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Coinjoin is an ongoing attempt to remove centralization from tumblers: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

• vkou 7y ago
  It will take a stroke of a pen for the US Government to require that exchanges do not accept any coins that have gone through a known tumbler after <certain date> Imagine a money laundering operation, where every laundered physical dollar gets a physical stamp of 'THIS CAME THROUGH A MONEY LAUNDERING OPERATION'. That's the current state of BitCoin tumblers.
  • rtkwe 7y ago
    That really just starts the true cat and mouse game of trying to hide tumblers as legitimate flows. edit: To expand it's harder than tracking normal money laundering too because the "businesses" (ie wallets) can be generated by the thousands per second.
  • nybble41 7y ago
    > It will take a stroke of a pen for the US Government to require that exchanges do not accept any coins that have gone through a known tumbler after <certain date> Assuming they can actually identify it as having gone through a tumbler, sure, but it's not like tumblers advertise the addresses they use. Especially not distributed systems like CoinJoin. These are just ordinary transactions that happen to include inputs and outputs from multiple, unrelated sources. Following long-established best practices, any given address will only be used once. They could ban exchanges from accepting coins that do not come directly from another authorized, compliant exchange, but that would be tantamount to banning cryptocurrencies altogether. It wouldn't stop them of course, just drive them underground.