Bitcoin Forum

Apparently this is the first time law enforcement has taken an action against crypto mixers.
It's funny because I am familiar with Bestmixer was just looking at it last week actually lol

https://www.coindesk.com/eu-authorities-crack-down-on-bitcoin-transaction-mixer

that is super crazy but honestly it was bound to happen sometime especially if they have companies like ciphertrace who help scout out bad actors on public blockchains

what about BitMixer?
it wasn't exactly a authorities kicking down their doors but the circumstances were suspicious in my opinion, they suddenly grew a conscious after years of giving service and mixing coins and shut down their operation and went away. there was a lot of talk about how they were under pressure from law enforcement.

I've always been a bit suspicious about mixers. The websites were always so sketch imo like as if they couldn't be more obvious. I'm not exactly sure if  this was the first or not but it sounds like it may have been a big bust for Europe

Mixers are the last man standing between governments controlling Blockchain technology or not and I think this action will prompt new innovation to decentralize these services in the future or to incorporate it into the protocol as a side chain service.

We saw what happened when governments tried to take down Torrent sites... right. :P  They had new copies of PirateBay up within a couple of hours and then many more sites popped up like mushrooms.  ;D

ah so that's why the signature campaign of bestmixer got to hold, I was wondering if this shutdown of bestmixer will affect any other bitcoin mixing service. In my opinion mixing service not exactly purposed for money laundering, but it can be used for that.

You have to admit that hosting your servers in Europe may not be a good idea when you run a mixer. It's like making waves with your Tshirt "Hello, I'm here, look at me!"  :D I have to re-read some reports but I think it comes firstly from Macafee who snitched.
I still believe that if bestmixer got busted it's because of the lack of anonymity in its service.

Also, something I found interesting is the website displaying "bla bla bla seized.. YOU'RE NOT ANONYMOUS"
Making me think that's the first motivation was to teach a lesson to people. Including "you're not anonymous" in a text that supposed to be somehow "official text" is just using sarcasm. Why?
Why the news doesn't talk about the owner? Where is he? What are the charges?

Another thing, the same day a new mixer is introduced, I may be wrong but...got my point?...
this mixer is using cloudfare for ssl and cdn, to be sure to be hidden?

Speculations, but they didn't get seized, so they might have gone into hiding at the right time.
There was a bit of speculation about them and the arrest of the guy running BTC-e but nothing got confirmed and probably will never be.


Seriously, if this is our last barricade we're f****.


And torrenting is dying down. TPB is a shadow of what it was while Netflix is doing twice the traffic compared to all torrent traffic.
Besides, torrenting is not decentralized, you have to take the magnet link or the torrent hash from somewhere, and that's the weak point. Not even talking about privately marked torrents which are dead once the tracker goes down since you can't enable p2p discovery.



Say what??????

But mixing coins that are not used, or intended to be used in the dark market, or from/to anything illegal might be more put at risk by mixing them through a mixer, in my opinion.

There's also the Wasabi Wallet if you want to mix them without giving up custody, or risk leaving any logs that might be traceable to you held in a server, https://www.wasabiwallet.io/

This kind of websites are supposed to mix our coins so that our transactions can't be traced back to us but apparently they can't even cover their activities and remain anonymous. It seems like bitcoin mixers are not as safe as everyone thinks, especially because most of them don't even complete the mixing process the way it should be done.

So I stumbled upon this:


So for as long as mixers don't show a faq as to why you should mix your coins (which Bestmixer had), they're perfectly legal? Or are there other factors at work here?


Lol to be fair, Netflix's (and other streaming services like Spotify in general) success seem to be credited more than authorities' efforts for that.


The security firm McAfee, which has no connections to McAfee anymore, was involved in the seizure

This is pretty interesting..
I've been googling for some time to check if this one is indeed the first mixer seized and I've found a lot of mixers, some very old that are still online, so I really think there was something fishy that applied to bestmixer only.

But I have a feeling nobody will hear more than we already know about this case.



He used Macafee and snitched and I thought he was really poking fun at the eatmything guy :P
Still, I find it weird seeing the company involved in this, one more reason to never install software from them.

Privacy coins will be their next target, they'll politely ask e exchanges to delist them, or they will close them, and exchanges will comply. But the most interesting part is how would they react to future privacy features of Bitcoin protocol - Lightning transactions are not public, Schnorr will make chain analysis much harder. Banning Bitcoin can be viewed as tyrannical by western investors, even if they never touched Bitcoin themselves, so my guess is that regulators will double down on KYC requirements for Bitcoin-using businesses.

So monero has massive botnets mining it and a thriving malware industry to infect and mine and not only that there was the crypto jacking service coinhive and nothing happens to them but the moment you mix some bitcoins your a criminal?
Something is very very wrong here.

If bitcoin cannot or will not take note that we are under attack and we must push for more privacy tools in the space then we might as well give up now..

And yes Mcafee seemed to play a part in this one.

https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/crypto-currency-laundering-service-bestmixer-io-taken-down-by-law-enforcement/

Obviously, there was a recent signature campaign is this community so I'm sure there's a lot of awareness to this mixing services.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5125389.0

Unfortunately though, it was seized by the Dutch authorities and it looks like they're tracking everything and found out that this mixing services have been used by some bad actors, however, the authorities was able to de-anonymized, followed the track that leads to this services.

So this might set precedent, but I'm sure mixing services are doing their best right now to stay 'anonymous'.

So they weren't anonymous after mixing the coin after all because right now they were being tracked. Must be interesting to see the reports and find out who those bad actors laundering money through them. Its not a new thing though, there was a time when a mixer's name was bitlaunder but were soon busted as scam.

Apparently Bestmixer is based in a country which also has a strict anti-money laundering laws and when authorities saw that the platform had been used in that way then investigated further and then the rest is history. I am sure this is sending some shivers with other more popular transaction mixers but i am hoping this can't happen to them as there are really people who prefer to use this service for their privacy and protection and whether they are doing illegal or not that is not for me to decide.

I'm guessing most mixers who don't want to implement kyc rules would have to move to the darknet, ie. a Tor's hidden service. Of course criminals would look at such services, take for example the Binance heist, how are they going to cash their ill gotten coins? We of course hope all mixers would cooperate with the exchanges when these things occur, but that also goes against privacy. Unfortunately privacy also aids crime, so you get put in a difficult position.

Well i guess you could have some sort black list of bitcoin addresses without divulging personal data from their owners, only the (verified) reason would be on the list (ie. Binance theft), which could be privately shared among all exchanges, mixers and casinos, etc voluntarily among themselves. Because anyone else can be a victim, so its in their best interest to help deter this.

Oh and btw, even if you are a Cloudflare customer, you can explicitly accept tor connections (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203306930-Does-Cloudflare-block-Tor-).

Some EU countries are also have some restrictions for torrent users. I know a swedish guy that got fined some years ago for using torrents.

I guess that some services would be working via Tor. So we still gonna have a chance to mix our coins.
The problem is that quality of that mixing gonna be questionable: after trying to mix my own coins I would definetely get some coins that were related to different illegal activities.

Yes, but until that moment all those privacy coins have to be somehow popular.
Maybe now some people would understand that possessing a crypto coin does not move them to another world where they can do everything they want.

Closure of mixers is only a small part of actions taken by authorities against bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a phenomenon. I don't think they care about fraud or even money laundering too much, but rather they are trying to push people out of crypto to buy more themselves - it's likely to be the true reason of such closures.

Mixers were always the grey area in the crypto discussion. Their prime intention being hiding where the money came from.
There would be no other use of hiding your source if it's not black money. Mixers are used as a tool for money laundering and are a headache for law enforcement agencies. We would be seeing more crackdowns in the future.

It was suspicious, but Bitmixer voluntarily shut down. This is definitely the first time that we've seen authorities seizing the domains and servers of a mixing service, and putting out press releases about it.


They were based in Europe, which seems like an odd choice for a Bitcoin mixer. I sure hope other mixers are housing servers in countries that are less friendly to European and American authorities. Belize, BVI, Bahamas, Seychelles, the Cook Islands -- so many better options out there.

What were these guys doing operating out of Luxembourg? They may as well ring Europol while they're at it.

Balls.

Many people just want to break the link between known addresses and the next one they use in a comprehensive manner. If you have a publicly posted address on places like here anyone reading could trace your every subsequent transaction for the rest of your life without much effort. Why should anyone have to put up with that?

Would you tolerate that in your conventional financial life? Every time you bought a can of coke with your debit card the guy behind the counter would know your bank balance and where you'd spent it. There's a tricky balance to be found somewhere, but opening your legs and peeling back your flaps for everyone to have a look isn't going to cut it long term.

I agree. The reason for mixers is to hide illegal movements of money. The government sees that and AML compliance firms like ciphertrace are on the lookout for the sources.

I don't think mixer companies realize that there are crypto forensic companies like ciphertrace that can still trace the mixed pathways.

LOL, they always knew that someone is watching over their shoulders every time they mixed some coins. You don't need companies like Ciphertrace to trace the footprints, you can read everything here, Breaking Mixing Services (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5117328.0).

I still can't understand why they really operated servers under the jurisdiction of EU,  ;D. Are the people behind that mixing services really think that they are not within the reach or Europol? As far as McAfee's snitching, here is the official tweet from Europol,

https://twitter.com/Europol/status/1131217847789740033

This might sound controversial, but I would like it if the authorities could search through all those data and find massive criminal operations and/or people who were responsible for major hacks on exchanges and if they could be brought to justice now.

It is unfortunate for the people who simply used the service to protect their financial privacy, but lessons needs to be learned and sometimes innocent people gets burnt in the process.  ::)

They opened a whole Pandora's box with this seizure.  :P

If you want to stay anonymous just don't use bitcoin. Even theymos says monero is superior to bitcoin when it comes to staying anonymous.

Mixers look fine on paper but there is no way you could know if the mixer was being owned by the government already by the time you decided to use them.

That's exactly what happened to bestmixer. The government owned the service for more than 10 months before they finally decided to seize the domain.

It could happen to any mixing service you are using. It is pointless and dangerous af.

Is there any confirmation about this?
I find it weird for them to wait that long and at the same time it means they would have infiltrated it just two months after the launch. Not that it is impossible but I find it a bit hard to believe.


Exactly this.
I don't care about small sums or when I send some coins to wirex or local bitcoins from my second wallet cause nobody will be able to tell what I've done with that money, but I like to keep my main stash as hidden as possible, it's nobody business how much and when I spend and what I have left.

They started the investigation in June 2018, and have been collecting evidences since then. That's what I wanted to mean.

I know it is not the same thing as owning the company literally. (maybe they did, who knows) But the outcome is more or less the same.

What if they are already on chipmixer or any other decent mixer out there? Who can give us a guarantee that it is not already happening?

tldr; just stick to monero if you have something to hide.

ah yes, Theymos say something and everyone repeat, sometimes without understanding. Since Theymos posted something yesterday you're the 6 or 7th user repeating, quoting, licking, whatever. Now I'm saying there are better coins than monero.
Always the same argument with mixers, the famous honeypots

Not really, the fact is they were "monitoring" bestmixer for months.

Or use TOR + Wasabi wallet,

https://www.wasabiwallet.io/
https://www.torproject.org/

It would be much less risky because you don't surrender the custody of your Bitcoins. Plus centralized services keep logs in their servers, that could be used to analyze, and trace them back to you.

I guess the good thing about this is now people like me even will one day be forced to learn how to use wallets like Wasabi. It took me almost a year just to get used to a proper Bitcoin client, and now to read something like this,,, makes me relieved I never used a mixer yet even though I considered a few times just for privacy.

How soon before they go after wallets that help privacy?

Authorities only showed their power to a single entity and may follow more movement but they don't have a suspect in custody after this Bitcoin Mixer shut down so I think they've still failed and just simply seized a website which is so easy to create an another one and heighten its defense against them.

They do care about money laundering and cryptocurrency is best suited with it.

There's no way authorities legalize mixing transactions since it can be used for crimes especially for money laundering transactions. Good thing they'd warned their clients to get their funds out of their mixing service before they're seized by the government. The war just started. So if you're using mixing service, be aware that authorities can shut it down anytime. As everybody was saying. Use more secure and safer cryptocurrencies. Bad news for mixing services out there. It is inevitable

What? Who warned of anything?  ;D ;D ;D
I'm starting to believe you have no clue what a mixer is.


Then I'm entitled to two years of extra funds for my pension :P and some tax returns.
As for hiding, there are two types of hiding.

Putting some curtains in the windows because I don't want the neighbor to see how I make sex with my wife, and putting curtains because I don't want my neighbor to see I have a meth lab in my bedroom.

I have nothing to hide from the authorities, I even paid taxes on bitcoin earnings for the last year a few weeks ago, but I don't want that anyone can track my coins and see that I gamble or I buy video chat tokens or I've tipped a stripper (https://mashable.com/2017/08/21/legends-room-strippers-bitcoin/?europe=true).
Disclaimer: Never actually done any of those!

Are mixers even necessary when you can transfer bitcoin to monero and then back to some other crypto?

How are you going to do that without an exchange? Maybe some day it'll be possible on chain or in wallet. It isn't at present.

If you try it P2P no monero owner is going to want your dirty coins.

It is odd they waited so much.

By the way, i can't be sure, if transaction mixers are good or bad for the crypto ecosystem.

right now, the best way is to use an exchanger like flyp.me, which doesn't require account registration or KYC. you can access through TOR/VPN, swap for XMR, tumble the XMR in multiple tx, then convert back to BTC.

it's hard to avoid centralized services at this point. :-\

Unfortunately bestmixer is the first mixing service that came under fire from the authorities and some of the mixing services closed their service earlier fearing these sort of actions will come once the bitcoin market become more mainstream and i am not convinced with the way they took them down, they cannot pin point one thing that they did, all the authorities say is that they helped in money laundering, which is a broader term and it is very difficult to sort these type of issues and today bitblender has closed their service too after this incident, we now have chipmixer and will see how long they will last.

you can get the magnet/hash directly from the bittorrent network. that way it's decentralised, as no trackers or websites are needed

The tech is getting better that is why these mixers are able to be tracked back to the source. Security firms like ciphertrace are working with large enterprise level companies to work on AML specifically.

Somebody has to create that torrent hash and publish it somewhere and you must find out what that file is via some sort of ratings that again will be centralized.

Even with IPFS, you still need a central point.
Take a look at torrent paradise, it runs on top of IPFS as a search engine, would you trust to download a file only relying on the name and number of peers and nothing else?
Edonkey and Kazza worked that way, and they were 99% fakes and 1% porn on those networks.

Of course, I can create a torrent, send you the hash via PM and nobody will be able to track it, but once Jon and Alice and Oliver and Thanos and Daffy and two million more want the torrent you must have a way to send all of those the hash, creating a  place where those can be stored> centralization.

Even if you do it via a telegram or whatsapp group, it's still has a central point.