanges and big holders to approach them with some interesting proposals.

All in all, wasn't also Bitcoin "advertised" by media as drug money and so on? But time has shown that they are wrong. Haters are always gonna hate.

Not to mention Chainalysis and similar businesses charging somewhere close to $50k / year for access to their database.

A few limits and common sense policies do reduce the laundering. But the direction this chainalysis thing is going, within a few years we will see many stories of random people's houses being searched and their lives ruined essentially because they didn't buy their coins from a regulated exchange - even small amounts. And that's bad for crypto. Not for criminals, they'll be fine. Just regular crypto users.

Regarding mixers and exchanges, you rightly said both provide a service, both are businesses. Both of them have been used to accommodate the transfer of stolen coins or those gained from illegal or maybe illicit sources. Whereas some exchanges might pull the KYC and investigation card, mixers do not do that.

I recall a few weeks ago certain users were openly stating they were happy to display either the Yobit x10 banner because they saw no difference between Yobit and mixers and argued anybody showing a mixer in their signature should be getting the same treatment as those showing a Yobit or x10 banner. Obviously the two do not correlate but that was the false justification put forward saying mixers were almost exclusively used for illegal activity. Moving forward, there is no doubt some users have taken advantage of the anonymity mixers (claim to) provide in order to hide some sort of criminality but as was pointed put in the previous post, the estimated figure currently stands at around 8% and that is fairly low considering the reputation some users are trying to paint about mixers in general.

For me the ethical concern surrounding mixers in the argument of illicit activity versus general users sending their funds from their exchanges direct to mixers in order to make their holdings effectively unknown after they are moved from any centralised exchange - is a non-argument. Mixers are providing a service for users that do not want anybody to know how much crypto they hold, if a tiny minority of users take advantage of that service and use it for illegal activity then there is not much that can be done at this moment in time.


This does not surprise me. The forum is full of posts where questions or semi-questions have been asked from not so commonly known individuals then they never post back in the same thread, or if they did they would completely disregard what they wrote before or others have written then ask another question or semi-question.

They're not, but it's still worth correcting their nonsense for anyone else who will read this thread and may erroneously believe that only criminals deserve privacy.

Chainalysis, who are probably the biggest blockchain analysis company and who have over 200 customers including Binance, Bitstamp, and Bitpay, found that only 8% of funds passed through mixers are from illicit sources, with the majority of funds coming directly from exchanges, meaning the most common use of mixers is individual users seeking privacy from the prying eyes of centralized exchanges. You can see their webinar on the topic here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/8980410054773689612. The section about the source of mixer funds is at 37:12 (you can type any old nonsense in to the name and email boxes to "register" to view the webinar).

What about people like me who trade exclusively peer to peer and never touch an exchange? Better just shutdown bitcoin altogether to be safe.

Nothing to fear, nothing to hide, is an utterly nonsense argument:

I really think we should start by closing down exchanges that are not requiring KYC for deposits and withdraws under a certain amount.
After all, it's not mixers that are the ones swapping "illegal" funds into fiat, right?


I'm having problems understanding how mixing your coins is protecting you from scammers.
Was there some process implemented in mixers where for every satoshi mixed you get a new brain cell?


Since you're that confident about the legitimacy of your funds can you please post here a statement of your bank account?
It's all legitimate right?
Let's make it like the blockchain where once you know an address is connected to someone you can check his entire history and how much coins he has at least.


With bitcoin sir, you can earn money from posting sir. You can also trade sir and earn money while posting sir!
Anyhow, I think we are wasting our time, those guys are never going to visit this thread again and engage in a real discussion.
Btw, check their profiles   the same pattern, 2+3 lines of text in 90% of the cases.

--------
LE:
Not to make another post.


People that have more than 3 "_" in their nickname should be banned from everything
I'm sure that if we dig around we find out there is something illegal regarding your name somewhere on this planet in some 15th century forgotten town.   ;

Again such a stupid post based on nothing but your “experience”.
 If you had just looked at my previous post it would have been obvious that there is at least the possibility *some* users of mixers are in fact not immoral/criminals.

I’m dumbfounded by your arguments against mixers.
Do you have any clue what bitcoin is about?

Legitimate uses of these kind of mixers were stopped long ago. In the early 2014 to 2015 these kind of mixing services were been used to keep the money anonymous and out of reach of hackers or scammers but after that time, mostly the hackers and scammers are the ones who use mixing services. These kind of services might perhaps not be needed anymore because we people earning from legitimate source should never worry about the origin and destination of our funds.

We should always be confident about our funds. It should not be us who are motivating the use of mixing services. Sometimes I even think why are these kind of mixers even needed if they support blacklisted people who have intentions to scam or hack and nothing more. These kind of mixing services are giving boost to such people.

There are so many things wrong with what you're saying that i don't know where to start.

Yes, bitcoin mixers are used by criminals, but by far the most people using them are simply privacy-oriented persons, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/chainalysis-most-mixed-bitcoin-not-used-for-illicit-purposes

There have only been 2? 3? mixers that were shut down, the others either exit scammed or closed down themselves.

They are quite literally the opposite of anonymous. Every bitcoin leaves a clear "trace" which can be chained to a person on each and every offramp (exchange).

Currently mixers are been used by maximum community who have scammed someone and now want their bitcoins to get mixed up so that it might never be possible for anyone to catch them. Also most wider use of mixers are been done on the deep web or dark web where almost each of the site used a bitcoin mixer in order to mix their transactions. That is where the maximum illegal funds gets rolled into bitcoins and also spoil the reputation of bitcoin.

Mixers give boost to such illegal platforms and hence there are a lot of mixers which were been forcefully shutdown by the legal authorities. Bitcoins are naturally anonymous which makes tracking the transactions a bit difficult(but not impossible) and these kind of mixing services literally make tracking the transactions almost impossible.

Personally I appreciate why smart bitmixer's owner was, this person is great. He created the most amazing mixer and also he closed it himself. To make it more clear, only in 2015 year bitmixer was roughly mixing up to 60K-70K coins monthly (they launched service in 2014 year). Then in 2016, bitmixer owner stated himself that their website mixed 1 million coin. So what do you think, how many people were using it for just protecting their privacy during online shopping? I think maybe some percent only, max 4-5%. See how many websites were seized and how many still aren't and how many things are done without websites via different messengers.
Nowadays mixers aren't used for good purposes, it may was in 2014-2015 year just for the interest of mixer.

Mixing services are really causing a pain in the neck. A lot of mixers are been introduced which might be giving a boost to all those hackers to convert their hacked funds into unknown funds which would than make it easy to get whitelisted.

Mixing services tend to keep the cryptocurrency transactions more secure and anonymous. Even it might be possible to track the transactions underwent through the mixers but if by any chance the hacker uses multiple mixers to mix the same coins than it would never be possible for us to track the transaction. In this case, we have no options left. The mixers too can't shut down just for this reason as there also are some legitimate use of such mixers.

Just a quick question since I do not quite have knowledge of mixing coin or bitcoin tumbler process.
In a mixing service, how many times they will tumble the coins before it will be done?
The second one is, is there a possibility that a mixer company will tract any transactions they had. This case perhaps they will help to solve hacking incidence if hackers used their service.