[campers]

While there's no doubt they are used for money laundering, they also serve an essential privacy purpose.

Imagine if every vendor you made a purchase from with your credit card also received a copy of your entire transaction history with that card. The mafia run business, the fetish porn shop, the megacorp, the government agency.

While it wouldn't be that easy to connect a wallets previous transactions to the real world sources, the more people use it, the more incentive there would be for databases/services to grow mapping wallets to people/companies. Just like the services now where you can provide an email address and get the persons full details.

And that transaction history is out there forever, to keep re-analysing as more wallet data is discovered.

[rspeer]

It's not that tumblers are just "used for" money laundering, it's that they are money laundering, definitionally.

All the terrible privacy implications of using Bitcoin that you've described are true. The conclusion "so therefore it's okay if I launder money" does not follow. You could instead not use Bitcoin.

[smallnamespace]

You're taking the different definitions of money laundering and switching between them as it suits you.

If by 'money laundering' you simply mean transacting in a way that is mostly anonymous, you can do this today just be using cash, finding someone else with cash, mixing your bills together, and none of that is either wrong or illegal.

If by money laundering you mean committing a criminal act and then hiding its financial traces, then that is only one possible use of tumblers, but there are other legitimate uses.

[rspeer]

It's kind of confusing that you consider switching bills around to be a normal part of transacting anonymously with cash. I mean, make change if you need to, but this is usually not motivated by anonymity.

It's sufficiently anonymous for most people to just spend the cash they have. You didn't get the cash from D. B. Cooper, right? So nobody's watching the serial numbers. You just spend it.

It's only Bitcoin where that isn't an option.

Edit to be clearer about what my point is: cash has a moderate amount of anonymity, with practical limits. If those practical limits are a problem for you, you probably are covering up a crime. Bitcoin, however, has no level of anonymity between "everyone can see everything you spent" and "covering up a crime".