I read all of the comments. Some people didn't like the change in policy at all, of course, but continuing with the status quo isn't going to happen. Some people found the policy too vague/subjective. Some loopholes were identified. Some people found the original policy too constraining. Taking these comments into account, I adjusted the policy to this:
DRAFT - NOT CURRENT POLICY
Starting Jan 1, 2024:
- Forum accounts that are obviously run by mixers are not allowed. *
- Mixer announcement threads are not allowed. **
- Promoting mixers in signatures, avatars, and profile-bios are not allowed.
- It's not allowed for mixers to do giveaways, sponsorships, bounties, paid posts, or paid ads in posts. If a thread is for paying people to do something for a mixer, then that's also not allowed. **
- Mixer URLs will be automatically wordfiltered out, but you can still discuss mixers otherwise.
* Existing accounts will be banned from posting, but will be allowed to continue sending/receiving PMs for at least a few months so they can settle any business.
** Existing threads will be locked and archived.
This would
replace what's currently written in the OP, and my previous clarifications in this thread would become obsolete.
What do people think about this version of the policy? Does anyone think that it's worse than the original version, and if so, why? Are there any possible improvements (which wouldn't totally undermine the whole thing)?
Will you include the feedback system for filtering words?
Probably not.
I imagine the Dutch Local Authorities would not be too happy
My goal is not to act in the best interests of the state. If that was my aim, I'd probably continue to allow mixers. My goal is to put in place as few restrictions as possible while keeping risks (for bitcointalk.org and its users) at reasonable levels. Centralized mixers have qualities which make them especially risky in ways which other things do not.
Because it is possible to send Alice->Bob->Charlie as two on-chain transactions, and have a service, that will batch it, and put Alice->Charlie into the final block. Is it called mixing or not?
If the middleman can steal coins, it might be a mixer. But those sorts of things usually use cryptographic techniques to prevent the third-party from actually having custody of the coins at any point.
2. In case of Lightning Network, it is possible to broadcast the old state of the channel, so yes, "it is possible for the mixer to steal property
passing through it". Even though it may be hard, it is still possible, because you have no guarantee, that the attacker is not a mining pool.
My mixer definition says to assume that
zero miners are evil. Lightning is not a mixer under my definition.
The goal of my definition is to include the mixers that we're all familiar with, and to ideally also cover all ways of obfuscating these types of mixers, without any false-positives. If things very unlike mixers are covered by my definition, then this may be a flaw in my definition. But in reading all of the comments here, I've so far not been convinced that my definition is flawed in either classifying too many or too few things as mixers.