Life experience shows true the age-old principle that people who add gratuitous moralizing to their names are usually covering for their own defects. For example, if you see a user who calls himself “Honest Trader”, then you may presume that he is a scammer:
Methinks he doth protest too much.For another example, the self-styled “No HATE” drips acid hate for privacy beneath a transparent veil of mealy-mouthed, nicey-nice “sorry” and “no offense” and other sickeningly saccharine platitudes:
IMO, Mixers are the most evil in crypto because they use for money laundering and those who wear a signature supported that shady activity of them.
Why wear chipmixer? Because they paid you a decent rate, up to BTC0.0375 a week is big enough, big enough for the members to sell their souls and criticize others, sorry if I make that as an example because I notice that most of the critics are from that campaign, sorry again if I'm wrong.
No offense, this is only my opinion and I always like to see fairness in the forum, besides those investors are not kids, they know the risk when investing.
STOP THE HATE, LOVE ONE ANOTHER BECAUSE IT'S CHRISTMAS.
Boldface and red colouring are in the original. This is stated in response to negative trust-tagging of users wearing
a Yobit advertisement that makes impossible financial promises,
i.e., a scam. Of course, “No HATE” does not pause to consider the possibility that the persons who wear Chipmixer ads tend to be honest, and are thus motivated by a desire to alert others to scams.
Now, observe “No HATE’s” premise: If you want to unlink your financial transactions on an
immutable global public ledger, then you must be doing “shady activity”, your privacy tools are “evil”, and people who promote those tools thereby “sell their souls” to the devil of so-called “money laundering”.
(The whole concept of so-called “money laundering” is perverse in principle, twisted in practice, and misunderstood by most people who bandy the phrase about; but that is another matter.)
Having seen one sick tree, step back and observe the forest.
Such attitudes and beliefs are increasingly common nowadays; and by no coincidence, they are becoming more common as governments worldwide work overtime to destroy financial privacy.
Chainsaw needed: If nobody stands up against this trend, then the trend will continue until all financial privacy is destroyed.
For my part, I cannot tolerate the above-quoted smear of Chipmixer and its signature advertisers—much less the widespread promotion of the underlying hatred of privacy. Thus in protest, despite the misgivings stated below, I will now spend an as-yet undetermined time carrying an
unpaid, unsolicited advertisement for Chipmixer.
I have not spoken to anyone at the Chipmixer campaign before doing this; my actions hereby are completely unilateral—and indeed, I don’t even qualify for the Chipmixer campaign. My ad is admittedly not as slick as the official one; I may try to improve its aesthetics a bit.
This is an act of solidarity. In the past, I have spoken to well-known Chipmixer signature advertisers who told me, in essence, the following list of their reasons for wearing Chipmixer:
- It’s good money. By such means, they can afford to spend endless hours making this forum a better place, as opposed to spending those hours on some other job. (There is nothing wrong with the pay rate being a criterion, as long as it’s not the only criterion, and not decisive in itself. Also, observe that this motivation is the inverse of the sig-spammer: They want to get paid so that they can spend more time on the forum; they’re not coming to the forum so that they can get paid.)
- Advertising Chipmixer, a reputable privacy service, is more ethical than advertising the scams pitched by many other campaigns, which they found grossly unacceptable. In particular, they recoiled in horror at the idea of pumping ICOs (which were all the rage when I had these private discussions). I infer that they would have flatly refused to advertise Yobit “earn 10% daily, 100% safe” scams at any price. This directly contradicts “No HATE’s” accusation that they “sell their souls”.
- A related weaker form of the preceding item: The Chipmixer campaign is one of the most selective campaigns on the forum. It is quite difficult to get in; you can’t just be some idiot who spams illiterate, nonsensical shitposts as a desperate money-grab. Chipmixer sig spam posts are thus practically nonexistent, despite their high posting requirements: They offer relatively large payments, but they only offer those payments to people who have a long-demonstrated record of prolific, high-quality forum activity. They get what they pay for—and thus, on the other side of the coin, they offer the person accepting the ad a way to sell your signature without looking spammy. For elite users with sterling reputations, this is a major concern.
I think that’s fine. But for my part, I must consider these factors of my own:
- I generally dislike signature ads. I may take one someday; but I would prefer to avoid it. I do recognize that signature ads make it possible for many of the forum’s best regulars to spend fantastic amounts of time and effort here; and really, I could use the money, too. Well, thus far, I just have not been able to get past my personal feelings on the matter.
- Although I have nothing against productive, profitable businesses—to the contrary!—it is childishly foolish to behave altruistically toward a business so wealthy and successful that it evidently has a stratospheric advertising budget. If I am to advertise their services, thus increasing their wealth, then it is only fair that I should get paid. Well—I will make my point, then change my signature to something else.
- By design, Chipmixer is a privacy service that you must trust with your privacy. I strongly dislike that, and cannot endorse it. On this point, the best that I can say for Chipmixer is that my dislike applies more or less equally to all mixer sites (excluding trustless services such as JoinMarket, which are not “mixers” in the usual sense); and I probably dislike them the least. I do commend some of Chipmixer’s efforts to improve privacy on the forum; whether that indicates anything useful for trusting the privacy of Chipmixer’s mixing service is a difficult question, and one for which I have no immediate answer.
- Chipmixer does not implement Segwit. As an external observer, I infer that it must be because they started when Segwit activation was still tied up in politics; and their innovative design requires them to keep what must be a terrifically large inventory of pre-made “chips” (i.e., UTXOs of various sizes) to distribute. For privacy reasons, slowly rolling over the inventory of chips may be out of the question: That would partition the unlinkability set between those who received non-Segwit chips, and those who received Segwit chips. But rolling over the inventory instantaneously may be financially prohibitive; and that would not avoid a partition, although it would minimize the partition’s effects. At least, this is my hypothesis based on blackbox observation of how the service works. I have not spoken to anybody who may actually know.
If you want to use a trusted mixer, Chipmixer is probably the best option. They are innovative. By all accounts, they are very reliable. I myself have sometimes used their services (with coins already anonymized by other means that do not require trust), and I generally avoid trusted mixer sites like plague.
Compare the situation with Tor versus VPN. Tor is designed to minimize trust generally, and to eliminate the need to trust any node in particular. If a circuit passes through a node that logs all data, the node still can’t see both endpoints. With a VPN, you need to trust that the VPN provider is not logging all your Internet activity—as many of them do, all promises to the contrary notwithstanding.
If you want to just send coins to a mixer site, cross your fingers, and hope that it’s not a honeypot logging the links between inputs and outputs, then I suggest that you click the links in my signature and try Chipmixer. Chipmixer is convenient, and it unlinks your transactions on the public blockchain. Javascript is not required.
If you want
trustless privacy, that is a complicated subject beyond the scope of this topic. The best I can say here is that as Lightning grows, it will render all these questions obsolete for most use cases: Blockchain spies can’t trace transactions that never touch the blockchain!
.
