Anonymity with Bitcoin: Mixing service Bitmixer.io set

The service Bitmixer.io, which obscures money flows at Bitcoin, stops the service - and warns its competitors that their activities could soon be illegal everywhere.

The popular crypto money service Bitmixer.io, with which Bitcoin money flows are disguised, is set. In a forensic entry at Bitcointalk.org , the unknown maker explained that he wanted to discontinue the activities despite great profits. It was clear to him that Bitcoin had been designed from the outset as a transparent, non-anonymous system. Without transactions through dark marketplaces, the crypto money could have a great future. "You can use Dash or Zerocoin if you want to buy grass, not Bitcoin," it says in the entry.

Bitmixer is also directed to the competitors: "I hope our competitors will hear our message and close their services soon. In the near future, such activities will be considered illegal in most countries." In the discussion thread, the announcement caused astonishment, regrets and above all Also plenty of speculation about the real motives behind the end of Bitmixer.

Arrest in Greece
Some assume that the makers of the service could have got cold feet after the recent end of the largest Darknet marketplace Alpha Bay , that they could now also be on the collar. Users and salespeople at Alpha Bay should have been regular customers for mixing services. Other foresters see the connection to a Wednesday arrest near the Greek city of Thessaloniki.

Both the Reuters and the Associated Press report that in Greece a man was arrested, which the US authorities searched with arrest warrant for money laundering. He is said to have washed around $ 4 billion through bitcoin transactions since 2011. According to the Greek police, the 38-year-old Russian head of a criminal organization, which has operated a world-wide cybercrime website. The name of the site was not mentioned, according to the BBC , Greece would soon negotiate an extradition to the USA. Whether there is actually a connection with the end of Bitcoinmixer.io, can not be said at the hour yet.

At the moment there is a strong speculation that there may be connections with Btc-e, an opaque bitcoin exchange in Russia, which has been unattainable since yesterday. The last entry on Twitter speaks of maintenance work. Reuters reports citing sources that the arrest is linked to the exchange.

Pseudonym instead of anonymous
The bitcoin is different than often does not claim an anonymous payment system. All payments, cash flows and credit balances are publicly available in the blockchain. Users are only protected by pseudonymous bitcoin addresses, from which one can generate as many as desired. If the identity is known behind an address, it can be used as a point of reference for further analyzes or even criminal investigations along a chain of payments. Meanwhile, there are also some companies and research projects such as Project Titanium , which are co-financed by the EU , for example, which devote themselves to methods of getting bitcin users.

With mixing services, this privacy gap can at least compensate for something. Simply put, the coins of different depositors are re-paid out. So you pay the service a sum and one or several freshly generated addresses as a disbursement target. The Bit Coin value is then returned to these addresses, usually with a certain time delay and minus the fees. And it feeds out of the pool of coins, the other to the mixing into the service have paid. The coins paid by a self go to other users. Thus, the chain of transactions that can be traced in the blockchain is interrupted