I don't think the forum should allow mixers until there is some form of policy on how these mixers work. We need decentralized solutions, not centralized ones, if the forum wants to succeed with mixers and if users are to be safe. Bitcoin has evolved a lot since the ban, creating decentralized mixers can work, so I would hope that the community rally together to build a decentralized framework in comparison to relying on anonymous individuals who abuse the forum and its people.
If we're waiting for the policy,
it will high likely illegal because most people see mixer is bad instead of good. The government might make it legal, but the mixer will act like a honeypot because they're working with the government.
It's not accurate to describe mixers as illegal or to presume that they engage in fraud.
Surely there was a problem for the forum when several mixers ended up getting accused of being illegal and/or committing fraud, so in that sense, there could have had been possibilities that the forum could have had been charged with being complicit and/or facilitating fraud and/or illegal activities... and so it seems that several mixers are on the hot seat, then more and more unwanted attention could end up being directed towards the forum, whether information requests (subpoenas) from the government, other kind of governmental inquiries and/or legal actions against the forum.
As theymos had already mentioned, I would imagine that if it is seeming that there are way lessenings in the hostilities towards mixers, then there could be some ways that some aspect of mixer advertising could come back to the forum, and yeah of course, theymos listed some specific ways that he would consider the hostilities to be going down, and a lot of that did not seem too likely.. and so my point is that merely because hostilities have been high and that there have been criminal accusations towards several mixers, that does not make mixers illegal or even able to be challenged as being governmental overreach - even though surely the forum does not want to get unnecessarily sucked into such a legal battle.....and not that I even proclaim to know much if any details beyond just my wanting to opine on the idea that mixers are illegal or fraudulent in themselves, which I would suggest is not necessarily true.
There are also plenty of forum members who would proclaim that we have rights to privacy and security, and surely mixers could be one of the ways to facilitate privacy and/or security, even though there surely might be some devil in the details regarding how a mixer might be defined or how it might be operated and even the extent to which some government agencies might have had been unnecessarily impinging on rights that we have to both privacy and security. The devil is in some of the details, too, of course.
The decentralized solutions to increase privacy in Bitcoin is called CoinJoin and the forum still allow that, although it's not really effective to hide your trace compared to mixer.
Fair point.