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BitMixer, the world's most popular Bitcoin mixing service has announced last weekend it was shutting down operations effective immediately.
Bitcoin mixing is a process of taking money from one account and breaking it into hundreds or thousands of smaller transactions to transfer it to another account.
For years, it was believed that Bitcoin mixing is a safe way to transfer funds anonymously from one account to another, mainly because there was no technology to track all the transactions and reveal the destination account.
In a statement, the BitMixer owners said they were shutting down the service after realizing that Bitcoin was a "transparent non-anonymous system by design."
[...] "Blockchain is a great open book. I believe that Bitcoin will have a great future without dark market transactions. You may use Dash or Zerocoin if you want to buy some weed. Not Bitcoin," the BitMixer team wrote.
"I hope our decision will help to make Bitcoin ecosystem more clean and transparent. I hope our competitors will hear our message and will close their services too. Very soon this kind of activity will be considered as illegal in most of countries," the team also wrote, issuing a warning for fellow Bitcoin mixers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday August 02 2017, @05:38PM (16 children)
Wait, I thought everyone knew the history of a bitcoin was traceable through the block-chain all the way back to inception. Did they build their entire business model on a misunderstanding or failure to RTFM.
Or was I mistaken?
But tracing those addresses is not impossible. http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf [ucsd.edu]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:16PM (2 children)
Moreover the whole Bitcoin mixing business only makes sense because Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous. So they claim they didn't know the very fact that is at the base of their business?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @10:53PM
Are you saying that they were PHBs and MBAs?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 03 2017, @08:47AM
Civil forfeiture can then go wild.
(And whilst that would be terrible, it would also be hilarious.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:17PM (10 children)
Sadly, the people who propel society to ever greater heights are usually the people who have no idea what they're doing.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:59PM (8 children)
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes the unreasonable people know what they're doing, and accomplish great things. Other times, the unreasonable people have no clue what they're doing, but are good at getting people to go along with their idiotic ideas; Trump is a good example of this one. Sometimes, the unreasonable people are actively malevolent and really good at lying, and also at getting people to follow them. This is generally how religions get started, with L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, and David Koresh being good examples.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:10PM (6 children)
Trump is the sand in the unreasonable machinery.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:20PM (5 children)
Its so easy to blame others for the faults and stupidity in your country. American PEOPLE elected your president, not aliens from a distant galaxy. Reap what ye have sown.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:48PM (4 children)
*I* didn't sow it, and neither did 53.9% of other voters.
Hey, at least give the Electoral College some credit for fucking things up, too.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @11:09PM
Bigot!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:07AM (2 children)
That's just BS. Trump was elected because of the way the electoral college system works, but the voters (all of them) are still at fault here, because they never demanded their elective representatives to change that horrible system. This isn't the first time this has happened, and the last time wasn't that long ago, it was in 2000 with Gore and Bush. Did the voters get outraged and demand the system finally be changed? Nope, they re-elected Bush instead.
The parent is right: the American PEOPLE elected Trump, and the rest of the government, and are entirely to blame for everything that's wrong.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:42AM
So what about the people who did?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 03 2017, @03:56PM
You seem to really have a problem with blaming the entire population bar none for things that are the fault of a subset of them.
Maybe cut back on the absolutes a bit.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 03 2017, @02:56AM
And the cool thing about a population of Billions is that the successes can replicate and endure while most of the failures just fade away.
Also stated as: "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes, and if you have enough blind squirrels...."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @07:15PM
Or rather people that researched the current model of how things are done (RTFM) and found flaws or opportunities not yet explored sufficiently. And thus knew enough what they were doing and had the insight to be unreasonable within a specific domain with those that didn't get it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 02 2017, @10:38PM (1 child)
Amazingly, no - for a period of time around 2013, I tried, really tried to convince any number of "internetz expurtz" that bitcoin was never, and will never be anonymous due to its design. Never did I hear anyone back me up, always did I hear: "nah, man, it's just too hard, the cops will never figure it out."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday August 03 2017, @12:35AM
I work in industrial automation, with industrial automation technicians and engineers. Even they fail to understand the implications of automation from a perspective of privacy.