Topic: Is there a chance we get a takedown notice? - page 5. (Read 1683 times)

I thought similar about tornado cash recently too though. I don't know if that can be traced because I haven't investigated their source/algorithm but I think the news articles about that have been great advertisement for it.

Bitmixer lasted 6 years until they shut down and didn't seem to face many consequences. Bitmixer was a big team, chipmixer gives an impression of being small, I think it's possible chipmixer used what they knew from prior mixers and used it to their advantage - with staying fairly anonymous. The history of bitcoin mixing is large enough to include one mixer in 40+ that manages to maintain its privacy.


I think this is how chipmixer remains functioning too. If they give you limited chip sizes, they give you an incentive to donate back change rather than joining mixed funds and making users more traceable.

Most privacy tools available are too advanced for the average user imo and probably a lot of advanced users. You don't need a company to do chain analysis to denonymise you, just an enthusiast with an hour or two to spare (or less).


There's a use case for VPNs improving security of companies and aiding in certain things (ie storing and processing personal information in one territory while accessing non sensitive information outside of it).

No log VPNs are generally well marketed on increasing security and privacy of users (especially on public WiFi) but I'm surprised they've lasted so long and become so widespread.

Obviously I meant the "we" we not the "WE" we.  I will do my part to help I meant. I think you would agree to help too?

At most Theymos can give them an IP Adress which may or may not follow to the actual account users. Opsec baby. Opsec. The honeypot theory in the other post freaks me out more than the possibility of legal action against BTCT.

Like what? Can you name a few?

They weren't. The first ones might had used ChipMixer, but they also utilized Coinjoining (which is inferior in term of privacy) and deposited their money on centralized exchanges a few days later. I don't read anywhere that they traced them by breaking ChipMixer. From the Bloomberg link, we have a person who deposited 1.4 million dollars worth of bitcoin to Coinbase? Am I reading right? Lol, just lol. The third link doesn't load from Tor.

The feds don't have to break a privacy enhancing tool to get to you. If somebody stole 1 million dollars worth of bitcoin, and at about the same month, Mr. Nobody made such huge deposit on a completely surveilled exchange, he's instantly a suspect.

Um.. why?

Sure. Let's see how it goes then.

Nah, its really not. All kinds of illegal & otherwise shady shit has taken place here over the years yet the forum still stands. ChipMixer will simply cease to exist before forum access is affected by it.


People get caught all the time; of course maybe they weren't using it "properly" according to you. Some of the most famous examples:

https://ciphertrace.com/twitter-hack-update-blockchain-analysis-helps-identify-twitter-hackers/
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-microsoft-xbox-gift-card-fraud
https://www.tradingview.com/news/cryptonomist:86bf18ad1:0/

Then there's an offshoot of the REvil ransomware gang that laundered the proceeds of a huge extortion through ChipMixer, only to send the BTC to Coinbase and be instantly de-anonymized (can't find a reference for that one or remember the specifics).

I wouldn't say REvil and the Lazarus Group - two of ChipMixer's biggest clients - "got away with it"... REvil no longer exists and Lazarus is under extreme scrutiny.

Putting on the conspiracy theorist hat, I'd say part of the honeypot is not letting the public know about exchange hackers caught who had used ChipMixer. Part of a good honeypot is you never know its one until after its all over (as happened with the Hansa darknet market).

Regardless of whether ChipMixer is a honeypot or not, the fact remains you'd have to be out of your mind to be using them in Q4 2022. The forum will be fine, as sig campaigners will probably be as well -- too small potatoes for the feds to expend energy on. Simply advertising a service that isn't explicitly illegal isn't a big deal to them, I don't think...

Surprise!

Government don't have to make no log VPN illegal when they could send secret subpoena.


It's possible the one who run the honeypot is either still looking for much bigger target or waiting for "right moment" to take action against all criminal. Although personally i find possibility of ChipMixer being honeypot is rather low.

It's a potential forum issue.

Um.. except that it has bunches of ChipMixer ads all around?

It's just this concern of mine, which I believe it might concern the rest of the users as well.

Or, it might have operated nearly completely privately so far, and made it infeasible for the feds to figure out where it is, or who runs it.

Answer me this question: if it was a honeypot, why do exchange hackers that use it to mix always get away with it? Seriously, I haven't read once a case of a person who used ChipMixer properly and got caught. Reasonably, if it was indeed owned by the feds, we'd see them getting caught, and in fact it has happened before numerously; mixers that were honeypots went out of business, because the people that needed them the most got screwed.

Funny you should mention it.

The founders of most other high-profile mixers have met terrible consequences, yet for some reason - even after 5 years in operation - ChipMixer has avoided all sanctions and much political attention. I'm not a conspiracy person and prefer hard evidence before making conclusions, but CM being a honeypot would explain a lot.

Even before recent events & revelations, I think you'd have to be crazy to use ChipMixer to mix coins. Unless you are highly schooled in blockchain OpSec and possess the utmost mindfulness when spending mixed coins, there's a good chance Chainalysis could deanonymize your BTC if they really wanted to.


"We" don't have a say in this. You have no rights here -- this is a privately-owned forum.

Regardless, what's more likely than a takedown is a subpoena to theymos asking for info about the ChipMixer account.

The CM site would have a seizure notice first, before the feds interrupt forum activity, as that would be a giveaway that something is up.

Is it a Chipmixer issue we are talking about on the topic or forum issue?

The forum is not endorsing Chipmixer or any business that are advertising on the platform. The platform is independent. Additionally it's not an advertising network too so I do not think it's even logical to warn the forum not to allow advertising a specific service. If anyone wants to take down Chipmixer then it's their problem which they should resolve or do whatever they want to do, why would we discuss it in the meta board?

Are you not using TOR or VPN from all these years to now? 🙄

Yeah, a VPN is probably the perfect comparison. They're often used for privacy, I'd go as far to say that the majority of users are using it for privacy, but technically it can be used for aiding legal activity. However, people don't tend to automatically assume you're a criminal just because you use a VPN, since it's now becoming a common thing to use.

Governments haven't banned no log VPNs from being used yet, and I think that would likely be the area to look into if they wanted to prevent illegal activity since they'd want to have access to that data ideally, even though I still wouldn't agree with that.

So, taking that into consideration I don't think it's much different form this scenario. There's going to be a lot more people using no log VPNs as a way of aiding their criminal activity, yet the government haven't appeared to have much of a problem with it, likely because they identify that the mass majority are using it for legitimate reasons.

I do not think we would take a take-down notice lying down. We would fight for our rights in the courtroom.

Also I doubt that a take-down notice would have any kind of underlying legal basis. At least not in any western non-US countries that I know of. Worst case scenario the servers get moved to some country in which Bitcointalk would continue functioning as before. Business as usual.

Any way I look at it, its not something that seems probable to happen.

I know this is likely a rhetorical question, but the fact that we are all using Bitcoin suggests we already have trust issues, whether that's the government or third parties such as the banks. Obviously, you have the speculative investors too looking to make a quick buck, but the majority of long term users here are here for a reason.

As for this question; I imagine certain parties have tried this on. Probably not government level agencies, as I said I think they'd need to have grounds to request that information (at least for the advertising example given), and would likely need to be investigating a user for that information to be requested. However, I imagine lower level people or companies have requesting this information of theymos. I mean, he's probably got all kinds of requests from the professional to the damn right absurd.  

A government agency wanting to track people using mixers to commit offenses are probably better off building their own honeypot and advertising it - they don't need many people or much of a budget to do that themselves.

Mixing feels, to me, a lot more like a vpn (for legal reasons and everything else). Especially in the case that you could mess up while using a vpn or tor and log into a personal account, or log into a more sensitive account without the vpn or tor in place - I think this is done a lot with mixers in a lot of cases where people don't consider what they're doing before they do it - and it's one of the main reasons people get caught for any crime.

A probe into mixers here, if done, would likely be done on cloudflare or amazon's side. I think a forum hosted on an onion domain for crypto wouldn't be hard to find either but would be slightly harder than clearnet if it had to go down that route (it might find other decentralised channels first though)..

Presumed guilt is becoming a lot more common in Europe (again) and it's likely what the tornado cash developer was actually sentenced on. Their conviction wasn't exactly labelled either afaik and was just a judge saying someone should be held for 5 months - but it was a bit weird.

I know, but can you trust regulators nowadays? Remember what happened with that Ethereum mixer this year? Just a friendly reminder that even self-custody is a red-flag for intergovernmental organizations: https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendations/Updated-Guidance-VA-VASP.pdf

You're going to have a hard time convincing this board, me included, that enhancing Bitcoin privacy effectively, cheaply and in a comfort manner is trifle in comparison with it being used as money laundering in some cases, and in a negligible manner.

Yeah, it wouldn't be a take down notice, unless they came after the forum for facilitating illegal services if they were ever made illegal, which seems unlikely. I imagine the majority of users using the service are indeed using it for legitimate legal reasons, such as retaining privacy, which is why I think it would never be made illegal. Since, cash can be used to money launder, but that doesn't make using it illegal.

 It would be a information request on a particular user or a set of users. I don't think any party requesting this information would have much of a case unless they're already investigation a user that so happens to be advertising it too though. Since, there's no grounds to assume that someone that's advertising is even using the service, and even if they were that they're using it for illegal purposes. So, they'd have to have some suspicion that a particular user was using it for this, and would likely need supporting evidence.

Unless, these services become illegal in the country of the requester. Then, they could investigate for another reason; advertising illegal services. That's at least how I'd think it work.

I don’t think this sort of advertising would result in a takedown notice either. More likely it would be used as a honeypot or it’s participants investigated to see what other shady activities they’re involved in. This site though expects the community to take the responsible approach and not encourage or support users who would engage in the advertising of money laundering activities for their own benefit. Is it illegal to advertise? Probably not. Is it unethical and leads to scammers feeling empowered here, in my opinion, yes.

But ya, they’ll say it’s about privacy…
https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1596048606720823297

Did you lose money on FTX? Thank a Chipmixer advertiser today for supporting the laundering of your funds for the hacker.

Surely, the only way that would happen is if the party that's requesting that information has reason to believe user x has broken the law. Advertising or even using the service doesn't mean you're using it illegally. Many users who are advertising don't use the service. Then, as has been discussed several times over the years, many users use services like these to retain their privacy, and as we speak there's no laws against using it legitimately. So, if a third party did suspect someone in particular of using the service to money launder then they could potentially request theymos to release any information that could aid upon that. However, whether theymos complies is up to them, and probably done on a case by case basis.

If governments start cracking down, and deem services like this illegal, then advertisers would have to make the choice of whether they continue to advertise the service, since it would be technically illegal to do so. Until then, I can't see any reason why a party would request this information, unless like I suggested they can tie a particular user to a money laundering case.

The way I see it; sharing or retaining user data beyond the stipulated timeframe is a bit different from actually requesting the website to take down a certain ad cause it pisses you off. It would also be sort of ironic for a Bitcoin oriented forum to work with the authorities to take down a privacy based platform which aids Bitcoin users.

If there is a court order to that effect, it could be possible, but I don't see that happening.

Due to recent events with (another) exchange collapse from hack, and millions in stolen funds that must have got mixed already, I got this concern of mine. Should users who advertise mixing services feel confident in this place? According to our Privacy Policy - Variation, administrator might choose to share individuals' information, even without law enforcement involved.

Has it even happened, or does it seem probable to you, for some agency to request any kind of take down due to the advertisement of a service that might be one of the top targets of the authorities when it comes to bitcoin as we speak? As far as I can tell for ChipMixer, bitcointalk is the gateway. It's unlikely you happen to access it otherwise.