Topic: Mixers - Are we the product? - page 2. (Read 332 times)

I think everybody who is using a mixer is a product so to speak. The mixer needs as much funds from different sources as possible. The more users, the more they mix, the better for privacy. So, every unique user is actually contributing to the most fundamental operation of the mixer. In which case, they're all products. But, in a way, those who are bringing in clean coins are probably serving more those who are only bringing in coins coming from criminal transactions. After all, mixers have two kinds of users, those who are simply after privacy and those who badly need to erase some criminal tracks.

Alot of things that were not n place before the government threat on mixers are now coming out after the stipulated ban of mixers on bitcointalk, now we don't know the way forward, but the truth to be told here is that not all miners are found guilty of this alleged fraudulent related activities, people are making business to help safe the privacy of bitcoiners, but it's now a pity that the whole idea has been hijacked by miscreants to engage in fraudulent acts and the governments are not also taking decision to help the situation but rather seing it as an avenue to attack bitcoin users the more against their privacy.

It's a real challenge these days to find a mixer that doesn't talk about privacy and anonymity.
Some even talk about exchanges tracking you:
The above is from a mixer's promotional materials. Tell me if THAT doesn't seem like the mixer is directly encouraging the user to interact between exchange and mixer.

What kind of anonymity and privacy that might be, that associates your KYC'd exchange account to criminally tainted coins, I don't know.
But surely mixers would like us to believe that they stand for privacy.

The use of a mixer, as far as I understand it, is to hide the source of your coins, or rather, to break the chain that connects the sources of the coins to the destination. The point of using a mixer was never to hide the trail of your coins to the mixer.

I don't know how some people still don't get this.

This is a very interesting theory.

Do you mean Mixers are in your theory used to replace bad money of criminals with good money from the innocent?

As in there is a pool of criminal money and every Mixing Transaction is pretty much,
Innocent sends 0.5 Bitcoin from legitimate source to Mixer
Mixer sends back 0.5 Bitcoin from criminal source to Innocent

And that they advertised on Bitcoin Talk so they could get rid of more criminal money while bringing in more Innocents?

I never thought of this.  If that is the case, ban Mixers.  But then how difficult is it to get Bitcoin from Innocents?  Bisq, Monero Atomic Swaps et cetera can all be ways of doing this.  A criminal with BILLIONS can open up a seemingly legitimate Blockchain Analysis tool particularly to artificially 'clean' their own criminal Bitcoin by bypassing the filters.  Or they could bribe already existing Blockchain Analysis companies to bypass the filters.

I do not think this is the case but interesting outlook.

Not that your coins was traced, but it was noticed that coins was sent to you from an address that belongs to a mixer. So people that used Binance to receive coin from the mixer address were affected. But people that are using decentralized exchanges will not be affected.

I can't be the only one.

After chipmixer was shut down, a ton of other mixers started operating at a very close proximity time-wise.
Is that fishy or am I paranoid?
It can't be that one sided I think.

Chipmixer had indeed become too big. There was a lot of co-mingling between its funds and funds from darknet marketplaces.
So after one of the biggest darknet marketplaces was traced and shut down, naturally authorities also went for this big mixer.

While authorities claim to have managed to seize more than 1909.4 bitcoins in that sting, that probably didn't cover the full balances of the mixer.

The recently seized mixer, Sinbad, was said to have been a re-launch of a blender that came under sanctions for having laundered funds that were stolen by North Korean hackers. We can all safely assume that this is very notorious business. And what most of these services had in common was that they were advertising on bitcointalk.

This really does make you think, WHY? Why would a service allegedly moving billions worth in proceeds need to advertise here, and so aggressively even, especially when their customer base seems to be set in stone from day one?

I have a simple theory on why that might be happening. By looking at what generated the largest volumes in these mixers, I conclude that no bitcointalk user could be possibly be in need to launder billions in hacked funds, and would never be in dire need to launder cash associated with violent crime like drugs or fraud at this magnitude.

Instead, an illusion of privacy was promoted to clearnet users (that's us here in bitcointalk), while in fact our "cleaner" funds were used to bail out real criminals and terrorists. Because to a mixer, a clean bitcoin, is worth more than market value, so they were willing to overpay for it in the form of advertising. Come to think of it, the recent bust of Sinbad served as a reminder that mixers are in fact very traceable.

Authorities even had contacted exchanges ahead of time and even users participating in the signature campaign faced issues having to answer to authorities:
What's the point then, of using a mixer, when your funds can be traced so easily? Do its methods of mixing really work, or could it be that this is intended functionality for someone to get the short end of the stick?

This is all just a theory of course, but honestly, trust no one, not even me.
It's a very real possibility though, that with mixers, we might be the product.