3 ms·

If you were trying to run a signicant and profitable business, would you expect to know who your customers are? You need to be able to get your product in front

If you were trying to run a signicant and profitable business, would you expect to know who your customers are? You need to be able to get your product in front of them right? Market to them somehow? And you must get outreach for support or partnerships now and then, even if you try to make yourself hard to identify or reach. They may have avoided collecting identifying information on specific individual people, but it's absurd to think that they could have reached the scale they did with no knowledge of where and for what purpose their service was being used. The startup engineer's fantasy is that you can build something useful and users will flock to it through no further involvement of your own, but that's almost never a thing -- and certainly not here.

Ajedi32 3y ago
Is there any evidence Bitcoin Fog was marketing their service specifically to criminals? The affidavit[1] another user linked elsewhere in this thread says: > BITCOIN FOG was publicly advertised on Internet forums and well-known web pages promoting darknet markets as a tool for anonymizing bitcoin transactions. But it doesn't really go into detail. "well-known web pages promoting darknet markets" might just mean "Reddit". And I think you might be underestimating the impact of word-of-mouth advertising. I don't recall Tor or Mullvad having to extensively advertise to criminals in order to get as popular as they are now. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.230456/gov.uscourts.dcd.230456.1.1_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.230...
- codedokode 3y ago
  Tor and Mullvad are definitely tools for criminals, I am aware that they are often used to access illegal information which is legitimately censored by the government. And some news media outlets openly promote using these services to bypass the legitimate censorship.

Ajedi32 3y ago

Is there any evidence Bitcoin Fog was marketing their service specifically to criminals? The affidavit[1] another user linked elsewhere in this thread says: > BITCOIN FOG was publicly advertised on Internet forums and well-known web pages promoting darknet markets as a tool for anonymizing bitcoin transactions. But it doesn't really go into detail. "well-known web pages promoting darknet markets" might just mean "Reddit". And I think you might be underestimating the impact of word-of-mouth advertising. I don't recall Tor or Mullvad having to extensively advertise to criminals in order to get as popular as they are now. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.230456/gov.uscourts.dcd.230456.1.1_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.230...

codedokode 3y ago
Tor and Mullvad are definitely tools for criminals, I am aware that they are often used to access illegal information which is legitimately censored by the government. And some news media outlets openly promote using these services to bypass the legitimate censorship.