I think most of the coins that flow through mixers are from petty scammers and signature spammers who are taking precautions to cover up their own shady activity in order for it to continue.
I had used ChipMixer to not reveal to my merchants that the funds come from signature campaigns. It costed zero, and it was fast. I'm pretty sure lots of other clients thought it this way.
What do you think the merchants that receive funds from you marked to be from a mixer and possibly even from criminal activity think? Your beliefs might be cute in your head, but when you're doing things that can get other people's businesses caught up in criminal investigations that doesn't make you a hero for privacy, it makes you an asshole.
Centralized solutions will obviously never solve the privacy problem.
But decentralized solutions will solve the "shady and criminal activity" problem... I'll never understand your perspective.
My perspective is that a privacy solution shouldn't setup someone to be investigated for accepting Bitcoin or land the service provider in jail while having all the service users' funds confiscated. If all transactions are private, then we're all accepting the same consequences and fighting for privacy. Your solution leaves the service provider and the unknowing recipient to take the fall for your privacy. Again, not a hero fighting for privacy, a weasel that leaves others to take the fall for the sake of his privacy. I don't want to support weasels, I want to fight for real privacy.
Good luck with finding a new signature after the 1st. Hopefully then you'll stop shilling money laundering under the guise of privacy for a paycheck.
I agree wholeheartedly.
If people want true anonymity, they should migrate to Monero (#2 most popular cryptocurrency in some online stores, more popular than ETH). Bitcoin wasn't designed that way. I've been saying this for a loooong time, but nobody paid attention (if you know, you know).
And yes, I know that Satoshi had some thoughts about anonymity, but he never implemented ring signatures (unlike Monero which has them since day 1). Satoshi is gone, a hard fork will never happen (it would have been so much easier back in 2009-2010), so we're stuck with what we have.
I really don't like like it when a CEX gets "hacked" and someone uses mixers to launder BTC funds. Even if you don't use CEX to store funds (I don't), it hurts BTC's credibility in the Average Joe's eyes (
"FTX went bankrupt, therefore BTC is a scam"). Do we
really want that?
You may get non-traceable BTC after using a mixer, but it's NOT your BTC, it's someone else's BTC (innocent victims from crypto/CEX frauds such as FTX).
