3 ms·

So “mixer” quite literally as “launder”?

by Waterluvian 3y ago

lacrimacida 3y ago
Seems so. I wonder how such thing can be legal…
- anonym29 3y ago
  Typically they aren't. Unfortunately, laws are not magic spells that prevent activity from happening, they merely provide penalties for those caught breaking them.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    Unfortunately? It's rather fortunate that that's not the case, as man is fallible and the law is not absolute.
dale_glass 3y ago
It's not quite the same thing, but similar. In money laundering you're introducing dirty money into a legal looking business. You pretend that you washed more shirts or cars than you truly did, for instance. You pay tax, and from the outside it looks like you have a fully legit, profitable business. On BTC, all transactions are public and traceable. You see Alice pay Bob $50. You see Carol pay Dave $25. You see Eve pay Dave $25. A mixer is an intermediary that makes it less obvious who's dealing with who. Everyone puts money into the pool, the mixer at some points sends payments to the destinations, and it becomes harder to tell who's transacting with who. A mixer can take extra steps to confuse things further, like delaying payments and doing everything in chunks of say $5 at random delays, and rounding amounts, so it's harder to tell from the outside how many transactions there were, and to correlate an input of an odd amount of $123.45 with an equal output. Some mixers offer swapping for freshly mined coins for a higher fee. Unlike laundering, it doesn't really make a transaction look legit. You see Alice send $50 to a mixer, but it's harder to tell who it was truly for.
- salawat 3y ago
  Just say it. Structuring-as-a-Service. Things are pretty cut and dry in the finance world. And we have names for these types of things. It isn't mixer. It's Structuring.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    I think structuring is splitting a transaction to evade reporting requirements? Then it's not entirely the same thing. Mixers don't do that to avoid reaching some reporting threshold but to make transactions less identifiable. If 100 people send $1M to the mixer each, mixer sends $1M to 100 destinations, and since all the amounts are the same you can't easily tell who wanted what destination.

So “mixer” quite literally as “launder”?

lacrimacida 3y ago

Seems so. I wonder how such thing can be legal…

anonym29 3y ago
Typically they aren't. Unfortunately, laws are not magic spells that prevent activity from happening, they merely provide penalties for those caught breaking them.
- hiatus 3y ago
  Unfortunately? It's rather fortunate that that's not the case, as man is fallible and the law is not absolute.

dale_glass 3y ago

It's not quite the same thing, but similar. In money laundering you're introducing dirty money into a legal looking business. You pretend that you washed more shirts or cars than you truly did, for instance. You pay tax, and from the outside it looks like you have a fully legit, profitable business. On BTC, all transactions are public and traceable. You see Alice pay Bob $50. You see Carol pay Dave $25. You see Eve pay Dave $25. A mixer is an intermediary that makes it less obvious who's dealing with who. Everyone puts money into the pool, the mixer at some points sends payments to the destinations, and it becomes harder to tell who's transacting with who. A mixer can take extra steps to confuse things further, like delaying payments and doing everything in chunks of say $5 at random delays, and rounding amounts, so it's harder to tell from the outside how many transactions there were, and to correlate an input of an odd amount of $123.45 with an equal output. Some mixers offer swapping for freshly mined coins for a higher fee. Unlike laundering, it doesn't really make a transaction look legit. You see Alice send $50 to a mixer, but it's harder to tell who it was truly for.

salawat 3y ago
Just say it. Structuring-as-a-Service. Things are pretty cut and dry in the finance world. And we have names for these types of things. It isn't mixer. It's Structuring.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  I think structuring is splitting a transaction to evade reporting requirements? Then it's not entirely the same thing. Mixers don't do that to avoid reaching some reporting threshold but to make transactions less identifiable. If 100 people send $1M to the mixer each, mixer sends $1M to 100 destinations, and since all the amounts are the same you can't easily tell who wanted what destination.