In fact. Theymos, I think you made a HUGE mistake by doing this. You are showing publicly a weak spot. By banning Mixers out of fear of a Bitcoin Talk shutdown, you are showing the Authorities there is a weak spot they can hit every time they want further restrictions on Bitcoin Talk. If they want Monero banned next? All they have to do is start a public crackdown on Monero in a few countries and there it goes. More Censorship! Hooray!
Perhaps Theymos did not use the most accurate words to disclose this information, but based on the various observations made, it is possible to understand what is involved here.
It is not prohibited to talk about mixers, what is not authorized is to promote mixers. They are two very different things.
I already gave the example of torrents here. Maybe you don't know, but 10 years ago, when the authorities started to hunt down torrent sites, they reached a point where they had difficulty closing these sites - they shut down one and 10 were born. Faced with this difficulty, authorities adopted another strategy: going after sites that listed links to torrents. In this sense, several forums and blogs were closed and their owners arrested/fined, for promoting torrent links. Note, these forums and blogs did not host any torrents, they only told visitors where to find the content.
For example, the biggest torrent search engine, which did not host any torrents, the owner decided to close the site, because he was about to have problems with the authorities. And all of this happened despite torrents not being illegal. The content of some is what they are.
The same can happen with mixers. The authorities' difficulty in closing mixers - associated with hacks - may lead them to start attacking forums, blogs or websites that promote these services. What the forum administration is doing is preventing something like this from happening to Bitcointalk.
Please note, I do not agree with the way the authorities act. And I regret that this type of decision has to be made. But that doesn't stop me from understanding what's behind the decision. We have to look beyond just the moment we are living in.
Therefore, I would like to highlight what I said in my previous post:
The other day I heard a very interesting phrase: "In the 21st century, remaining anonymous is almost impossible. But the more discreet you are, the more easily you can do what you want without being seen."
And I think that's what we want to be, to continue without being visible, so that we can defend what Satoshi created that helps us fight financial centralization. The forum was not created to combat centralization, but to debate the tool that does it. If this forum ceases to exist, this fight may be lost.
