Topic: Mixers service right protections (Read 247 times)

For someone who (almost) successfully ran one of the most used bitcoin mixers(I think) in history, those are some heavily amateur mistakes. To the fact that it seems like he didn't care(?) at all or at least wasn't expecting the authorities to go after him for some reason. What he did was so bad it was the equivalent of selling illegal drugs in front of a police station.

Investigations indicate that the tracking of ChipMixer began in 2022, and NGUYEN aka chipmixer, made many mistakes that led to  discovery his ID, even though the report said that NGUYEN has a doctorate in cryptography:


One of the mistakes he made was using an iPhone.
Use PayPay and credit card payment



Use Binance KYC
a lot of data that proves that it is impossible not to make a mistake during 6 years that this site was operated. Sometimes one mistake will destroy your privacy, let alone dozens of mistakes, and it is impossible not to make a single mistake.

Question for the privacy/opsec experts here: isn't running a mixer privately and exclusively on the dark web totally possible? ChipMixer almost did it successfully — would it be up and running normally today if the authorities hadn't found out about who the operator(the Thai dude) is? Same thing with SilkRoad.

press-releases PDF 60 sheets containing detailed information about everything, including activity in the forum, but it did not mention the nature of the data that was seized, The only conclusion that we can rely on is if there is a solution to issues related to the hacking of exchnages and dark web activities from 2017 to 2023, then we will be certain that Chipmixer Users logs were not deleted.

https://www.justice.gov/d9/press-releases/attachments/2023/03/15/filed_complaint_0.pdf


I would say that most of the mixing services use Cloudflare which means that if US law enforcement cooperates, they could easily track you down.

What happened to chipmixer is yet not very clear to me as I do not really understand what happened behind the scene. But I really know that the exit of chipmixer paved way for many mixers to embrace the crypto-currency market and I am very sure that these mixers have a very good team that must have learnt from the mistakes of chipmixer.

So, if you are asking how to prevent the faith of chipmixer from happening to any other mixer, it is at the hands of these mixers to understand what happened to the chipmixer and use it as a case study. But as I always said in general, the mixers all have many kinds of sins in the eyes of the government. So whenever theri sins is to a certain level or when the government want to hunt them, they  may not have any reason to escape their persecution and prosecution.

The bad thing about all the mixers available now is that they all mix the currencies of depositors to increase privacy, meaning that you will find that the bitcoins that came to your address are newly mixed bitcoins, and if there was a good tracking tool, it would succeed in linking your addresses. ChipMixer was unique by giving you the private key where you can get A private key that you can spend at any time, and this private key is for relatively old currencies. I don't know why no mixing service tries to imitate this idea, but perhaps the problem is that you need thousands of bitcoins before starting to implement it. The mixers who run signature campaigns here are safer because they spent money on the signature campaign and because the entire activity is based on trust.

Yes, it's the sad reality for mixers.

If there's a mixer want to survive, they need to comply the regulation and it's already contradict the purpose of mixer.

We can take a look with other grey area business e.g. No KYC centralized exchange and No KYC P2P. Binance, Kucoin, OKX, Localbitcoins, etc etc now make KYC is mandatory requirement to use their exchanges.

Nothing can be done about it, if you use mixers you have to trust them, not only with logs, but also with your coins because they hold custody of it when you participate in mixing your coins in their service.

If you are concerned about this, you can use CoinJoin services like Whirlpool or JoinMarket and run your own full node for total privacy and also have self custody of your coins as you participate in the CoinJoin. Or you can as well use a p2p exchange and trade BTC to XMR and trade XMR back to BTC on a fresh address.

It was all over the news:
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/15/germany-and-us-seize-over-46m-crypto-tied-to-chipmixer-investigation-europol/


Nothing. Just as you can't open a bank account anonymously you will never have a regulated mixer with no kyc.

Is that really the fate of all mixers… they grow big on the scale and becomes susceptible to attacks?
It’s almost like hopping no mixer ever gets big and you wonder what’s the target model for the business.

It’s overly that. Previous existence and only got overly popular on the forum following the Chipmixer unfortunate demise. You would have reasons to believe that forum and time of existence made this mixer so big hence, the case pushed for a more exposure of there campaign strategy and here we are with a lot more with more to offer.

With FBI having to find some data, I don’t really get it. Could you relate with a link to verify on that. Yet again, how do you hope to identify between legit and illegal transactions with the goal to make tracing impossible.

From the business perspective, they can do many things. For example, making sure that their servers are secure, data are never stored for too long, make sure there are no repeated inputs, etc. From the customer side, there's nothing as mentioned above. You can never be sure, even if they open-source their platform. If you are not comfortable with it maybe you should look for other options such as coinjoin.

This is wrong. These mixers existed, but they did not have active signature campaigns on the forum. I agree with you that the disappearance of CM gave the mixers an incentive to expand their investments, but there were always alternative options if you wanted to try them.


Mixing services are for anonymity and not to comply with regulatory restrictions, if they want to comply they have to ask users to verify identity.
Mixers work to break the link in the bitcoin blockchain which is necessary since money need to have some privacy.

The common thing is that all of these mixers are centralized and you must trust them in the strength of the mixing service, how successful of breaking the link to your outputs, and whether they keep records. Unfortunately, even CM FBI say they found data. I do not know if it was user data or other data, but there is no guarantee of that.

There's no way to prevent something that happened to Chipmixer, if you're using centralized mixer, it means you must trust them everything including their behind operations. You can't know if they're store all everyone logs, selective scam etc, though there's no proof, but everything is possible.

Obviously there's nothing wrong to protect our privacy, but every government hate privacy and want to control everything. That why if there's a mixer become big, it will be a target for government to find the mistake especially related to criminal activity or money laundering.

It's really normal to see a big site shutted down and new site will come up in grey area business.

This should be moved to Service Discussion Board really after the collapsed of Chipmixer, a lot of mixers have emerged in the forum. Some of them have given up the race while some are still running for long term achievement. Chipmixer really over shadow oppressed many mixers as of that time. And after the demised of Chipmixer others show face and flooded the forum.
The crypto ecosystem is already a different technology entirely from others and crypto space brought the Technological Revelation, so it only alienated those who are not technologically literate. And for those who are good in this new Technological Age is benefiting from the revolution.
That is the common saying of people. Ignorant is not a disease and not really a disease but when you are not informed then you will be disinformed. So those who are not well inform see the new Technological Revelation as fraudster business and activities. And mixers are mainly for mixing coins for private purpose.

Really there are some fraudulent activities that some cryptocurrency Companies carried out that is affecting the cryptocurrency blockchain. And that is not withstanding, if the mixing company doing the right thing then nobody will tag it will different names. So Chipmixer name is different from other mixers and everyone has their own way of operations.
All the mixers you mentioned are all doing well in the forum, they all have different way of operations but one goal to achieve. Well all have seen what happened to Chipmixer so the first prevention will come from them, then the second one to prevent it, any mixer that found doing the contrary should not be promoted. And this is not only mixers but also casinos and other Companies.

What’s good with Mixers?

In the eyes of recent development that followed 2023 with the predicament of Chipmixer, came with a pouring of mixers. Not because most were not in existence but because of the shadow cast by the most popular on the forum at the time.
Then the lawsuit and there we have the mixer flood exposure.

It’s nothing new that the crypto space have got services that might be alienated to the rest of the world while being an adorned service by those who choose to embrace a new world order under construction. Some of the ideas is the very idea of cryptos itself, decentralized finance, blockchain and the idea of mixers in breaking the links between addresses.

Most ignorant and even know well individuals chooses to see cryptocurrency as a currency adorned by scammers and used for fraudulent activities else, what’s wrong in using fiat!
Worst still, the idea of mixers where you get to break the chain link in addresses to be more anonymous and private on your transactions and the question to the rest of those that don’t see the need is, why be private if not fraudulent.

There is nothing thing wrong in trying to keep your activities private and decentralized.
Security wise, it’s what you should be doing to avoid hack attempts as per phishing, brute forcing and more.


Now the case to this is:
Is this a typical case of you can’t eat your cake and have it?
Now, the case with Chipmixer carried that, mixers aid scammers in being invisible by eliminating traces. Now this is the Chief service of mixers, eliminating traces not just to those that might be looking but as well to themselves.

I have taken a look at some of the company policies of some of the mixers on the forum and established core areas the service to be:



What’s has/is been done
There is a need to make particular reference with what has been done in the T&C with particular relevance to the thread and if it could serve a real purpose in the protection of mixers and prevent the Chipmixer scenario without ambiguously relaying the event. (Note: Summed T&C are very much that, a brief of what is available on site and could be referenced on individual mixing sites)

[banned mixer]
- To sum the T&C for as relevant to the thread, you could say it banks on;
- Zero collaboration with states of USA and EU nations to avert what might stern from there. Not even having to use service based on referral or have it from a discussion.
- Dissociates from activities that would or could cause violations and prohibited substances (Drugs & related).

sinbad.io
The mixer has a direction of usage found on there FAQ file on how yo efficiently use there service rather than any proper T&C at hand as far as I could look.

[banned mixer]
- Summing up the relevant section of the T&C to thread leaves us with;
- Agreeing to be of proper age as defined by legislation to use service.
- Using services within legislated territories.
- Dissociation from having storage of defamatory, illegally, menacing and things of that nature with the service.
- Dissociation with materials of illegal actions & cover ups and can lead to violations, etc.

[banned mixer]
There isn’t any T&C readily available for the mixer other than a direction of usage on the FAQ file along with other popular asked questions.

[banned mixer]
- A sum of the T&C as relevant to the thread goes;
- A sole responsibility of users to local laws
- Prohibitions of/unlimited to; using service to clean funds from sales of weaponry, narcotics, violation of intellectual rights, credit repair & debt settlement, explicit content, money laundering, etc

This is as far as my research on this goes.
Now,
The question to the later is;
1- Is the above readily enough?
2- what more could be done to prevent history from repeating in the manner as with Chipmixer?