[ChuckMcM]

I read it slightly differently.

He said "I was convinced of a right to privacy" and "I was wrong". This is someone who has either seen (or perhaps been shown) the sort of thing that is enabled when you give criminals a way to exchange value anonymously. And found that he did not want to be the agent enabling that sort of thing.

If an officer came to you and said, "Here is a photo of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave. The payments were all in bitcoin and we would have caught the criminals involved if they had not used your service to hide their transactions." I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who would look at that situation and decide to turn off their service and forego any more profit to keep from being a part of that pipeline.

[literallycancer]

>If an officer came to you and said, "Here is a photo of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave. The payments were all in bitcoin and we would have caught the criminals involved if they had not used your service to hide their transactions."

They'd just use cash. The argument against anonymous transactions and tumblers is the same as the argument against cash. Besides, this kind of emotional blackmail is the reason people avoid talking to the police.

[pjc50]

You can't send cash over the internet. That's what Bitcoin enables.

[grenoire]

You just use WU. May be even more anonymous than bitcoins if you bribe the agents well enough.

[ChuckMcM]

> You just use WU. [Western Union]

While true, criminals dislike getting ripped off just as much as normal people and have a wider variety of remediation techniques at their disposal. Cash pipelines are really really hard to manage without losses and/or disclosing identifiable/traceable information.

[MichaelGG]

Well a: he could work with LE if he felt this was some strong moral point, and b: LE saying that is definitely lying. There are other services, and there's now more solid ways (e.g. Monero) to hide cryptocurrency. So it's super unlikely it was just his service providing a totally unique thing and without bitmixer.io oh no criminals would just give up and return their sex slaves.

What about people writing secure messaging services? "This terrorist attack would have been prevented if it wasn't for your encryption!"

[Ivoirians]

No one said law enforcement literally went to him and tried to convince him it was a bad idea. And if they did, he still made the decision himself, right? Unless we're subscribing to the theory that he was compelled to shut down.

I would personally refuse to work on a secure messaging service because the thought of making a product that will be used by awful people to do awful things would actually be offputting. If that's less of a concern to you than having secure communication, whatever, go nuts. Not everyone is a gung-ho privacy advocate though.