That's borderline, but I decided that it is a mixer. The part of the mixer definition I was debating was the "advertise that it's improving deposited coins' privacy somehow" part. Without that "we offer a fast and cost-effective exchange into clean, AML-free assets" quote, I probably would've allowed it, since the site itself and most of the other materials I saw didn't seem to advertise privacy enhancement. (The site itself being no-KYC isn't a privacy enhancement of the coins, so that part is irrelevant.)

Done, thanks! Since these are all defunct, I removed all of the icons from posts/PMs. Though I kept them on profiles, since I don't like completely removing extant data.

krishnaverma has for quite some time been in the habit of poking around for security flaws, and he has in fact found several which earned him bounties. For example, he most recently earned a bounty for noticing that some pages stripped whitespace from passwords, while others did not, which reduces password entropy and could cause someone to get locked out of their account. This is less severe than the lowest $1000 level on the security bounties page, but I felt that it was significant enough to award a sub-$1000 amount.

So this password-changing behavior is not unusual for him.

This month 114 users were eligible.

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The PMs page will get really slow if you have more than about 30 pages of PMs, so it's best to prune them periodically.

If anyone wants an mbox dump of all of your incoming/outgoing PMs, I don't mind producing them for people once per year. I do it for myself periodically, and it works really well in Thunderbird: the PMs appear exactly like emails, and you can search them, etc. If you want an mbox dump, PM me either:
 - Your PGP public key, and the email to send the PMs to as a PGP-encrypted attachment. Or,
 - An acknowledgement that you have 7-Zip or gpg, and the email to send the PMs to as an attachment. Then I'll email you the symmetrically-encrypted file and PM you the decryption key. Or,
 - An acknowledgement that I'm going to send it to you by PMing you a link to mega.nz or something, which is probably less secure.

I've long been planning to make PM exporting an automated process, but it's a bit tricky to set up because it involves large files, a relatively slow process, and highly sensitive information. And since not that many users have tons of PMs, it's not been a high priority.

Merry Christmas!

I removed the wordfilters and updated the OP with the new, somewhat-loosened rules:

(I used the clumsy term "dark site" because I didn't want to say "darknet site", since "darknet" is sometimes taken to mean all Tor hidden services and similar things, and I couldn't think of a better term.)

Yep, that's a mixer. Thanks.

---

By the way, after observing the Trump administration for a while, I've decided that I will not change the rules to allow:
 - Paid links to mixers.
 - Mixers operating here, such as by having official accounts or having official announcements posted.

While the Trump administration is massively better than the Biden administration regarding persecution of privacy-protecting services, this seems partly to be due to general chaos at the agencies and a deprioritization of this kind of thing, rather than a real pro-freedom ideology; you can see in e.g. the Samourai and Paxful cases that they will go after privacy-protecting services when convenient. Moreover, right now is the best environment that we're ever going to get: I think that Trump may get progressively worse on these issues as he and his subordinates get annoyed by specific cases of money laundering, and after Trump, whether Democrat or Republican, it's almost certainly going to get a lot worse than now.

I am thinking that I will change the rules to allow:
 - Unpaid linking directly to mixers in posts, as long as the mixers aren't also "illegal darknet sites" (which is a term I need to more exactly define).
 - Easing the enforcement of indirection. For example, in the past we would not allow sig ads which point to an article talking about and linking to a mixer. But it's probably OK now if this kind of thing is allowed.

I haven't decided yet on the exact language of those rule changes, though, so the existing rules stand for now.


I've said this before, and I'll reiterate: My goal is not to stop anyone from doing whatever they want. You're thinking as if I'm trying to help governments in achieving their goals, which I'm not. The rules are not designed to be effective at doing anything in the wider world. The point is to prevent bitcointalk.org from being viewed similarly to "that gas station where all the drug dealers hang out". Places like that end up under increased surveillance, and eventually the authorities usually find some excuse to shut them down.

This topic has been moved to Trashcan. Disallowed mixer.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5567572.0

This topic has been moved to Archival. Disallowed mixer.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5568015.0

This month 112 users were eligible.

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Here are the results after applying the specified adjustments (at least 1 extant post in the year between the time of the OP and 1 year ago, and Member+ post rank):
+----------------+----------------------------------------+
| Adjusted votes | Candidate                              |
+----------------+----------------------------------------+
|             20 | themepen                               |
|             12 | Jayconz                                |
|              8 | summonerrk                             |
|              7 | maxmueller                             |
|              6 | su-asa                                 |
|              6 | Porfirii                               |
|              6 | taufik123 (champion of btalk contests) |
|              3 | m2017                                  |
|              3 | DaNNy001                               |
|              3 | Mahiyammahi                            |
|              3 | byebyebtc                              |
|              2 | agbam                                  |
|              1 | TokenTikas                             |
|              1 | Scarlett_23                            |
|              1 | mr_brilliant$                          |
|              1 | gallar                                 |
|              1 | unknown op                             |
|              1 | Gentle_soul                            |
|              1 | 7Juju                                  |
|              1 | Johnlomape                             |
|              1 | noorman0                               |
|              1 | promocodeudo                           |
|              1 | Just say                               |
|              1 | ojinga                                 |
|              1 | leonair                                |
|              1 | happybitcoinph                         |
|              1 | zackz5000                              |
|              1 | ldl                                    |
|              1 | giftedman                              |
|              1 | Lida93                                 |
|              1 | tread93 (my boy)                       |
|              1 | rduffy                                 |
|              1 | hazink                                 |
|              1 | Franklyn-wood                          |
|              1 | nheer                                  |
|              1 | Hyudien                                |
|              1 | Tonimez                                |
|              1 | abdulzuruku01                          |
+----------------+----------------------------------------+

It's very difficult to identify alts with much accuracy, but after looking into the IP logs, it's my opinion that removing votes by alt accounts would not have changed the winner.

Thanks to all participants!

Thanks for doing the contest again, ChiBitCTy! I voted for Johnlomape: I really liked his creative turtle design, which also thematically matches the idea of "hodling".


I looked into the IP logs, and most of his votes seem to be from legit users. I see only 3-5 votes for him which I'd classify as likely alts. (Always hard to say, though, in either direction.)

Edit: To be more clear, I don't mean 3-5 alts of ThemePen. Of voters for ThemePen, I identified 3 groups of voters with possible alts, like this:
    A and his alt B
        C and his alt D
    E and his alts F and G
The second group is lower confidence, and it may or may not also be the same as the first group. So that's 3-5 extra votes.

This month 114 users were eligible.

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I wouldn't be surprised.


Right. The takedown notices are legally unjustifiable, 100%.

We get this kind of thing quite a bit, and normally I don't post about it, but in this case I was prompted to do so because it's a high-trust service which you'd hope would be trying to address criticism/concern/confusion rather than trying to silence it.


Not with total certainty, but I think that it's probably real. The emails come from an @lunobrandprotection.com email address, which is a domain that was registered in 2020 and is typical for these sorts of takedown notices. In other emails, they say, "Under penalty of perjury, we certify that [...] we have the authority to act on behalf of the owner of the trademark(s) and/or copyright(s) involved."

Luno has been spamming us and our service providers with false takedown notices targeting posts which are obviously not actually trademark-infringing, apparently trying to eliminate negative pages about them from the Internet. This strikes me as a major red flag, so I'd approach Luno with caution.

Yes, I am "biased" toward the software project which Satoshi started, which is now maintained by Bitcoin's most dedicated champions and the crypto industry's most skilled experts.

I'm not going to recommend Knots to people. It's not nearly as well-reviewed, and Luke is a bit unhinged, so I don't think that it's a good idea to run it in important contexts. Also, the way that Knots "resists" big-data transactions is ineffective and bound to fail, so portraying this as some kind of "vote" would be misleading. If there was a serious movement toward a softfork which would ban big-data transactions starting in eg. 18 months, then that'd at least have some chance of success, so maybe I'd put some "both sides" note in the news-bar in that case.


achow101 always posts an "official" announcement thread in a particular format, and that's the one which gets stickied. Neither the old topic nor the new topic are locked.

This month 116 users were eligible.

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Yep, that's a mixer. Thanks for pointing it out.

It took me a while to figure out exactly what he was doing, but this quote made it pretty clear that it is a mixer per the forum's definition:

As rat03gopoh guessed, this was a bug caused by the special character in his name. I fixed it now, thanks!