Hackers and their use of mixing services

[shield132]

There are so many things wrong with what you're saying that i don't know where to start.

From reading of this article: https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-hackers-bombard-chipmixer-to-launder-at-least-4-836-btc

Yes, bitcoin mixers are used by criminals, but by far the most people using them are simply privacy-oriented persons, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/chainalysis-most-mixed-bitcoin-not-used-for-illicit-purposes

According to that analyze (no one knows how fair it is but still...) only 10.8% of mixed funds are 100% linked to illicit activities (8.1% - stolen funds, 2.7% - darkn). If we consider that this numbers are true, then what do you think, would this number be lower or higher in 2016? I guess higher... Do you agree with me?
But still roughly take 10%, in 2016 bitmixer mixed 1 Million bitcoin, 10% of 1 Million is 100 000. How much bitcoin was in circulation in 2016? 16 million but at the same time 4 million is lost (according to 2017 statistics) so what numbers we got? 12 Million. 8.3% of overall bitcoins were mixed via bitmixer alone. At the same time there were very popular mixers like cryptomixer, bitblender. So a lot of bitcoins were mixed, right?
And what do you think, have people changed recently? Did they become more kind?

There have only been 2? 3? mixers that were shut down, the others either exit scammed or closed down themselves.

Great decision from owners:

About question "is a knife good or bad tool?". If you sell knifes and you know that most of your clients are murders, will you stop your business? My pastor suggest me it is not a business I should continue. Sorry for that.
No one is silly to destroy unlimited money printing machine for no reason.

Bitcoins are naturally anonymous which makes tracking the transactions a bit difficult(but not impossible) and these kind of mixing services literally make tracking the transactions almost impossible.

They are quite literally the opposite of anonymous. Every bitcoin leaves a clear "trace" which can be chained to a person on each and every offramp (exchange).

That's why people prefer to use mixer, why to leave traces to those who are going to catch me? At least make it difficult and unworthy.

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[o_e_l_e_o]

The fact that they try to keep everything under surveillance is not new and the phenomenon is expanding at a very fast rate, although in some cases common sense starts to prevail (CMIIW, but I think that public face recognition postponed in Europe until the software gets more mature and harder to be abused).

The last thing I read regarding facial recognition was this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html

I followed the story a bit more and ended up on this article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/facial-recognition-london-inaccurate-met-police-trials-a8898946.html

The TL;DR is that London Police are rolling out mass surveillance and facial recognition, despite it having a 96% false positive rate, and physically stopping and handing out fines to people who pull scarves or hoods over their face to avoid it.

And honestly, I wouldn't even care if the system had a 100% accuracy rate. You do not have the right to harvest the faces of innocent people without grounds or any reason to suspect them of a crime, add it to your database, link it to a bunch of other information you have "obtained" about them, all without their consent or probably even their knowledge.

This is not an isolated case. Facial recognition is being trialled/rolled out all over the world.

ToR is not illegal. So I can hope that Monero will also not become illegal. It's just a clever software after all.

Tor is not illegal yet. There have been plenty of politicians and administrations who want to "ban encryption", or some other such nonsense, until someone who isn't a moron points out that doing so would break the entire internet. If we continue not caring about our privacy and electing these kinds of people, it will only be a matter of time.

[NeuroticFish]

London Police are rolling out mass surveillance and facial recognition

I was talking about this:

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses

But overall you're right. There's a high degree of uncertainty of what will politicians decide.
I won't continue on this direction since we are on the same page (with tiny bit different levels of "optimism") and I don't want to go too much off topic.

I can hope that mixers and privacy coins will not be harmed too soon.
At least the mixers can easily survive by handing over logs if asked with a warrant.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I won't continue on this direction since we are on the same page (with tiny bit different levels of "optimism") and I don't want to go too much off topic.

Haha, that's a very diplomatic way of saying that I'm a cynical old fart.

I can hope that mixers and privacy coins will not be harmed too soon.
At least the mixers can easily survive by handing over logs if asked with a warrant.

I would hope that as and when it comes to that, the good mixers will be able to go the way of the good VPN providers, and prove to a court that they have no logs which they can hand over. Certainly any one which can do that is likely to see an increase in activity and volume. That's if blinded nearer certificates or some other untraceable mixing method doesn't become commonplace first.

[NeuroticFish]

Haha, that's a very diplomatic way of saying that I'm a cynical old fart.

LOL! No, I didn't meant that. It'll mean that I'm also one.

and prove to a court that they have no logs which they can hand over

Interesting approach! Just that'll anger Big Brother and we're back to square one: the discussions about extinction 

[stompix]

According to that analyze (no one knows how fair it is but still...) only 10.8% of mixed funds are 100% linked to illicit activities (8.1% - stolen funds, 2.7% - darkn). If we consider that this numbers are true, then what do you think, would this number be lower or higher in 2016? I guess higher... Do you agree with me?
But still roughly take 10%, in 2016 bitmixer mixed 1 Million bitcoin, 10% of 1 Million is 100 000. How much bitcoin was in circulation in 2016? 16 million but at the same time 4 million is lost (according to 2017 statistics) so what numbers we got? 12 Million. 8.3% of overall bitcoins were mixed via bitmixer alone. At the same time there were very popular mixers like cryptomixer, bitblender. So a lot of bitcoins were mixed, right?

You started throwing numbers around you've lost count of what's more important comparing things that are related, not apple and oranges.
The average output value of all bitcoin transactions in a day is at around 200 million bitcoins.

So rather than 8.3% of the total supply is more like 1.5% of all transactions went to bitmixer.
That's what fun about statistics, you can take two accurate numbers that are both true but show a totally different picture.