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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: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:16PM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:16PM (#548032) Journal

    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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @10:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @10:53PM (#548149)

    So they claim they didn't know the very fact that is at the base of their business?

    Are you saying that they were PHBs and MBAs?

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 03 2017, @08:47AM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Thursday August 03 2017, @08:47AM (#548267) Homepage
    However, doesn't mixing taint every transaction that involves portions of the payment used for an illegal (say silk road drugs) transaction. Which makes that transaction illegal. Which taints all of the bitcoins used for that transaction. And so on, until basically the whole bitcoin pool is tainted, and everything purchased with bitcoins.

    Civil forfeiture can then go wild.

    (And whilst that would be terrible, it would also be hilarious.)
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