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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the purpose of Bitcoin mixers. The use-case seems to be half-assed money laundering. You're concealing the source of money[1], without bothering to invent a plausible alternate source. It's at best like a petty criminal who "launders" his money by simply claiming to have found it.

[1]-Poorly at that -- do we really think the people who catch launderers of actual money will be stymied by the transaction log of your average tumbler? It makes way more sense to launder money by renting BTC mining hardware and electricity from someone who doesn't care where the money came from, taking a loss but effectively trading your "tainted" BTC for brand-new BTC.

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It's not money laundering, it's vanishing with the traces of to where went that amount of money someone could be tracking.

That kind of service is not needed if you're dealing with cash.

Money laundering, if you need that, is a different step that must be taken after the "mix".

That step is needed if you're dealing with paper assets like wire transfers and real estate. It is considered money laundering in those cases, and they catch people doing that with some regularity.

It's even worse than that. It's probable that in some cases both sides of the "mix" had connections to these illegal markets.

Vendors mixing coins with each other.

good mixers do that. They give you coins that are completely unrelated to yours

Completely unrelated, in that they've never passed through the mixer? Then, what does the mixer do with the coins you've sent to it?

completely unrelated as in if you follow the transaction graph they haven't crossed paths, so you'd need the mixer log to break the mixing.

It's difficult to know what they do with the coins, but they could be selling them on an exchange to move onto a different currency and then buy bitcoin again.

This sort of thing has been done with actual money, basically forever. It's exactly what forensic accountants are trained to untangle, in cases where far less information is available. It's not going to fool any serious player.

Nobody's bothered doing this yet on any kind of scale, but that is only because major players in the underground Bitcoin space have found other ways to get caught.

getting the information from a tightly regulated bank could be a different story to getting it from an anonymous service on Tor though. They probably don't even store it.

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