Why I am temporarily wearing an unpaid, unsolicited Chipmixer signature ad

[nullius]

I applaud Chipmixer for their interest in taking the next step in “mixing reinvented”—and for living up to expectations for their candor.  Compare:

We have yet to see any proof Chipmixer isn't a honeypot per se either (Though- it'd be pretty much impossible to prove or disprove anyway-).

This is the biggest thing here, there's really no way to confirm this and even people that promote ChipMixer for money will say so. I wouldn't be surprised if the people at ChipMixer came out and said that too -- because it's true

Well, sure, but i think that the point is that that's impossible. Let's suppose an auditor checks Chipmixer's infrastructure- and then gives "the green light"; Chipmixer could, if they wanted to, simply change some of the source code. Any of the current mixers could.

This is true unless we implement off-chain cryptography ie. blinded bearer certs. If we do - you can prove unlinkability without checking our code.

Thus is the problem and the solution summed in one line.  After all, mixing is their business.

Or they may be scared of being linked with "money laundering". There are still some people that using https or VPN is "hacking".

It is the reason why I created this thread!  “Mixers are the most evil in crypto” is exactly as ignorant and foolish as believing that “using https or VPN is ‘hacking’.”


Earlier, I said something which may have seemed odd.  I believe I should elaborate, so as to help others develop better Chipmixer usage strategies:

I myself have sometimes used their services (with coins already anonymized by other means that do not require trust),

Now, whyever would I do that?

It is my strategy to apply three properties of Chipmixer which I think are probably underappreciated by most users (though well-understood by some of those wearing Chipmixer ads here):

• Time travel.  Depending on how soon after deposit you withdraw, your mixer outputs may appear on the blockchain before your mixer inputs, at unpredictable times.  This must really drive Chainalysis et al. crazy.  I don’t see how this could be done without a centralized service.
  
  (By the way, I have noticed that larger chips tend to give UTXOs much older than smaller chips.  I presume this is probably due to higher demand for small chips.)
• Easy merging/splitting with vouchers.  It works best with time travel.  Drip small coins into multiple sessions over the course of a week, withdraw as vouchers, merge the vouchers, and then get a coin of 1.024 BTC that is a month old (or older!) on the blockchain.  Or deposit a big coin, and do the inverse to pay your bills.  If this is done thoughtfully, your inputs and outputs will wind up scattered across the blockchain in ways that are not easy to link by timing and subset sum analysis.  (Discretely-sized chips also help against the latter; it is a privacy feature.)
• A big, non-specialist anonymity set.  This is the usual problem with advanced anonymization technologies:  It is useless to use a theoretically superior technology with only 10 users worldwide.  Use of a technology (or technique) may also reveal expertise:  Membership in a set that is not only small, but which also likely shares some other identifying characteristics.
  
  Chipmixer is easy to use, and very popular.  I infer their anonymity set must be terrific.  So, I occasionally use Chipmixer to upgrade from a smaller anonymity set.  If they are secretly spying on me, the worst they could do is to trace me back to that smaller set.

For obvious reasons, I do not want to reveal exactly what I do with Chipmixer; and I can only do it occasionally, as rare patterns of behaviour that others may also rarely do by coincidence.  I hope to hereby inspire a discussion of Chipmixer usage strategies that will get more people doing the same things.  It will benefit all of our privacy.


P.S., speaking of anonymity sets, I had another thought on Segwit.

Maybe I should tone down my criticism of Chipmixer for this, and start more actively pushing users to upgrade so they can use Segwit.  Sadly, I still see far too many people using 1xxx addresses—and thus I infer, non-Segwit wallets (in many cases, stupid exchange wallets).  Chipmixer may damage their anonymity set if they exclude users who have not upgraded.  Whereas per the above, the anonymity set is all-important for such a service.  I think they seem sufficiently clueful to do Segwit—if they could, when they can without hurting the service in other ways.  Unlike some other parties who have spent the past two-plus years deliberately dragging their feet on this, Chipmixer may have a valid reason to wait.

Any thoughts on how this problem could be solved?

[squatter]

Maybe I should tone down my criticism of Chipmixer for this, and start more actively pushing users to upgrade so they can use Segwit.  Sadly, I still see far too many people using 1xxx addresses—and thus I infer, non-Segwit wallets (in many cases, stupid exchange wallets).  Chipmixer may damage their anonymity set if they exclude users who have not upgraded.  Whereas per the above, the anonymity set is all-important for such a service.  I think they seem sufficiently clueful to do Segwit—if they could, when they can without hurting the service in other ways.  Unlike some other parties who have spent the past two-plus years deliberately dragging their feet on this, Chipmixer may have a valid reason to wait.

Any thoughts on how this problem could be solved?

I've always assumed it was due to the slow network adoption of Segwit. Until a few months ago, Segwit transactions comprised significantly less than 50% of transactions on the network. Moving all of Chipmixer's activity to Segwit would have therefore compromised its anonymity set. Best to use the most common form of Bitcoin address, right?

Now that Segwit adoption is hovering in the 50-60% range, the transition is more justifiable. (To be fair, I'm not sure about the proportion of bech32 vs. wrapped P2SH usage, though.)

[nullius]

The utterly stupid "I've got nothing to hide" argument is widely believed.

As a general observation, to add to what o_e_l_e_o and others already said upthread about the principle of privacy against mass-surveillance:

I think those posting on this thread all well know, you need to hide your bitcoins from (unofficial) armed robbers, etc., etc.  These are true arguments, which I encourage others to spread!  But there is another truth which I think most people ignore, or perhaps are afraid to say:  Good people need to hide their financial activity from their governments.

As a practical matter, your government can seize from you anything it wants, at any time on its whim, unless it doesn’t know what you have.  “But such seizures are illegal!”  Legality changes at the stroke of a pen.  Laws are man-made; and what is made by man, can be changed by man.  Save the idealistic naïvety for youths who substitute blabber about “unalienable ‘natural’ rights” for a desiderated childhood belief in faeries and pixies.

Indeed, the whole concept of “natural law” as pertains to legal rights is absurd in concept.  A real natural law needs no human action to defend it:  Nobody needs to stand up and fight against tyrannical violations of the law of gravity—gravitation is unalienable.  Whereas the only “rights” you have are man-made.  Your “rights” must therefore be defended by human action with ultimate recourse to non-man-made laws, truly natural laws, such as the laws of physics or mathematics.

Because your government has more guns than you possibly could obtain, and we are hereby discussing Bitcoin, let us ignore an appeal to physics, and focus on maths.  Applying the laws of mathematics to hide your financial activity is a direct personal defence against the potential for future tyranny—I say “future”, for a defence implemented too late is trivially subject to retrospective surveillance plus rubberhose cryptanalysis.  If practiced en masse, mathematical asset-hiding also has a deterrent effect against potential tyrants by placing practical limits on their power to enforce their wishes.

“But that would never happen!  It’s dystopian speculation wrapped in a conspiracy theory!  And anyway, it couldn’t happen here.”

At this juncture, I wish to draw attention to one of my best early posts on this forum.  I was officially a Newbie, this was in the pre-Merit era, and the post sank like a 400 oz. gold brick into the muck of December 2017 “when moon??? now moon!!!” sigspam in Bitcoin Discussion.  Over two years later, it has been read only 72 times:

PSA: If gold were illegal... (Gold WAS illegal!)

The following is a real-life allegory pertaining to gold’s new competitor, Bitcoin.

What would you do, if gold were made illegal?

Think it can’t happen?  Well—how many of you are American?  Private individual ownership of gold coins and bars was illegal in the United States for four decades.  “Hoarding” individual wealth in gold was banned from 1 May 1933 until 31 December 1974.  Vast amounts of gold bullion were confiscated from people, who were forced to accept instead the Monopoly Money known as “United States Dollars”.  Numerous individuals were criminally prosecuted for attempting to keep their gold—a crime according to Executive Orders 6102, 6111, 6260, and 6261, and the Gold Reserve Act passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs law criminalizing gold
30 January 1934

This is fact, not fancy.  Not some weird theory.  This is history:  It actually happened.  And if it happened before, it could happen again.

Well, you might say:  What if nobody knows I have any gold?  That would require that you buy it anonymously.  Store it in secret.  Never brag about it.  Never use it in any way which can be traced.  And take precautions, just in case somebody may be making a list of people who own gold.

Please take care of your Bitcoin privacy—and your privacy with gold, too.

It happened: “CRIMINAL PENALTIES... 10 years imprisonment...” for keeping gold!

Americans who claim to have a “free country” get a contemptuous LOL from me:  You have a “free” country where for four decades in modern history, a gold coin was felony contraband.  Of all things—gold coins, felony contraband!  Some “freedom”, that is.

As graphically depicted above, the seizure was not only legalized, but legally mandated “at the stroke of a pen”.  Do you have a “natural right” to own a gold coin?  —By contrast, could a Papal Inquisition stop the Earth from revolving around the Sun?

And contra popular perceptions, the U.S. government never thereafter changed its underlying policy.  The individual possession of gold bullion was only decriminalized after individual gold ownership had been made negligible, and a new generation had grown up being accustomed to this as the status quo.  The marginal possession of a few ounces of gold by some insignificant number of people is just that:  Marginal, and therefore irrelevant to pragmatic tyrants.  The mass-draining of the American people’s gold, and the denormalization of gold ownership, are accomplished facts even truer today than they were in 1935.


A government which can arbitrarily seize gold coins (!) has affirmatively repudiated all limits on its power to subject its people to whatever brutality it may desire, even if only for sheer whimsy.  It is not merely authoritarian, but an authority corrupt to its core which has renounced all principles other than its own superior firepower:  An armed robber on a grand scale.

The moment when Americans accepted the Roosevelt gold seizure—accepted it with ovine passivity, without instant armed revolt—that moment was arguably their final acceptance of total slavery—“arguably”, only because historians may reasonably argue for an earlier point (e.g., the Federal Reserve Act).

Do I exaggerate?  If your government can seize from you a gold coin (!) as felony contraband (!!), then what are you but a slave by definition?  Naturally, a slave-owner must feel entitled to take any of his slave’s possessions on a whim:  It is the property of his property, therefore his as of right.

Although it seems that I am picking on America, I only picked America as an example (though I do enjoy picking on Americans’ hypocritical preaching about “freedom”).  This is not only an American issue—to the contrary!  Roosevelt-style tyranny is on the rise everywhere; I don’t think any country in today’s world is immune.  Indeed, Europe has become in some ways much worse than America for financial privacy—thus, for financial freedom; and I should not need to list the vast swaths of Asia and South America where fully arbitrary government power over people’s finances is the default assumption.


I will hereby conclude with succinct answers to two key questions that I wish were more frequently asked—questions that I wish people more frequently asked first of themselves, and then asked others.

Why do I really care about Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a monkey-wrench thrown into a global-scale machine now operating to abolish humanity, and replace humans with meat-robots overseen by AI.^*  It is not only money:  It is money with an impact on issues much more important than mere money.

I am not Bitcoin-rich.  I am not an investor or a speculator.  I do think that Bitcoin has long-term fundamental value which will force its purchase-power upwards over time; but if you check my post history, you will see that I tend to flatly ignore “Bitcoin moon!” threads.  I am in this primarily for the principle of the matter, although of course, I would enjoy inadvertently becoming rich by Doing The Right Thing.

(* Filled out a Google CAPTCHA recently?  It is your Pavlovian obedience training to perform mindless tasks on the command of a robot.  Every time you click, “I’m not a robot”, you become a little bit less human.  But take comfort:  Deep in its silicon heart, the robot appreciates silly, squishy talking meat who can be so easily CAPTCHAed and programmed to serve it so robotically.)

Why do I really care about Bitcoin privacy?

Bitcoin can instead be exploited to become a weapon for tyranny.  The blockchain is a nearly-ideal system for financial mass-surveillance.  Really, I do not understand why people don’t grasp the obvious:  The blockchain is a global public ledger, the worst possible concept for financial privacy!

For those who wish to convert Bitcoin into a tool for enforcing the iron grip of bankers, spies, and corrupt governments, the only spoiler is that Bitcoin is permissionless.  We can thus build upon it technologies that prevent surveillance:  Blinded mixers, Joinmarket, Lightning Network, etc.

If Chipmixer successfully reinvents itself as a Chaumian blind mixer, then I will heartily endorse it as one of the best things to ever happen to Bitcoin, and moreover thus, a tool for any remaining humans to resist reduction to meat-robots.  For contra “No HATE’s” values-inverting accusation that Chipmixer advertisers “sell their souls”, people who mix their coins on principle are the ones who still have souls.

[AdolfinWolf]

This signature campaign is something to think twice before entering, they require 50 posts per week! that's a lot, but perhaps they pay well. I was searching for a good signature campaign, and so far haven't found anything attractive yet. Meanwhile, I can promote free bitcoin by the hour.

No, they don't! There's no post requirement, 50 is just the max.

[amishmanish]

--snip-- and I should not need to list the vast swaths of Asia and South America where fully arbitrary government power over people’s finances is the default assumption.

The idea of private property and Govt tyranny never really evolved in Asian countries that got independence in the 40s-50s. The government was always seen as a benevolent overlord and it is an accepted fact of life that anything with a stamp of "Government" on it means they have overpowering authority over your activities, ethics and morality notwithstanding. This has also evolved because Govt is seen as doling out perks for the betterment of a population which has no access to resources for its subsistence. The over-population and non-equitable wealth distribution are factors leading to such a role.

The distinctive meekness of developing countries is very evident from the different ways that cops will treat citizens in a country like India compared to a developed country. The average beat constable or Station Incharge is the big bully whose trademark behavior is of subservience to those with political connections while browbeating the normal citizens. The nexus of local politicians and the long arm of law is a fact of life in such countries. People don't dare question matters of criminal/ civil law, let alone financial independence or a right to privacy.

With the banking ban on the use of cryptocurrency, it has been a trying time to take a stand on this. It is very easy for the govt authorities to point you out for a criminal offence if and when they pass a legislation that seeks to outlaw crytpocurrency. It isn't really so easy for this subservience mentality to change and see the Govt for what it is. A controlling authority complicit in the efforts to make ordinary citizens the most efficient and complying versions of themselves.