Topic: Which Mixer is getting axed next? (Read 837 times)

Sorry, but I don’t think you know what you are talking about.

Mixers complying with “regulatory compliances”? Regulated mixers? Illegal because they got shutdown?

A mixer receives coins and send coins. They don’t track, nor verify, nor “comply”. Do you even know what is the point of using a mixer? Why do they even exist?

What comes next? Mixers doing KYC? lol

As far as I understand, illegal mixers are those who are close by the regulators, just recently this year we've seen Bestmixer was close, so I think they are doing some illegal activities like money laundering. So to think that there's still a lot of mixers existing until now, I believe they complied with any regulatory compliance they have to or they maybe they are not regulated yet.

For me, using a mixer is kinda risky as any time they can disappear that's why I don't transact a big amount of BTC in one time, just to minimize the risk.

Sure, the site may have been compromised. Maybe it was even a honeypot. My point is that there were no criminal charges, not even any confirmed statements that criminal money laundering was occurring on Bestmixer. This shows that despite the lack of lawbreaking, a mixer can be shut down anyway, so this emphasis on the law is sort of pointless.

It reminds me of civil asset forfeiture in the US. The police come and seize all your property, then the burden is on you to prove a legitimate source of funds for all the property before you can claw any of it back. No criminal charges. They just shut you down, take everything you own, and tell you to bring your case to court. The Bestmixer admin isn't going to be filing a legal suit against the Dutch police anytime soon. Neither will any other mixer.

They did it already. This article isn't giving much information, just the minimal to say the site is seized, but there is. They were after Bestmixer since last year and they have been able to estimate its volume transactions, etc.
So for months, maybe the beginning, people were using a broken mixer

That doesn't mean a mixer can't be shut down or the operators arrested. What happens at trial -- or whether the case ever goes to trial -- is a different question. There are no explicit laws about mixing, but court precedents haven't been set regarding whether mixing could be construed as violating various money laundering statutes. That was the implication Dutch police made with Bestmixer.

Unfortunately, police tend to shoot first and ask questions later. That's why Europol is only now "attempt[ing] to determine the extent to which criminal money laundering was used on the site."

By definition, if there is no law that says it is wrong, then it is legal. As there exists no single jurisdiction that has ever specified that Bitcoin mixing is illegal, then mixing is legal anywhere in the known world. So yeah, Ninja's point stands... which law can mixers possibly break? Even if today someone wanted to make it illegal, they'd still have to draft the law, and then get it passed, that's going to take years.

And yeah, what would a legal mixer entail? And what would the point of making your mix legal be, if making it legal means you probably have to disclose a lot of information that would render your mix non-private?

Honestly, the only thing which you can call "laundering" about a mixer is that it layers the bitcoin, but as it isn't even recognized as a currency, i'd say this does not even come close to calling it "Money Laundering".

And; is layering money as a single procedure even illegal? I'm not so sure.

@TryNinja is right. I don't even know what is an illegal or legal mixer. And the funny thing is: which laws do they break? Money laundering? But the government don't want to consider Bitcoin as a legal currency!

Are there any illegal banks? Because I know for fact they participate in money laundering massively, it's well documented and can't be denied (some even accepted publicly) but what happened to them? A small fine at best and they're still here.

What exactly makes a mixer "ilegal"? Which laws can they possibly break?

How can we separate a "legal" mixer from an "ilegal" one without tracking the users? Are you saying that people can only mix when they're not buying/selling drugs or doing other shady stuff?

MarkBTC11 seems a little bit confused, we are talking of privacy here, privacy is not a crime, therefore it's right.
If we can call mixer being part of the mixing industry, we have to understand that there are also illegal mixers and that's those who violated the law, legal mixers serves with the right purpose which is to give us the privacy we want.

Unfortunately, people don't understand the value of their own privacy. They think it's just a matter to getting their name/last name, DOB, address, credit card numbers, and things like that, private/hidden. But in reality, it goes deeper than that. If they don't fight/act, it's the whole life that is tracked, data mined, analyzed, etc. They will know everything (even supermarkets can currently know when your wife get her menstruations).

I have just referred to the statement of one member that what happened with two mixers recently, does not mean their complete disappearance of them. Of course, the number of mixers and their reliability are two completely different things, so I would even say that it would be good to think more then twice before using any of less known crypto mixers.

People mixing a large number of bitcoins don't mix all in 1 transaction (even if they used the service several times before). They usually do it through multiple TXs. Once to test and then split the mix.
No matter the amount, if they don't know the site people should always do a 1st Tx before, at least to see if the site isn't a scam.

Sure there are dozens more, but do you really trust those mixers with substantial amounts of funds? I know i would think twice before using them.

So you think there were only three mixers, and now only ChipMixer is remained? This is only true if you think of those mixers who had the signature campaign here on forum, but that you by any chance read few posts at the beginning of this thread you would know that there is more mixers who operate today.

I would not bet that mixers will end, it is almost in same category as all the claims that bitcoin is dead or will soon be. Mixers will only need to adapt, and by that I think they will need to move from places as Europe or USA and also by using things which theymos explained.

Here is list of all available mixers : 2019 List Bitcoin Mixers Bitcoin Tumblers Websites

Yes, this is going to be the end of the bitcoin mixing service business as there are now many governmental regulatory bodies that are considering this type of business to be the tool for laundering money from illegal sources. Sad to say, against those in authorities, there is less we can do but to comply not unless we can go underground (where life can be so difficult, I guess). The one and only remaining standing in this industry is Chipmixer...let's see how things will turn out for this last guy on the ground.

Blinded bearer certificates (bb-certs) are a very old and fairly simple technology, though for some reason it's never seen widespread use. It basically allows a "bank" to issue tokens which can be transferred 100% anonymously. These tokens could be something like "IOU 1 BTC", or they could indicate other things like "whoever holds this token is entitled to a bitcointalk.org copper membership". Unlike Monero or Wasabi, bb-cert transactions aren't merely mixing coins around to make the transaction graph (hopefully-)prohibitively difficult to follow: transaction histories simply can't exist at all. A bb-cert system would also be very scalable -- easily scaling to Visa-level volumes --, and with instant confirmation of transactions. The main downside is that it's fundamentally centralized, since each cert has to be issued by some entity (though this entity could be a multisig arrangement).

I wrote a little article here with several example use-cases. Note that since I wrote that:
 - I learned that Cloudflare implemented an anti-captcha bb-cert thing in the form of Privacy Pass, which is really cool, though it doesn't work perfectly yet and it seems that there isn't that much attention on this.
 - Someone started working on hookedin, which is a project for a complete bb-cert-based BTC payments system, though it's in the very early stages of development and isn't really usable yet.

I suggested bb-certs to ChipMixer in 2017, but they weren't at that time interested. (Not too surprising, since I wasn't offering to create it for them, an easy-to-deploy solution doesn't exist yet, and ideas are a dime a dozen.)

Yeah. i've looked into that and still am. It looks very promising, but i don't really understand it up to a level where i'd be able to confidently explain it in a fashionable way yet.

in short though, (as far as i understand it): It greatly removes the current trust factor you need to have in mixers regarding them not keeping logs, and replaces it with mathematical proof. You still need to entrust the service with your funds though. (but this risk can also be greatly reduced if the service used multisig with a number of trusted members. (say all/a select group of DT1 for example.)

There's some more discussion here; https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5ksu3o/blinded_bearer_certificates/


I'm not sure if this is something chipmixer would be interested in implementing though, as once such a platform is developed, anyone and their mother could probably fork it & run their own version, which will probably result in a race to the bottom regarding fees for mixing & decentralization. (X trustworthy members will run their own bank with Y fees, lower than that of Chipmixer's (although chipmixer already has 0 fees, but you get the idea.), resulting in chipmixers "bank" getting less traction..)

And you probably need to pay the multisig signers a part of the mixing fee, which will just result in less fees for chipmixer themselves.

i saw theymos mention something about "blinded bearer certificates", saying that if chipmixer used them, they'd be a superior mixing method vs monero and wasabi wallet's coinjoin. any idea what that would entail or if it's possible?

Possible, BitBlender stopped his service for the reason you say. I'm pretty sure the reasons are also the same regarding BitMixer.io years back.
I believe he got something showing he's the next target, not really afraid of the Bestmixer case.

As for the hosting, any country can shut down a website if it's hosted in the said country but when a country wants to shut down a site hosted in another one, it's not that easy, since the country can just tell you to go out. You can imagine the answer if The US request to China to shut down a site...