Why are bitcoin mixers often accused of laundering money?

[rat03gopoh]

To this day, many bitcoin mixers have been caught in money laundering cases, such as Chipmixer, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog, and others. Apart from that, even though the bitcoin mixer users are at fault, those who make the mistake of using a mixer as a way of covering up their crimes, why is the Bitcoin mixer platform also considered guilty? Or is there a conspiracy between them?

Because a mixer is an entity that can be held liable for lawsuits, has large reserves of funds which is quite exciting to be confiscated, the rest doesn't have a license (which is impossible). However, most laws act subjectively.
Of the several conventional means of laundering money such as involving gambling, art trading, awards, etc. which used to use bank transfers as a medium for transferring large sums of money, no bank has been stopped because regulations allow it to operate.

[1714596398]

1714596398

[Z390]

Don't even try to rid off the fact that bad actors found mixers more astonishing to their evil plans, it's for real, mixers are good for good people and also very useful for bad people, if I have to judge, I believe mixers are more attractive to bad actors than the good men and women out there, correct me if I am wrong but the government wouldn't definitely care about the good side, every useful tools in the world can be used by bad actors but mixers are on another whole level because of what they can do.

[Bako97]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering? While we may not recommend going to KYC, it is useless and the anonymity of bitcoins will be lost.

To this day, many bitcoin mixers have been caught in money laundering cases, such as Chipmixer, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog, and others. Apart from that, even though the bitcoin mixer users are at fault, those who make the mistake of using a mixer as a way of covering up their crimes, why is the Bitcoin mixer platform also considered guilty? Or is there a conspiracy between them?
The ability to hide bitcoin transaction makes mixers a clear open ground for money laundering, this attracts tax dodgers and criminals willing to hide illegal activities, some pioneers of mixers has been arrested for money laundering, and those acts gave the mixers a bad reputation, therefore, rendering mixers not 100% legitimate at obscuring financial transactions.

[Bananington]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin mixers as a means of money laundering?

There is no way to really control how people use something, a technology that is meant for good can also be utilized for bad. Bitcoin mixers if they really want to prevent their services from being used by these criminals, they will need to be strict with monitoring and record keeping, and of course KYC no matter how much we do not want to mention it must be introduced and strictly obeyed. It will discourage many criminals from using these mixers and make them look for other ways to lauder their crypto. On the other side of things, their customers and people who use their service will reduce because a fraction of these customers are criminals. So mixers who do not follow these, have no KYC, and allow everyone mix their cryptocurrency will always still be found guilty by the authorities if there is a money laundering case and they are involved.

[D ltr]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering?

there is no way that can be applied in this matter actually, only from yourself and a clean heart not wanting to do things that are detrimental to other people for the sake of worldly satisfaction'
regulations and punishments do not deter people who are greedy for money, but if applied the death penalty can make people think twice about doing so.

[TribalBob]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering? While we may not recommend going to KYC, it is useless and the anonymity of bitcoins will be lost.

if it's true that there is a conspiracy between users and mixers, a very bad thing for a platform that has been formed for a long time.
the effect of greed / human morals can make a company worse when not everyone does this, this can make the anonymity of the owner disappear for btc users, and apply to KYC in every transaction in large numbers

[m2017]

I suspect that BTC-mixers are often accused of money laundering with the sole purpose of demonizing bitcoin-mixers to discourage people from using it. Big Brother doesn't like the idea that bitcoin and mixers can hide all tracks (money transactions). He wants to know everything about you. Therefore, they come up with such accusations of money laundering in order to ban. Perhaps some of the users of mixers use mixers for these purposes, but I can assume that their share is completely insignificant.

The knife is also used in many crimes, but for some reason it is not forbidden to use in the kitchen. In the same way, any mixer is just a tool, which does not mean that everyone who uses it is intruders and criminals.

[Smack That Ace]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering?

there is no way that can be applied in this matter actually, only from yourself and a clean heart not wanting to do things that are detrimental to other people for the sake of worldly satisfaction'
regulations and punishments do not deter people who are greedy for money, but if applied the death penalty can make people think twice about doing so.

You have a point there, this is human behavior stemming from greed, human cruelty, and each person's personality how will there be a general formula to prevent that? It is unethical to use bitcoins and mixers for malicious purposes, breaking the law is man-made, and the government should have a law or proper punishment for criminals, not trying to modify bitcoins or mixers. If the government wants to modify bitcoin, then they should first find a way to modify fiat currency as it is the most used by criminals by far.

[Woodie]

The fact that mixers never ask their customers to under go KYC or ask them about their sources of funds makes it easy to actually launder money for them, no questions ask..

But as the title says, "bitcoin mixers often accused of laundering money" aren't these kind of the mediators of this and people on the other side should be the ones pinned with money laundering label

Btw while we are out giving mixers a bad name, why dont these guys talk about the privacy side of mixers used to protect bitcoiners identities and the alike ..especially  knowing  that privacy isn't  easy to keep.

[Stable090]

Maybe this is where the beginning of the bitcoin mixer idea is needed. Bitcoin mixer will make transactions untraceable and as a double safeguard for the anonymity of bitcoin. But in practice, bitcoin mixers are misused by certain people or groups to hide money generated from crime. Maybe we often call it money laundering

Everything has both advantage and disadvantage, bitcoin mixer is used to mix bitcoin so that it will be untraceable  and it will increase privacy, bitcoin mixer can be used by anyone so you can’t stop anybody  from using it, so their are some people that will be using it for illegal thing and some will be using it for legitimate things but that those mean using bitcoin or mixer is bad.

If you are using a bank and you have connection with your bank manger, if you are trying to deposit a huge amount of money, their is a way the bank manger will do that for you and nobody will question you where you get the money from, so why   Is the government not against bank? So banks is also used for money laundering, most money stolen are saved in the bank and they are not exposed.

I think this is a problem, and cases of money laundering using bitcoin make bitcoin's image even worse. Even though in reality there is also a lot of money laundering that is carried out through bank institutions by falsifying bank account identities.

Let me ask you a question, is fiat currency not used for money laundering? I get annoyed when I see people complaining about bitcoin because it is used for money laundering, yes I know bitcoin is used for money laundering, but fiat currency is also used for it money laundering, up-till now higher percentage of illegal transactions happening currently is still don with fiat currency. So why is it that people are not seeing the bad aspect of fiat currency.

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering? While we may not recommend going to KYC, it is useless and the anonymity of bitcoins will be lost.

You can not prevent it, bitcoin is a currency and it should be used for what anybody want.

[Flexystar]

Why it is always one bad person and 99 good person ratio that I never understood in the world we live in. What about my privacy if I wanted to be anonymous? I am the person who would donate some money at religious place or may be on the street where I feel like it’s needed. What if that money is earned from bitcoin and I want to maintain my anonymous nature until the end? I would definitely use mixers and get freshly minted bitcoins. My intentions are whole heartedly good but does the use of mixers make me money launderer?  Then that must be changed right away. 

[coolcoinz]

It's all arbitrary... I always ask people who say that what is money, because is bitcoin money, or just another medium of exchange unrecognized by the governments. There was a time most countries treated bitcoin like a collector's item, not money. They would not protect investors in any way and also not demand anything in return. So, is obfuscating a source of the Internet data money laundering?

I'll give you an example. If you wanted world of warcraft gold and were selling nude photos of your sister in exchange for it, would that be a financial transaction? If you then mixed that through various game accounts to make it harder to find, would that be money laundering? Years go when I had bitcoin and wanted to buy something for it nobody cared and the government officials were laughing at people like me who live in a dream world. Now suddenly they all want to know how much I have and from what sources, so I say fuck them.

[kryptqnick]

I know that some people use mixers for legitimate reasons. For example, I recall that Buterin once mentioned using a mixer to send money to support the Ukrainian cause, and I understand why some people might feel the need of maintaining anonymity for such things. But the way mixers work makes them very useful for money laundering, and kids of similar to how money laundering is done in general. I've never used crypto mixers, and I'm not sure whether I consider them a neutral technology that should not be banned or not.

[Cookdata]

To this day, many bitcoin mixers have been caught in money laundering cases, such as Chipmixer, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog, and others. Apart from that, even though the bitcoin mixer users are at fault, those who make the mistake of using a mixer as a way of covering up their crimes, why is the Bitcoin mixer platform also considered guilty? Or is there a conspiracy between them?

KYC is a government policy that doesn't exist on bitcoin protocol. On the Bitcoin protocol level, Bitcoin invalidates censorship, its resistant to autonomy from a single person, and protects your privacy as a pseudonym person, but where the problem lies is that for anything that has a merit, it has a demerit, for any solution that is solved, a problem is always created from that channel and that is exactly what Bitcoin has done.

Bitcoin is a good censorship-resistant and nobody there argues that but the ability to stand on it own without a middleman is exploited by some bad actors, anyone can use Bitcoin for anything and the government cannot trace them and that is why they implement KYC but because something that uses less than 1% of bad actors doesn't mean everyone has to do the KYC, there are bad actors everywhere including in the Fiat system.

Mixers are strictly business individuals, they are not like centralized exchanges, they also follow the protocol level which is pure privacy protection, and no way they can implement KYC in that protocol, we have to live by it or let those who wished to use the service continue to use, there are bad actors even in AML policy platforms and they don't get shut down.

[Wimex]

It is supposed that one of the main characteristics of the use of bitcoin is its privacy, imagine that a person who handles large amounts of bitcoin ceases to be anonymous, this would attract many consequences for said person, and I am not saying that it only harms him legally but that he would be in the crosshairs of individuals with bad intentions…..or they have not noticed that when someone has large amounts of money, they are persecuted and even kidnapped in order to take what they have…..this asset makes it possible to avoid these events by not being detectable.

So no, I don't think there is the possibility of preventing it from being classified as money laundering, since that would imply violating privacy, and that should not be allowed, in addition, this way an alternative is generated for these cases, the people who do They carry out this activity with the intention of laundering money, they will find a way out to continue doing it, as it has always happened, this is not something new

[darkangel11]

Caught in laundering cases? Have you ever considered that they're a victim of government attack on cryptocurrencies and anonymity in general?
Mixers have been working for many years and suddenly there's a pressure from governments, at the same time when the same governments get directions from the World Economic Forum to introduce CBDCs as soon as possible.

Honestly, I don't care if some politicians think there should be no privacy and mixers are operating unlawfully. We'll have to agree to disagree.

[_BlackStar]

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering? While we may not recommend going to KYC, it is useless and the anonymity of bitcoins will be lost.

Exchanges and any centralized services have prevented this by adopting KYC – but cannot be completely free from money laundering cases. Bitcoin and all other currencies can be abused - even if certain platforms prevent it, it will happen to other platforms one way or another. Prevent this misuse case is also almost as if you'd expect robbers must be prevented from using weapons - that's highly unlikely.

[Faisal2202]

To this day, many bitcoin mixers have been caught in money laundering cases, such as Chipmixer, Tornado Cash, Bitcoin Fog, and others. Apart from that, even though the bitcoin mixer users are at fault, those who make the mistake of using a mixer as a way of covering up their crimes, why is the Bitcoin mixer platform also considered guilty? Or is there a conspiracy between them?

Totally agreed with your point because when the chip mixer was seized then I was satisfied with what happens but if I give it some more thought then what was the crime of those innocence users who were using it for anonymity purposes only.

Like after that incident I read a topic started by some user, where he shared that his money got stuck after the seizure of CM project. There would be many others fall prey to this halt of the project. But what can be done.

In your opinion, how to prevent the use of bitcoin as a means of money laundering? While we may not recommend going to KYC, it is useless and the anonymity of bitcoins will be lost.

You are right, a while ago I was reading an article about the same issue you referred here, it will take me some time to find the link but they were suggesting ZK-proof mechanism instead of KYC which will hide the identity of the user but help them to trace back if needed and I think only the owner could do that but after tornado was made developers has made it open source for everyone. (source)

maybe I got the idea wrong here so I suggest to check the source also as I said I read it while ago.

Coming to the point, to shift black money from one account to another money laundering system is used which will turn the black money into white. So, as you mentioned due to 100% transparency of transactions authorities and other freelancer like whale tracker etc can track those wallets 24 hours. Which has become so easy and it also has become easy to spread bad words about crypto among newbies on the basis of those account which are not publically available if they were related to banking sectors.

Because i have seen no files and documents shared by Authorities where they catched a laundering case like they share when it happens in crypto.

[AmoreJaz]

It is supposed that one of the main characteristics of the use of bitcoin is its privacy, imagine that a person who handles large amounts of bitcoin ceases to be anonymous, this would attract many consequences for said person, and I am not saying that it only harms him legally but that he would be in the crosshairs of individuals with bad intentions…..or they have not noticed that when someone has large amounts of money, they are persecuted and even kidnapped in order to take what they have…..this asset makes it possible to avoid these events by not being detectable.

So no, I don't think there is the possibility of preventing it from being classified as money laundering, since that would imply violating privacy, and that should not be allowed, in addition, this way an alternative is generated for these cases, the people who do They carry out this activity with the intention of laundering money, they will find a way out to continue doing it, as it has always happened, this is not something new

that is true, if not with crypto market, they will always find a way how to launder their money. remember, money laundering has long been existing even without the existence of btc. so it won't change just because btc market is now part of it. people will always launder so long they need it. and now, they just added one route to this activity, which is employing the use of crypto market.

[Cryptomultiplier]

Caught in laundering cases? Have you ever considered that they're a victim of government attack on cryptocurrencies and anonymity in general?
Mixers have been working for many years and suddenly there's a pressure from governments, at the same time when the same governments get directions from the World Economic Forum to introduce CBDCs as soon as possible.

Honestly, I don't care if some politicians think there should be no privacy and mixers are operating unlawfully. We'll have to agree to disagree.

There's always going to be this argument; DEX is DEX. If any kind of regulation is imposed, it no longer becomes DEX.
What good is anonymity if it is monitored or regulated?
Even the government officials mostly used these untraceable means to Psiphon cash and once they begin to contest for positions, they bring up these their schemes as if they are up against it fully.

CBDC adoption isn't a sure guarantee against laundering or a solution to the war on terrorism. It just puts every one within safe boundaries that can be easily manipulated against them. After all, government workers aren't saints.
Why should i be open about my wealth, when it could be surely exploited, mostly if I want to contest a government position.

BTC Mixers are often accused of laundering most times because of firstly anonymity and untraceable nature of transactions. Also, because of the region and ease at which it is used to perpetuate political crimes.