Why Bitcoin’s biggest mixer walked away from ‘huge profits’
The post Why Bitcoin’s biggest mixer walked away from ‘huge profits’ appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. A few years back at Bitcoin Amsterdam, I watched Core contributor Sjors Provoost make a point about the right to financial privacy in today’s digital world. “I go to the bathroom at the train station right now. If I pay with my debit card, these records are kept for at least a decade. So the bank can actually look up, 10 years from now, exactly at what time I went to the bathroom. I think that is ridiculous, and I think everybody would agree that’s ridiculous. “I think we should change the financial system to [stop doing] that.” The panel featuring Provoost was about how the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) threatens Bitcoin privacy. Which, to be fair, is something the intergovernmental agency has absolutely done over the past decade or so. FATF’s anti-money-laundering policies directly influence how worldwide regulators treat Bitcoin mixers and other privacy protocols built around more trustless implementations like CoinJoin. Surprise, they really don’t like them. It was on this day in 2017 that BitMixer, then considered the largest Bitcoin mixer by volume, bowed out altogether amid rolling raids on darknet marketplaces across the world. In the comments, the OP was adamant that they were not shutting down due to any interaction with authorities. BitMixer was the quintessential centralized mixing service. Users would enter some parameters onto a website and send bitcoin to an address, after which they would receive the same amount of coins back, minus a fee. The bitcoin received was made of entirely different UXTOs, which helped to break any blockchain analysis that might link them to the original sender. All standard for most Bitcoin mixers, including its predecessor Bitcoin Fog. Where BitMixer stood out was its reliability and…
The post Why Bitcoin’s biggest mixer walked away from ‘huge profits’ appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. A few years back at Bitcoin Amsterdam, I watched Core contributor Sjors Provoost make a point about the right to financial privacy in today’s digital world. “I go to the bathroom at the train station right now. If I pay with my debit card, these records are kept for at least a decade. So the bank can actually look up, 10 years from now, exactly at what time I went to the bathroom. I think that is ridiculous, and I think everybody would agree that’s ridiculous. “I think we should change the financial system to [stop doing] that.” The panel featuring Provoost was about how the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) threatens Bitcoin privacy. Which, to be fair, is something the intergovernmental agency has absolutely done over the past decade or so. FATF’s anti-money-laundering policies directly influence how worldwide regulators treat Bitcoin mixers and other privacy protocols built around more trustless implementations like CoinJoin. Surprise, they really don’t like them. It was on this day in 2017 that BitMixer, then considered the largest Bitcoin mixer by volume, bowed out altogether amid rolling raids on darknet marketplaces across the world. In the comments, the OP was adamant that they were not shutting down due to any interaction with authorities. BitMixer was the quintessential centralized mixing service. Users would enter some parameters onto a website and send bitcoin to an address, after which they would receive the same amount of coins back, minus a fee. The bitcoin received was made of entirely different UXTOs, which helped to break any blockchain analysis that might link them to the original sender. All standard for most Bitcoin mixers, including its predecessor Bitcoin Fog. Where BitMixer stood out was its reliability and…
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