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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 EvilSS on Thursday August 03 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)
*I am not going out on a limb and say it's a legal use, no matter how legit some of the users may be. But it's a use that wasn't intended to be money laundering in the strictest sense. Also not saying that the owners never intended it to be used for illicit purposes either, because let's face it, that's probably where 99.999999% of their business by volume was coming from and unless they are complete idiots they knew it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 04 2017, @01:38AM
Now I'm wondering just how specific the laws against money-laundering are - I could easily see them being worded such that the obfuscation itself was illegal, irrespective of the origin of the money stream being obfuscated.