From my point of view, mixing isn't inherently criminal behavior either.... As a matter of fact, many people (including myself) use(d) mixer to increase their privacy. It's nobody's business how much BTC i hold, that's private information (just like my FIAT balance on my bank account). But this didn't stop the world's governements of attacking all mixing services, so i don't see why they wouldn't increase their attack surface by making every service that isn't 100% KYC and actively working with them a valid target.
Don't be surprised if they even make Privacy illegal soon, that is the way we are going now.
If they started to ban and arrest people who created open source wallets than be sure they will expand in future to other wallets and services.
They clearly wanted to send a message with this.
Please be serious.
BAN from forum is not the same as not being able to type name of that service in forum
He was not accused of being a mixer, but that was back in 2015 and lot of things changed since than.
I am wondering if theymos is going to update his definition of mixer again
Definition of a mixer
For clarity, here is a detailed definition of what we mean by a "mixer". Most people know intuitively what a mixer is and don't have to read this.
Something is considered a mixer if it meets all of these requirements:
1. It has a feature advertised for taking property, improving its privacy somehow, and then returning roughly the same type of property.
a. Even though you can sometimes use non-mixers to mix coins by depositing and then withdrawing, this doesn't make it a mixer because this is an incidental use of the service; the service isn't advertised as privacy-enhancing.
b. If a site is not primarily a mixer but has a mixer function, such as a mixer function on a gambling website, then the whole site is considered a mixer.
c. If the site takes coins, gives you a possibly-transferrable IOU, and will convert this IOU back into mixed coins much later, then the temporary conversion into a different type of property does not prevent it from being considered a mixer.
d. If the site internally converts your deposit into other things as part of its mixing, but ultimately the point of the product is to get your original type of property back, then that's a mixer, not an exchanger.
2. It is possible for the mixer to steal property passing through it. Assume that the sender does everything as correctly as possible. Also assume that no miners/verifiers on the base-layer cryptocurrency are evil. But assume that every other actor involved is evil (everyone able to vote in a DAO, every coordination server, every counterparty, every member of a multisig, etc.). Ignore short-term software bugs which are expected to be quickly fixed.
3. The service does not collect KYC-type info from all users. (This is not an endorsement of KYC generally, or a condemnation of non-KYC services generally. Non-KYC services of other types are still allowed, and in many cases they are a good idea.)
Examples of things that are not banned mixers include exchangers (unless they have a mixing function), CoinJoin-supporting non-custodial wallets, and Monero.
