Topic: The Paradox of Privacy and Decentralization: Banning Mixers on Bitcointalk.org (Read 699 times)

Yes I was talking Chipmixer & sinbad. Both are still listed as 'ongoing'.
Bestmixer and a couple of others we know what they have because they told us as you pointed out, but that was after they were arresting people and doing other things with the data.
AFAIK there have been no arrests from these last 2 nor any official statements of exactly what data they have.

-Dave

@Kakmakr @DooMAD @DaveF

You're taking Chipmixer as an example (and as @DaveF says there is no confirmation as to what they have) but I can mention Bestmixer, back in 2019.

What happened: While seizing the few servers used, they collected IP addresses, chat messages, TXs details, and BTC addresses.
And it's not a speculation, it was annonced by Europol and others LEs.
I remember several months later, one of the customers who had been using bestmixer was arrested. They seized gold, luxury watches, BTC wallets and other stuff from him.

doomad motto:
"just have faith and trust and belief in services doomad promotes. dont scrutinise or criticise them"
"be patient the actual things may happen in the future"
but real privacy people want to know and want to ensure their transfers are not tracked by service promoted as "no tracking" now. not having to blindly trust and then only scrutinise once caught, to then investigate and decide in a court room..

gotta laugh when troll sig campaigners blindly idolise/defend project manager they promote, rather then scrutinise and review the feature the service is SUPPOSE to offer to protect the users
when a troll defends a business rather then care about the customer experience/risk.. that troll becomes a sell out

No confirmation as to what they have. And I would go so far as to say that since it's an ongoing investigation no confirmation of anything will come out until the investigation is done.
There will be rumor, innuendo and conjecture. But no hard data.

-Dave

I think that a post by theymos about mixers is very well-written and explains why they are going to be banned on the forum. The argumentation is very rational, based on the pattern of mixers being declared illegal when they get big.
Moreover, Bitcointalk is a forum, so it's for discussions, and even with the ban, it will be allowed to discuss mixers in general, as long as they don't provide links and direct people toward particular mixers.
I personally have never used mixers, so it won't affect me in any way. While I support the values of privacy and decentralization, they aren't absolute and primary values to me, so I wouldn't stand by mixers when they're becoming illegal.

Did we ever get confirmation it was user data, though?  Innocent until proven guilty and all that.  For all we know, authorities could have seized a bunch of full nodes, each with their own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain.

But yes, Mixers are far from perfect.  They absolutely require trust.  I'm hoping this is something that will improve over time.  Wherever possible, we should aim to employ a "trustless" model.

The thing is.... Bitcoin Mixers are the big unknown. We have seen Bitcoin Mixers saying that they are not logging any traffic and then it gets shut down and you find that they have stored Terabytes of data that are raided by law enforcement.

There are Mixers out there that are most probably "Honey Traps" for criminals and they are being used by law enforcement to monitor transactions. (Like some Exit Nodes on Tor) 

Fee priority is something that used to be implemented, but was changed for good reasons.  It's worth pointing out that the user suggesting this holds a long term vendetta against developers.  They advocate undoing just about every change made to Bitcoin over the course of the last 7 years.  

I've actually added them to my ignore list because I perceive them to be one of the forums' most prolific disinformation agents.  It's not worth reading their delusions about how this supposedly ought to work.  Particularly when they've been repeating the same drivel for years, hoping to gain a fresh audience.

And in previous topics, their proposed alternative to mixing sounded worryingly akin to setting up what law enforcement agencies would call a 'Front'.  I cannot stress strongly enough how bad this "advice" is.  It is not recommended to found a business with the intent of laundering money.  I'm sure that goes without saying, but just in case anyone did think for a second that it somehow sounded like a sane course of action, it really isn't.

Most of their ideas are equally dangerous and stupid.  

There is a solution to this paradox. I went into detail with it in a public letter to theymos which asks for a medium, a discussion board for Cybersecurity and Privacy. Something members have expressed that they want in a consensus manner for the last 12 months.

The topics in the thread could have been better. This isn't an attack on decebtralization as another member said, as mixers are centralized. It is an attack on privacy to an extent, in the sense that a service industry which charged fees to mix Bitcoins have now had a major advertising source (and community regulator) removed.

A medium however, is needed. We need to be able to discuss how to be private and secure in the bitcoin ecosystem, and on the net. It's a vital part of keeping the community safe from all kinds of threats in the future, and to innovate on the concept of mixers in a decentralized way.

I'm hoping theymos sees all of the discussions, votes and the letter, and makes a decision on the board before the mixer deadline.

Mixers are not the only privacy solutions, but yes it was one of the easy ones and user-friendly, we still have, coin-join, pay-join, and even HD wallets, I would like to mention that I have not experienced any of these but I've got some information about these solutions as well.

Mixers Ban on the forum is really a serious concern for the forum, as we dont want to see, opening our eyes in the morning and logging back to the forum, and there you go the Bitcointalk is no more, I think whatever thermos did is really for the sake of the forum. Let's wait for more solutions. In the end satoshi he dared to introduce Bitcoin mixers are not even a deal for him.

To me, it is a much bigger paradox that the OP opens a topic like this in BD when we already have a corresponding topic in Meta, and besides, the entire post was created with the help of AI.

https://sapling.ai/ai-content-detector/136d8c995e916e719e38232a9e599997
Also, the GPTZero detector gives a result of 93% generated with the help of AI -> https://gptzero.me/

@franky1
It's pretty much summed up.

It could deserve a dedicated topic because it's an interesting area of discussion. I made the link with the WEF and other because yes, I do like to follow the money. It answers to a lot of questions

I don't know why people haven't been interested in all this for years they're in the crypto industry.

Especially as the WEF's speech is quite meaningful, to the point where I wondered if the WEF wasn't behind the creation of Bitcoin lol. OK, maybe it's a bit paranoid and could be considered a conspiracy theory, but everything they're doing on crypto is enough to make you wonder. It's not just saying here and there that it should be regulated. It's about the technology, the development of the ecosystem, and even recently they've been talking about interconnecting all the crypto blockchains together.

They're at least trying to drive the bitcoin industry and influence it

Add to that the CBDC, blockchain for Carbon dioxide, Digital iD in EU,

you like to follow the money..
lets take you backwards..
WEF   world economic forum
   -BIS  bank of international settlements
      -CBDC: M-bridge the BIS project that will manage all reserve swaps of CBDC
           -CBDC the key-pair secured ID of multisig payments between customer<->bank, and bank<->bank to compete/replace visa/mastercard
               -hyperledger the group that helped design many CBDC and the M-bridge
                    -blockstream were part of hyperledger

many of the stuff blockstream done to bitcoin were actually sandbox tests for patented designs they passed onto hyperledger, and vice versa

https://www.ccn.com/hyperledger-blockchain-new-members-blockstream/

1) Still depends on where you are in the world. A blanket 2014 date is not accurate, even now there are still places that see BTC as property.
2) A lot of places still don't really care about mixers, they just monitor sanctioned addresses, no sanction no problem. The question is how far back do they look.
2a) Yes.
2b) Don't think that matters if once again people / services pay attention to sanction lists.

-Dave

True, they were telling us during years how "wonderful" it could be.

But it's worse than that in reality
Did you ever think on who's funding Blockstream or Digital Currency Group for example? And how it's funny if you think about it
Axa, Mastercard, and so on. Come on, what good could have come from letting them in?

If you listen to the WEF about the cryptocurrency industry, nothing is smelling good for us in their speech

Banning mixer on bitcointalk us nothing to me because the forum has been existing before the nicers company came in for ads by forum members. And if mixers services campaign no longer exist in the forum, the gorum will be doing fine and normal activities will still be going on.

Anything that will bring raising of eye browns to this forum ny government should be disallowed to keep the forum clean and save from the government, because the government has the power to shut down any company that they want to. It is sad to see that mixers wants to bring a bad name to bitcoin because of bad actors. This forum was built for sharing ideas on bitcoin and every angle of it, so whatever will jeopardize such mission shouldn't be encouraged.

Why do you think so? Lightning could work even on P2PK, if there would be no routing. Note that if you multiply a public key by a private key, then you can reach 2-of-2 multisig on a P2PK. Here is how: https://duo.com/labs/tech-notes/2p-ecdsa-explained

Also, there was a thing called "payment channels", that existed long before Lightning Network was even invented. See this page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels

Note that if you have a payment channel, you don't have to add routing to the whole picture. Segwit was needed only because of routing, if you remove routing from LN, you can implement it on any address type you want, even P2PK.

I believe it has something to do with Taproot. But I'm not sure if the making of opening and closures of Lightning channels indistinguishable from regular transactions have been implemented yet. But if it is, then I believe the Lightning Network could be used as more of an off-chain privacy layer rather than an off-chain network for fast and cheap transactions. Because I believe it won't be cheap forever once demand for Lightning goes up. Why? Because Bitcoin is a limited source of capital, then therefore Lightning channels will be limited.

yes we could change the economics of real world business transactions and interrogate all retailers spending to do payments for them
where instead of having price tags that are:
$300 [$285 + $15 (5%) sales tax] to become
$300 [$255 + $30 employee commission + $15 (5%) sales tax] where it cuts out the business from needing to later pay the employee

but the reality is when you buy a TV/PC from best-buy. you pay best-buy. .. the HR/accounting department of best-buy then pay an employee as a separate transaction at the end of the month

after all in most cases the customer does not know all of best-buys internal costs where best-buy pays out labour, bills, share dividends at the end of the month/year so its kinda impractical to interrogate the retailer about their future spending plans to reduce their transactions by you performing them for them


much like mixing is mentioned in regulations.. so is coinjoining, tumbling, AEC, obfuscation
https://www.fatf-gafi.org/content/dam/fatf-gafi/guidance/Second-12-Month-Review-Revised-FATF-Standards-Virtual-Assets-VASPS.pdf

currently "coinjoin" is not specifically on a list of things VASPS need to actually monitor/do things about officially/specifically. and its just something regulators recently are starting to learn about/discuss/have concerns. but soon enough they will add it to official guidance to monitor coinjoin users

the smarter trick is to go deeper in thought.. like "buy/sell game credit" where deposited coin is not same taint as withdrawn. but the service is advertising as a legit service of retail gaming. instead of promoting itself as "privacy" "coin cleaning" "mixing"
smart people can work out how to use legit services to their "privacy" advantage without needing it advertised as "privacy enhancing"

heck there were even the olden days where you deposit fiat into btc-e create a 'MT-Gox code' and using bitinstant reserves then use the code on mtgox to then withdraw through mtgox.. and that was not considered 'laundering' but instead 'arbitrage'. it was not advertised as "privacy enhancing. though many smart people knew the benefits of using the codes to "arbitrage" their way to different coin holdings
(bitinstant did not get shut down or charged due to its mtgox-btc-e code reserves.. it got shut down because the compliance officer was doing private trades with a drug dealer he had full knowledge about)

EG set up TWO services
a. a legitimate service people can buy 'game credit codes' (offering no withdrawal)
b. a legitimate service people can sell 'game credit codes' (offering no deposits)

thus each business cannot be considered a money service business/exchange. because individually they are retailers

You want to bring back something called "coinage"? This is a good idea. Some page about that: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Miner_fees#Priority_transactions

Which means, instead of the current, flat "satoshi per byte" model, we could have "priority" instead, and allow cheaper transactions, if some coin was not moved for a long time.

Yes, this is a good approach. For example, they could just implement something like CoinJoin. Because mixers are banned, but CoinJoin is allowed.

Because the main issue is not mixing per se. It is the way they are taken down. Which means, even if you have a mixer, you can still advertise it, if you for example don't control the coins, but you only provide a market for mixing (like JoinMarket or any other CoinJoin).

I think indirectly, but it is. What about tipping the waiter?

Note that the code can do a lot of good things. Which means, it is possible to write some code, that will allow transaction joining, and sending it later in a batched version to the network. And note that even though this kind of service meets the definition of the mixer, it is still allowed by the rules, if you don't control the funds of your users, or if you can meet any other condition, listed by theymos. There are many ways to do that.