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Internet's Largest Bitcoin Mixer Shuts Down Realizing Bitcoin is Not Anonymous

posted by martyb on Wednesday August 02 2017, @05:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the shake-it-up-baby dept.

Fnord666 writes:

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.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/internets-largest-bitcoin-mixer-shuts-down-realizing-bitcoin-is-not-anonymous/

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:11PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:11PM (#548095) Journal

    if bitcoins are NOT illegal, then how can a "remixing" become illegal?

    If dollars are not illegal, then how can laundering them through your hotel properties and real estate ventures become illegal?

    The answer is that dollars may be legal, but how they came into your hands, from, say, Russian hands, could be a problem.

    Bitcoin laundering could be illegal if the TLAs can identify which bitcoin wallets go with certain individual persons smoking things [postimg.org] not currently in favor with the present administration.

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  • (Score: 1) by nnet on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:25PM (1 child)

    by nnet (5716) on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:25PM (#548100)

    ...certain individual persons hiring killers....

    FTFY.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @01:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @01:18PM (#548331)

      for hire: knowledge of airiel navigation. can fly a plane and know's where the bomb-bay doors are. can also remotely fly a drone ...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @01:11PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @01:11PM (#548325)

    ok.
    but a certain money transaction is NOT per se laundering.
    i suppose it only gets labeled as "laundering" after it has been determined that the money was in the first place
    obtained thru illegal means ... one comes before the other?
    thus, just using a "mixing service" cannot automatically be considered "laundering"; it has first to be determined(*)
    that the money was obtained illegally and the subsequent action of trying to "hide it away" gets the label "laundering"?
    furthermore, if the "mixing service" is in no way connected to the illegal operation, then they cannot be held responsible for the
    action from the other party? as a bank cannot be held responsible if a thief deposits money into one of the accounts?

    (*)throwing out the baby with the bath water in case of bitcoins, because bitcoins are harder to pin to a real-life entity and
    thus just saying everything with "bitcoin" and "mixing" is automatically "laundering".

    • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:00PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:00PM (#548446)
      Reality disagrees with your legal assessment of the situation. If the mixing service is being used to launder coins, and the government can prove that a reasonable person should know this, the owners are going to end up on the hook for facilitation. Arguments like yours rarely ever work in real life courts.