Only two years ago, it seemed to me that most of the “we need KYC because of money laundering” propaganda was being parroted by the types who pad their activity counts with mindless drivel in megathreads.  Now, it seems to be all over the forum—and elsewhere in places where one may expect an understanding of privacy issues.

For the most ironic of countless petty examples that I have recently seen all over the Internet, observe how a a technical discussion on tor.stackexchange was cut short with extreme rudeness (archived):


I was shocked to see that from someone who evidently has deep technical knowledge about onions.  Turning the sarcasm up past (9/)11, I must remark, it seems the attitude is:  “Here, I thought you must be building some nice kidporn site or drug market.  Now that I know you are building a Bitcoin ‘mixer’, you are beneath contempt!”  Does an apparent expert in Tor onions not realize that all tools can be abused, but good people need them for good purposes?

I certainly do not want to reflect badly on Tor here, based on the rude and thoughtless comment by some arbitrary Stack Exchange user.  The Tor Project itself is proud that “Tor secures cryptocurrency networks!”  And the Tor Blog recently published as a guest opinion the single best short essay on financial privacy that I have recently read.  Print that one out, and hang it on your wall!  As I stated in OP here, I had long ago reached its same conclusion that Lightning Network is the future of financial privacy:

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Thanks for making this post much shorter!  I can only add that if I were Chipmixer, I would not get such an audit.  I would not want to risk granting the auditor (perforce an outsider) high-level access to my systems for no useful purpose; and I would not want to give my customers a false sense of security by “proving” the impossible.  I respect Chipmixer more because they don’t seem to be the types to claim that they can prove such a thing.

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Boldface added on some particularly important points that I fully agree with:



I should reiterate a theme of my OP:  I am walking a fine line in so far as I don’t want to FUD Chipmixer, but I need to examine this issue honestly.

It is a service that I want to like.  It is the only centralized, trusted mixer that I want to like.  Their signature ads specifically speak to privacy.  Their FAQ quotes Dr. Adam Back to answer the question, “Fungibility?  Why would I care?”  Oh yes, I want to like them!

They may well be real privacy advocates running an excellent, trustworthy service.  If so, they are also providing an ancillary benefit to society:  Their ads promote the idea of privacy at a time when society is moving in the opposite direction.  This is why I was outraged to see them and their advertisers smeared as “evil”.

I hope that’s what they are...


If Crypto AG could sell NSA-backdoored security products for governments and militaries for five decades, then I would not make such inferences.  Though of course that was the NSA, not a garden-variety police sting; and if Chipmixer is a honeypot, they certainly provide one of the best, most competently-run honeypots on the Internet today!

I further observe that Chipmixer’s overt attitude is not of the kind used to attract the criminal element; there is a sort of “darknet” cant seen on some sites, thinly-veiled hints that we will help you get away with it, which is completely absent from Chipmixer.  They “smell” clean.  They speak the language that speaks to you and me; and they pour what must be a fantastic advertising budget into the Bitcoin Forum, which is a good place to attract non-criminals.

This suggests that if they are a honeypot, they are probably an intel operation targeting smart people, not a police sting targeting the kinds of people for whom “opsec” means getting a post office box for receiving bulk quantities of felonious contraband from anonymous persons you met on the darknets.^*

Or else, they are hardcore privacy advocates who know that most people will use a centralized mixer, so they should provide a good one.  I said, I want to like them...

(* Not that all Internet drug dealers are so stupid, but many of them are!  The example hereby given is based on a real-life case that I read about a few years ago:  Somebody decided to get rich dealing drugs on DNM, and therefore bought drugs wholesale by the kilo from DNM.  Shipped to his post office box—where he picked them up personally—thus where the police picked him up in a controlled delivery.  This leads me to wonder, why do we need mass surveillance?  The cops have their hands full with dopes who are practically begging to be caught.)

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To be clear, there are two separate trust issues:  Trusting the mixer to not steal your coins, and trusting the mixer to not violate your privacy while pretending to protect it.  I have been discussing only the latter.  The former is an important issue; but if it were the only issue, I would be comfortable saying that I trust Chipmixer based on their established reputation.

Note that there have been major scams with mixers, including selective scamming and exit scams.  That never deterred the use of mixers generally; and it did not:


That effort started long ago, with practical implementations you can use today—plus too much related research to sum up in a few handy links.  Bitcoin privacy is a big topic.  And in the future, as I said, I think that this whole discussion will be made obsolete.

What a mixer site most provides is convenience and accessibility.  You send them coins; you get back other coins; and you hope that they did not retain any data connecting these coins to those coins.  It is simple for the user, though a well-run mixing site will have much complexity behind the scenes.  Chipmixer does a good job of that:  The site is a pleasure to use, and easy enough for anybody.