Quote from: PrivacyG on December 04, 2023, 03:03:27 PM

Quote from: alani123 on December 04, 2023, 02:43:03 PM

Instead, an illusion of privacy was promoted to clearnet users (that's us here in bitcointalk), while in fact our "cleaner" funds were used to bail out real criminals and terrorists. Because to a mixer, a clean bitcoin, is worth more than market value, so they were willing to overpay for it in the form of advertising. Come to think of it, the recent bust of Sinbad served as a reminder that mixers are in fact very traceable.

This is a very interesting theory.

Do you mean Mixers are in your theory used to replace bad money of criminals with good money from the innocent?

As in there is a pool of criminal money and every Mixing Transaction is pretty much,
Innocent sends 0.5 Bitcoin from legitimate source to Mixer
Mixer sends back 0.5 Bitcoin from criminal source to Innocent

And that they advertised on Bitcoin Talk so they could get rid of more criminal money while bringing in more Innocents?

I never thought of this. If that is the case, ban Mixers. But then how difficult is it to get Bitcoin from Innocents? Bisq, Monero Atomic Swaps et cetera can all be ways of doing this. A criminal with BILLIONS can open up a seemingly legitimate Blockchain Analysis tool particularly to artificially 'clean' their own criminal Bitcoin by bypassing the filters. Or they could bribe already existing Blockchain Analysis companies to bypass the filters.

I do not think this is the case but interesting outlook.

Agreed. However, it might be a mistake to speculate if this is the case or not. We should be speculating on how high or how low is the possbility that this might be in our reality or not. If someone in the forum like @alani123 can think and speculate on something like this, it might also be very much possible that there are other people who have also thought about this before anyone of us in the forum.

I am not saying that this is presently the case, however, if much of these different mixers are owned by a moneylaundering ring, it might be possible.