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Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down
- loader 9y agoSo it makes them huge profits but they simply don't want to keep it going? Time for someone to step in and take their profits.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aphextron 9y agoYeah, who would have guessed that money laundering could be profitable?
- dvcc 9y ago"Despite the huge profit we earn, we are closing our activity. [...] But we never had any government or legal pressure [...]" Sure? I think most would find this hard to believe. That was such an odd way to start the announcement.
- nerdponx 9y agoHi all! Despite the huge profit we earn, we are closing our activity. Let me explain why. I'm bitcoin enthusiast since 2011. When we started this service I was convinced that any Bitcoin user has a natural right to privacy. I was totally wrong. Now I grasped that Bitcoin is transparent non-anonymous system by design. Blockchain is a great open book. I believe that Bitcoin will have a great future without dark market transactions. You may use Dash or Zerocoin if you want to buy some weed. Not Bitcoin. I hope our decision will help to make Bitcoin ecosystem more clean and transparent. I hope our competitors will hear our message and will close their services too. Very soon this kind of activity will be considered as illegal in most of countries. Cheers, Bitmixer.IO If you take what he says at face value, it's that he's no longer interested in supporting Bitcoin because it didn't live up to his privacy expectations. Edit: commenters below are right and I was wrong. He's really saying that he no longer feels like the Bitmixer service is needed because he no longer believes that Bitcoin should be anonymous.
- taneq 9y agoThat sounds more like he no longer believes that privacy is a good goal for legitimate cryptocurrencies and is stopping the service as an ideological stand against using bitcoin for anonymous transactions.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI read it slightly differently. He said "I was convinced of a right to privacy" and "I was wrong". This is someone who has either seen (or perhaps been shown) the sort of thing that is enabled when you give criminals a way to exchange value anonymously. And found that he did not want to be the agent enabling that sort of thing. If an officer came to you and said, "Here is a photo of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave. The payments were all in bitcoin and we would have caught the criminals involved if they had not used your service to hide their transactions." I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who would look at that situation and decide to turn off their service and forego any more profit to keep from being a part of that pipeline.
- MichaelGG 9y agoWell a: he could work with LE if he felt this was some strong moral point, and b: LE saying that is definitely lying. There are other services, and there's now more solid ways (e.g. Monero) to hide cryptocurrency. So it's super unlikely it was just his service providing a totally unique thing and without bitmixer.io oh no criminals would just give up and return their sex slaves. What about people writing secure messaging services? "This terrorist attack would have been prevented if it wasn't for your encryption!"
- Ivoirians 9y agoNo one said law enforcement literally went to him and tried to convince him it was a bad idea. And if they did, he still made the decision himself, right? Unless we're subscribing to the theory that he was compelled to shut down. I would personally refuse to work on a secure messaging service because the thought of making a product that will be used by awful people to do awful things would actually be offputting. If that's less of a concern to you than having secure communication, whatever, go nuts. Not everyone is a gung-ho privacy advocate though.
- icelancer 9y agoOwner says: "Bitcoin has no future with drug/weapon traffic or any other illegal activity." Cash and gold trade has done well for thousands of years. As another commenter put it: "If you truly believe in bitcoin as a currency then it should be used to buy anything and everything good or bad." The most likely explanation is government pressure coming from side channels, but nothing specific. Likely has a warning shot fired across his bow and he's getting out of it with these idealistic words as his message.
- s73ver 9y agoThat doesn’t mean he has to work to make it easier to be used for those things, though.
- ikeboy 9y agoWell, at least they aren't exit scamming ...
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y agoWarrant canary?
- csomar 9y agoThis reads to me like someone writing while a gun is pointed to his head. It makes absolutely no sense, and it doesn't feel natural. My guess is that they have been chased by some government agencies and now they are closing down and putting this message to show good faith.
- beager 9y agoIf this wild theory is to be admitted, you must also theorize that the service was honeypotted for a while, and the proprietor is only now permitted to shut it down. With no evidence for either, it's simply speculation.
- cakedoggie 9y agoIt sounds to me like someone who was poor and believed in privacy, and is now rich and does not. It is funny how conservative you can become when you get a lot of money.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoHe probably made so much money that he said "Hey, why risk it by continuing to run this business when I may someday face jail time. I know I am aiding criminals". Smart move to shut it down on your terms and look like a good guy rather than to continue profiting from criminal activity. Whatever your on opinion the various issues at play here there is absolutely no doubt that running this sort of service is extremely risky from a legal / political standpoint. I wonder if the shutdowns last week played any his decision? Maybe he saw a large drop in volumes after the darknet markets were shut down and realized those use cases were much larger than he imagined.
- csomar 9y agoHe could have sold it for some serious money and he didn't expose his identity. I think his identity got uncovered somehow and now he is looking to shutdown operations.
- e12e 9y agoMaybe it was run by an intelligence agency/law enforcement?
- Jabanga 9y agoIt's really harmful to the cause of privacy when people equate enablement of privacy with criminality, as you're doing.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoI agree. I'm not trying to make that equivalence, but that sentiment is so prevalent that it has to factor into your risk assessment as a developer. If you are in this situation and are confident nothing is going to happen to you, you haven't been paying enough attention.
- Jabanga 9y agoThanks for the clarification. I agree that the decision made by the operator will likely to prove to be a wise one from a self-perservation pov.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pier25 9y agoYou can simply use SatoshiDice or any other gambling site to mix small quantities.
- MichaelGG 9y agoDoesn't SatoshiDice send back your win to the same address (chaining off the previous output, so they can do it immediately)? Or has it changed?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tuxxy 9y agoI've never understood the focus on explicit services for Bitcoin mixing. I made a comment on a different post a while ago and I'll paste it below: You're implying that mixers and tumblers are ONLY dedicated malicious services. What you're forgetting is that hot wallets used on popular bitcoin services also serve as tumblers. The distinction between a "malicious tumbler" and a service's hot wallet is just the dedicated use. For example, if a bitcoin shopping site had a wallet you deposited coins into, you'll be recording that you have <number> of coins and they will show that. Your coins will be mixed with their hot wallet and who knows how long they keep them in there. If you wait a few days and withdraw, chances are that most (if any) are NOT your original coins. Not to mention, if you blacklisted these coins, then users who receive these coins wouldn't be able to legitimately use them. TL;DR: Tumbling services are just dedicated to tumbling bitcoins. Most semi-large bitcoin services with hot wallets inadvertently tumble their user's bitcoins.
- mahyarm 9y agoWhat other pooled wallet service doesn't keep records on purpose or has no need to? Gambling?
- user5994461 9y agoTo have worked in Gambling, it is heavily regulated. To be allowed to operate in X country, we had to specifically store a replica of customers accounts in their jurisdiction, so that all servers and data could be seized by the local law enforcement should the need arise. The stories goes that these requirements raised after some shady gambling companies left with all their customer funds.
- nextstep 9y agoZerocash and Dash are terrible (technically) for security/privacy. Use Monero! Best privacy and not backed by a US company like Zcash. In the alphabay raid, US law enforcement wasn't even able to determine how much Monero the site had: https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/888150675946782720 https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/888150675946782720
- Jabanga 9y agoWhy is Zcash terrible for privacy?
- Casseres 9y agoIt's run by a US company where its CEO said on Twitter that they think they can make it traceable. Its privacy is optional and wallet balances are public. And it used a trusted setup.
- Jabanga 9y agoThe trusted setup only requires that you trust that at least one of the participants in the setup ritual was honest and destroyed their key. If they all lied and kept their key, they can't compromise privacy either. They can only create new coins and devalue others' coins. The wallet balances are not public if you use the private option. You're right that privacy is optional, and that is not good. But those who do use the private option do indeed get good privacy. As for the CEO's statement, I haven't seen it. I also don't think one should be basing their decision on whether to trust a cryptocurrency's privacy claims on what their CEO says. It should be based on audits of the source code.
- MichaelGG 9y agohttps://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856?lang=en https://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856?lang=en "And by the way, I think we can successfully make Zcash too traceable for criminals like WannaCry, but still completely private & fungible. " And aren't private transactions like 5% or so, making them very visible?
- amalcon 9y agoI've never understood the purpose of Bitcoin mixers. The use-case seems to be half-assed money laundering. You're concealing the source of money[1], without bothering to invent a plausible alternate source. It's at best like a petty criminal who "launders" his money by simply claiming to have found it. [1]-Poorly at that -- do we really think the people who catch launderers of actual money will be stymied by the transaction log of your average tumbler? It makes way more sense to launder money by renting BTC mining hardware and electricity from someone who doesn't care where the money came from, taking a loss but effectively trading your "tainted" BTC for brand-new BTC.
- zfran 9y agogood mixers do that. They give you coins that are completely unrelated to yours
- amalcon 9y agoCompletely unrelated, in that they've never passed through the mixer? Then, what does the mixer do with the coins you've sent to it?
- zfran 9y agocompletely unrelated as in if you follow the transaction graph they haven't crossed paths, so you'd need the mixer log to break the mixing. It's difficult to know what they do with the coins, but they could be selling them on an exchange to move onto a different currency and then buy bitcoin again.
- amalcon 9y agoThis sort of thing has been done with actual money, basically forever. It's exactly what forensic accountants are trained to untangle, in cases where far less information is available. It's not going to fool any serious player. Nobody's bothered doing this yet on any kind of scale, but that is only because major players in the underground Bitcoin space have found other ways to get caught.
- fiatjaf 9y agoThe declarations make no sense: "Bitcoin is not anonymous, so I'll shut down the service I was running to help people overcome this non-anonymity, which I created for this exact goal." Where is the new information? Every reason he is giving was already there and already clear at the beginning.
- joosters 9y agoI don't see how these bitcoin laundering services worked. Since it costs money to use a bitcoin tumbler, it's slow, and there's a non-zero chance that the operator will simply steal your money, there is very little reason to use a coin tumbler unless you're trying to hide the proceeds of crime. In which case, you are just mixing your coins with other criminals, as there's going to be very little 'clean' money going into the mix. So your coins that were 'tainted' by buying weed online are now possibly associated with arms dealing, fraud, child porn or any number of serious crimes. Doesn't seem like a great benefit.
- MichaelGG 9y agoThere's a non-zero chance, but if enough people are using a service, it's probably OK. And you can just put a bit through at a time, so you never risk a ton. The fees are 1-3%. It provides privacy. Why should Coinbase be able to see where my money went? As far as clean, if a criminal is cleaning their own money but gets other "dirty" coins, that's fine, since they're not connected to any crimes they committed. Plus, presumably, the other dirty coins will be spread over so many users that it just does not provide a real return on investment for LE to follow.
- tpallarino 9y agoFor those of you who don't understand how monetary privacy can be useful outside of illegal activities, see this talk by Riccardo Spagni of Monero: https://youtu.be/pTgadb7M47E?t=58s https://youtu.be/pTgadb7M47E?t=58s
- dingo_bat 9y agoI just posted a comment saying "I don't see a single use for Bitcoin other than illegal activities." Will be watching the video.
- icelancer 9y agoI use BTC to purchase prescription drugs that I have a script for but refuse to pay absurd marked-up US prices for. Is that illegal? I suppose it is by the letter of the law. But certainly not by the spirit of it. I am also a notable figure in some circles and do not want my name or credit card information to appear in the ledgers of certain vendors, despite them being legitimate businesses, due to potential records being exposed from hacking. I therefore use BTC and I've used mixing services on top of that. There's plenty of other reasons, but those are my first-world ones. And I'm not even a privacy nut.
- sowbug 9y agoA week ago I bought some beef jerky and a wifi router with Bitcoin at Bic Camera in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Transaction was fast and easy.
- dingo_bat 9y agoI bought a can of Mountain Dew the other day, with cold hard cash. Transaction was fast, easy and required no computing power.
- sowbug 9y agoI'm really happy for you that you did that! But you started a thread asking whether there were legal uses for Bitcoin, and I answered with one. Why the non sequitur?
- mirimir 9y agoSo it goes. We still have Bitcoin Fog and Helix, so whatever.
- contingencies 9y agoTheory: Operator (who seems European) was also purchasing/selling in quantity on Hansa. Given the amount of information gathered by the Dutch Police, it's possibly a risk-based decision by the operator to clean house.
- Frogolocalypse 9y agoIt is trivial in todays market to do this anyway, if you were so inclined. shapeshift.io allows you to exchange a crypto for some other crypto, and it doesn't even require a login. Peer-to-peer across blockchains. When lightning is deployed trivial will become less than mundane. Pop! The genie is seriously out of the bottle. If you don't know about how these things work, you should probably take some time to at least start to understand it.
- aladinmix 9y agoWhy would people need mixers if you can use shapeshift and monero ? Monero is anonymous, it solves the problem i guess
- oron 9y agoWhy do you need this kind of service? how is it different than selling your BTC on a major exchange, than immediately buying the same amount seconds after?
- jstanley 9y agoThe exchange most likely has KYC/AML information, so could be coerced into helping to trace your money.
- cflynnus 9y agoTo anyone reading this, I wouldn't infer that privacy and fungibility in Bitcoin are not improving. The recent activation of segwit enables practical lightning networks, which do provide a layer of privacy, and also makes it easier to add a feature called schnorr signatures. Schnorr signatures will lead to something dubbed by some as "incentivized privacy". https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-power-of-schnorr-the-signature-algorithm-to-increase-bitcoin-s-scale-and-privacy-1460642496/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-power-of-schnorr-th...
- santiagobasulto 9y agoIt's funny because a bunch of people in a forum are saying that: "People are free to use whatever coin for whatever they want" and "people do have the right to enjoy..." but it's "stupid/crazy" that they're shutting down. Seems like "freedom" is selective.
- gimili 9y agoCould this simply be related to the 1st of August potential bitcoin fork? Something like cashing out, before all the bc of the mixing service are worthless?
- omusa 9y agoLet's hope that other services stay up and running. FoxMixer.com has been the mixing service that I used so far. Had no issues, but who knows if they continue operation or if they also shutdown. I don't hope so.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jason_slack 9y agoIs there still a market for a mixer/tumbler now? I think there are still plenty of ideas out there, that haven't been done, to help ensure anonimity.