Topic: Mixers to be banned - page 36. (Read 23840 times)

yep and to anyone with a good stack of coins that have a low capital cost privacy is import.

like I said before when I write a check to pay my mason he does not know what is left in my bank account.


mixers are one of the only ways to hide non taxable coins.

if a guy is holding 50 coins from a block he hit  in 2011. He wants  to cash a few in 2011 that block was worth under 500 bucks and he reported hitting the block in 2012 paid his tax.In the USA 🇺🇸 if he held it to now he owes no tax.

If he wants to cash some of it he should not need to reveal the rest as it is not taxable.

This is very interesting as we have seen many older untouched blocks from 2009 to 2010

I wonder if they have been held in case the government wants to do this.

The feds could get burned bigly over this. In the meantime bitcointalk can wait on the sidelines as the best way to end this issue is some of those old blocks get cashed mixed and there are lawsuits over it.

That's a different story, you can ask people to report criminal activities and give them money, there is even a big percentage of the embezzled  money that goes to the whistle blowers. This case is different the money does not belong to the government, it belongs to people, besides we are not attracting criminals here, in fact no criminal logs in this forum, they just watch from distance, not to mention all of these operations of all on forum mixers, are just a distraction, the big fishes are operating elsewhere.

But do we know which one of the existing mixers are honeypots? I'm willing to bet half of them are honeypots and the rest are a front, a facade to keep the LE busy.

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The largest money washing machines are big centralized exchanges, just like the big banks.

Irs pays 10% to some one that reports a tax evader.

The fbi regularly uses civilian as assets. pays them.

so if the hundred or so people that had sinbad signatures get a reward for attracting criminals to use sinbad why would not  they get some of the confiscated funds.

We need a good class action lawyer to sue the government agencies for proper compensation.

Btw as I understand the new rule I can keep this signature the way it is. or do I deactivate the links in it.

I fully intend to comply with theymos rules. as i understand them them This goes on dec 31 and I am all good.

What are you saying man? Are you saying that any undercover agent should get %10 of the dirty money? What does a forum poster do other than posting? Lol
This statement of yours is wrong on several levels, the cops do the work, you want the "confiscated" to be shared? I can't digest this logic.

But I like it, let us all go undercover and get paid with hacked money.😉

I was privately absent from the forum for a few days and this greeted me. A very bad decision by the forum administration and this is nothing but the introduction of censorship. I have read most of the discussion, and I completely agree with PrivacyG and what he stated here. Well, I won't repeat the same things.


The whole idea is wrong and leads to the marginalization of the Bitcointalk community. It is almost certainly leading the forum towards the introduction of KYC and is sliding to become a training ground for Gambling and NFT discussions.

So many loopholes were found in the implementation of this censorship, so it will be very interesting to see how the moderators manage this in practice. Different interpretations will cause new discussions, so it is to be expected that the Meta section will be full of questions about whether any discussion is in accordance with these strange rules. Also, this is expected to cause some new bans, I am of the opinion that for such unclear rules, the forum does not have a sufficiently organized moderation. and so far we have seen that moderators' reactions are only after several months or even years when a ban appeal appears.

Next, LoyceV has already mentioned various threads that contain a collection of scam mixer services. So, the new rule is that they (scammers) can be mentioned and written about, and for example, the mixer who has been here on the forum since 2018 has been expelled.
Should we add an example that the Russian board has a dedicated section for HYIP scams? A separate place for Ponzi, hyip, cloud mining and similar seeds. Nobody got banned for that.

One very important thing. Many non-forum users, when stuck in a problem with a Bitcoin service, come to the Bitcointalk forum to present the problem and ask for help from this community. It has happened in quite a lot of cases that because of the pressure on the forum and maintaining the reputation here, the service is more attentive to solving the problem.

For most mixers, this forum is the only place where they have their official representatives. Now I even think that the investigative authorities do not approve of this decision, because one source of information that they used during the investigation eludes them.

I sincerely hope that the bigger picture will be looked at and this decision will be reconsidered.




It is even possible to register on Google without KYC. It's a bit unbelievable to me that this is a theymos statement. 

I think that this move is definitely in the best interest of all the users on here, and being affiliated with any such mixers is probably not the best to have shown anywhere publicaly if mixers like Sinbad are getting shut down. The coins mixers are definitely seen as a threat to the US Govt' because they have been linked many times to the laundering of money. Privacy is a non-renewable resource in this day and age and the day that we are purely in a cashless society will be a very grim day for everyone. It was a good run I suppose w/ the mixer campaigns! Definitely feeling for all the signature campaigners, it was a great way to make a little extra and talk about something we all liked and kept up with daily. This move won't stop the mixers though, they will continue on through other online forums and online advertisment efforts.

Also, I just read Ben's comment above on the Cyber Security Board and I couldn't agree more! People need to be aware of industryi standards in a way that relates to crypto preservation and anti-theft safety and security practices, especially here where we have so many newbs who have no clue, even higher ranked forum members.

I have no issue with mixer advertisements being banned...it is certain that the intentions and motives of the entire user base can not be said to be 100% innocent and purely for the right of privacy

However, we should not be limiting or censoring their entire discussion.

They should be allowed to be discussed in the services discussion board, and announcements should be allowed in the announcements board.

The reason for this is more for scam prevention than anything. Imagine how many people will be scammed because they don't know what service is legitimate or not? What we will find is that there will be scam accusation topics discussing mixers, but then no where else on the forum will.

It is wrong for the forum to have no policy on mixers to now completely censoring them. That is entirely wrong, and a very bug statement that BCT is in favor of working with LE rather than discussing with its users the fair medium and standing strong on tuat fair medium.

Additionally, now that privacy has taken a hit yet again....why don't we have a board to discuss legitimate privacy and security topics as this is now integral to ensure users are secured against threats?

Theymos, it's unfair to take a shield away from users just because of its material and brand, and not give them a perfectly compliant shield in return. A Cyber security and Privacy board is the compliant shield and is needed more than ever now if you care about the BCT communities human right to privacy.

Satoshi would have added this board by now and I don't think anyone can argue with that.

exactly this.  i had a mason fix my front porch. I paid him 2 checks one for 2000 usd the second for 1000 usd.

does he get to see that my checking account has 10 million (wish it did). my remaining blance stays hidden.


the world governments are morons. they used sinbad to catch huge vast 50% illegal mixing.  and they shut it down. fine okay if it did that but this means they can use more mixers to catch more illegal coin action.

so they should encourage mixers and give bitcointalk the ability to advertise mixers like a mofo.

then contact the mixers to find crooks.

we did the governments of the world a favor by attracting 50% illegal activity (their words not mine)

to sinbad.

I think if sinbad has 5000 confiscated coins every sinbad ad should be reward 10% of the take.

if it wasn't for us the evil doers would not have been caught.

The current situation neither makes sense. It is the same as saying that it is illegal to use guns unless not bought from gun shops. Alright, so innocent people won't buy guns or will be inconvenienced at buying guns as they will have to look for alternatives, and criminals will definitely find guns elsewhere.

Gun shops = mixers.
Guns from elsewhere = XMR, coinjoins etc. (which, just between us, are more effective and therefore "dangerous" than the former)

Yep. But that's the view of one country with about 4% of the global population. Of course there are more, like EU states under MiCa, with similar requirements for any service which stores customers' coins. But in many countries crypto services aren't regulated, and in others (like Switzerland), for KYC to apply there are thresholds which could be respected by mixers without putting into risk their business model. They simply could implement a policy like "only X coins per IP/day", and to circunvent that, you need proxies or VPNs so that would be again an "advanced" technique (and it would be simpler to use Monero for example).

There should be ways for mixers to use geofiltering to exclude users from the KYC-demanding countries. Tor may be an issue there, but normally if a company takes "reasonable" action against being used by customers of a particular country, they should be fine against prosecution from the US and other privacy-unfriendly states.

Thats the thing, I would rather the Forum to continue operating at the expense of advertising
Mixers.

Its a sad thing thats happening given that mixing Bitcoin is to us normal and a very
important tool to have at our disposal, this doesnt change from the 1st of Jan though.

We can all still talk about mixing coins but in the same vain as Harry Potter and
"he who must not be named"

For me it's better for mixer to leave bitcointalk than government seize bitcointalk because of promotion of mixers in the forum, I know the reason many comments is emphasising indirectly of mixer not to leave the forum, the thing I know that should be the major objective of people lamenting in favour of mixer is because they give high offer in signatures but we have to consider the existence of bitcointalk, because its obvious that as long as mixers is been existing in the forum they will other commitments of mixer in which bitcointalk will not be aware unless law enforcement agencies seize their platform before forum will get aware, and besides government can come to attack forum saying that they are promoting scam and because of it they may seize forum. So it's better theymos ban mixer as he said before they will implicate bitcointalk

Well, do not be surprised if we keep on seeing this conservation active for another 27 days until the mixers are banned and I am sure at that time theymos will lock this thread too. Till then keep the ideas and emotions flow in  


Don't know if this cry is only for the mixers going away from this forum (the people can still use the mixers even if they are not discussed on the forum), it's also about the signature campaigns and earnings associated with the mixers on this forum. 

He said (no) for from the starting of 2024 ,

there were been years he did say nothing !

And it is not the "owner", is more likely the Big manager !




Question:  Who you, The adjustment bureau ?!   🤣

Trolling? That is laughable. Don't tell me you are one of those dictators who always want their views accepted, no question asked. If you are, then you had better be trolled indeed.

Mind you, I'm fully aware of the situation, it's you who is beating around the bush and deviating from the context of my initial post.

Another deviation! You know what? I better leave it be, it seems we are not on the same planet.

This is from August 2022, Chainalysis:


There is more interesting info to be found if you use the link, but I think it is quite easy based on these requirements for US prosecutors to operate internationally because American citizens are served by all mixers and that case can easily be made. They could just find one single person to have used a particular service. Worst case is that a mixing service really launders tens of millions of stolen funds. But I underlined the part that Chainalysis correctly brought up as the major contradiction: KYC + mixing coins makes zero sense.

I don't see the point: criminals already know what they're doing is illegal. It sounds like a gun shop putting up a sign: "don't rob banks". Innocent people weren't going to do it, and the bad guys already know robbing banks is not allowed.

How about you stop making things up about me.

That makes it much worse than the average. And that makes me wonder:
I used to think mixers are good sites that can be used for good and evil, just like a car can be used for good or to get away after robbing a bank. But given enough mixers, there is a possibility that at least some mixers are created by bad people, and in that case they need good people to hide their bad money.

"Why argue with the authority of the onwer of this forum?"

Do you keep the same stance in every occasion in your life?

Let's say the "owner" of "something" wants YOU to do something you don't like, don't you have the right to express your opposite opinion?

Even theymos himself knows that we have the right to express an opposite opinion. We didn't insult him, we didn't poduce violence through our writtings, but we want to express our opinions.

It's better to prepare and work on alternative solutions than to worry about this.
There is nothing we can do since identity of bitcointalk owner is known publicly, and servers are located in his country.
I can understand theymos from this position, it was probably not an easy decision to make, but he just opened big can of worms and pandora box  
On positive side, there will be a lot of space open for new and old campaigns to hire good quality members, so it's not the end of the world ^(yet).

My stance on this discussion (dunno if someone will read it after more than 15 pages ):

We should first think about why mixing services are there, and why they do not only provide "legitimate" use cases, but why it should be considered a human right to use them. The blockchain is completely public. Everybody with some blockchain analysis skills can link your addresses to merchants or employers and thus know what you buy and where you work. That's something not possible with the banking system, as long as the logs of the banks aren't hacked, and without mixers you would need advanced techniques to preserve your privacy in the same way. (For sure, you could "mix" your coins on a KYCed exchange too for this purpose, but if you only need the exchange for that purpose, it would mean you take the risk your documents may be hacked and used for identity theft. You could also CoinJoin or P2P altcoin exchanges but that's already an "advanced" technique).

And even if mixers can be used in money laundering schemes, mixing is not the core part of money laundering. It can be used to hide a particular trace, but you can't convert mixed coins into "clean" money without using advanced techniques like founding a company (or collaborating with one) which receives the mixed coins and converts them into "legitimate" money. This means, while you can cash out small and medium quantities to fiat (via P2P, for example) you won't be able to buy a house with that money if you need to provide a proof of funds like it's common in many countries.

I can however understand the decision to not allow mixer ads anymore. Ads can give the public outside of the community the impression that there is a link between the forum and mixers. If a particular mixer is actually used with the collaboration of their owners in money laundering schemes, and advertises here (without knowledge of the community of course), then for the government agencies it may give the impression that this behavior is tolerated in the forum, even if this isn't the case. So I can understand the perspective of the forum admin to ban them.

So my proposal is actually simple: talking and also linking to mixers, as long as they aren't seized (and thus be considered illegal) should be allowed, but for mixer ads, I could understand a ban.

Doesn't mean I'm happy with that, I think there should be ways to advertise mixing services which are legal in the country they operate, and for example provide their company address. Don't know if many of these services exist though.

LN "as a whole" doesn't fit the requirements. You always need two channels to use LN as a mixer, and "sending to yourself" is not necessarily what's advertised (does Phoenix Wallet advertise this service as a core part of their software?). The funny thing is that if you use it with one channel only, it could be seen as the opposite of a mixer, as for "the blockchain" (i.e. non-Lightning-aware software) when you close the channel you simply move the same coins you entered, but their "economic value" may come from a completely different source (which includes of course criminal activities).