You can't really expect theymos to break the law. This comes to mind:
Maybe Bitcoin will be banned in the US someday, and then I'll have to either shut down bitcointalk.org or find a way of moving it to some remaining territory of freedom in the world. That's the problem with centralized forums. I wish that more work was being done on creating decentralized, uncensorable, but also usable forums. I would love nothing more than to be able to shut down bitcointalk.org due to some decentralized solution making it obsolete. Find me a 501(c)(3) nonprofit working on this, and I'll donate to it.
I still do not see the presence of mixers on the forum as a violation of the law.
Kucoin founders were recently indicted for not having KYC implemented. Is this an alarm for theymos to start banning all no-KYC services from the forum?
As far as I know, Kucoin is much more important in the crypto ecosystem than the mixers that caused the ban decision.
But Kucoin is still operational legally. It wasn't seized, and certainly it is not a darknet website like SB became.
This is the reason why mixers were banned. They are not having just small legal problems, they were getting seized and that may be a problem for the forum.
Bitcointalk.org aims to allow about as much freedom as is reasonably possible. But this is not a darknet forum, and with mixers looking "grayer and grayer", it's no longer
reasonably possible to allow linking to mixers. Even though
"a cryptocurrency mixing service is not necessarily illegal," a clear pattern has emerged where mixers pop up, last for a little while, and then get taken down by law enforcement once they get too big. Allowing mixers to be posted on bitcointalk.org before they seemingly-inevitably get declared illegal and seized is not sustainable. Therefore, promoting mixers will no longer be allowed, similarly to how darknet sites are already disallowed.