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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: 2) by dak664 on Thursday August 03 2017, @12:53PM (3 children)
I don't follow bitcoin, but it seems the recent split was caused by the (predictable a long time ago) increasing transaction costs and delays. So bitcoin is now for large transactions, and bitcash for smaller ones. Methinks masking a large bitcoin transaction by splitting and recombining now becomes too costly.
Even if wallets could be anonymous, the actual tokens never were and it would have been easy to block usage of stolen or laundered tokens. Apparently the ponzis don't want to do that (yet).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 03 2017, @03:23PM (2 children)
Did I miss something? My understanding is that unlike some "e-money" strategies, bitcoin doesn't involve any form of tokens at all. Rather it's simply a secure and transparent method of tracking accounts and the transactions between them.
Similarly, just because a bank account "contains" $287 doesn't mean that actual physical bills in that denomination are reserved to it (or even exist, thanks to fractional reserve banking), nor are they transferred when a check is written against it. Instead there's just a couple notations on a ledger - account A is reduced by amount X, while account B is increased by the same amount.
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Thursday August 03 2017, @11:36PM (1 child)
As you say, transparent. My $1000 wallet receives $100 from a looted wallet - the next $100 I spend shows the world that I am a thief. No matter how finely divided into noncents.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 04 2017, @01:31AM
Why wait for you to spend it? Every transaction is public, so the world knows you're a thief (or at least received funds from a thief) the moment you get the $100