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Well, because the owners stay anonymous since they know their services are illegal. The ones I have seen are TOR hidden services. Enter destination address, th
by ATsch 9y ago
Well, because the owners stay anonymous since they know their services are illegal. The ones I have seen are TOR hidden services.
Enter destination address, they give you an address to send stuff to, send btc, wait. That's basically all a service like this needs to do.
- daemin 9y agoSo there's nothing stopping a mixer service taking 50% of the incoming bitcoins, or even all of them.
- CJefferson 9y agoNothing except it takes a long time to build up trust as a good mixer service. If you were ever closing, you could indeed steal all coins from the final round of use.
- koolba 9y agoOr maybe just an "if" statement that checks if the amount is greater than X and, if so, take the money and run.
- dmix 9y agoThis could be said for any capitalist business. You can't build a repeatable business around scamming. At most you can do it once or twice before word gets out... Just because it's operators are anonymous doesn't mean the consumers operate in a limited information marketplace. Word travels quickly. The simple fact is you can make far more money not scamming people by running a real mixing service than by scamming a couple people once. So ultimately the real services with get built and gain a reputation and a large audience. People will get burned more often with BTC but it's a cost of doing business in black/grey markets. But that hasn't stopped billion dollar black markets from existing for the entirety of modern advanced human economies.
- 43224gg252 9y agoDo ethereum smart contracts prevent this?
- sigstoat 9y agohuh, that's a good question. my initial reaction is that if the point of a launderer is to move the money from public party A to secret party B, you can't really mention A and B together in a public contract without defeating the purpose. and if you don't mention them, how do you enforce anything? (the above doesn't mean i'm convinced it is impossible, just that it would be a neat trick and i'd very much like to know if anyone has given it more/sufficient thought.)
- benchaney 9y agoYou cannot write a tumbler as a smart construct, so no.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI don't see why not. The bitcoins would just need to be converted to ETH first, which I think can be done anonymously.
- benchaney 9y agoThe execution of all smart contracts is deterministic and publicly verifiable. It would be trivial to find out how much money was sent to each participant and why.