[hnthrow1010]

No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.

[JohnJamesRambo]

This is not the level of comment quality I would expect on HN. You can do better.

[hnthrow1010]

Sorry but I try to avoid dumping huge amounts of information on people in every comment, that often doesn't go down well either if you can imagine. If you want more I'll elaborate. There is no possible way you can deploy this service anywhere while effectively complying with AML laws. It isn't going to work. But it's also the only real effective way you can obscure the source of transactions on a blockchain that's forced to be public. There's no reason transactions need to be forced public in the first place, other than how blockchain designers insisted it was a fundamental design parameter, when you probably agree that it isn't and that some transactions should be private by default. The simple solution is to avoid all blockchains and cryptocurrency altogether. Yes, they are that bad. I wish it wasn't true and I could say something good about them, but I just can't after watching 13 years of bad things happen.

And no, things like monero and zcash aren't a working solution to this problem either, that's a whole different discussion though.

[salawat]

I mean, if you really think about it distributed public transaction ledgers were really primarily beneficial to those looking to actually understand more about where/how money flows. It's the classic problem of Networks. If there is enough information to ensure that something gets to one endpoint, and not others, that de facto becomes a tracking lever for surveillance and signal analysis. It's part of the package. There is no escaping it. As it giveth, so to does it take away.

Things like the Bank Secrecy Act are only there to guarantee a level of secrecy/protection from other customers. Law enforcement, government, and third party service providers are not counted there realistically. If you want financial privacy, you keep your own books. By that same token though, you don't get to act surprised when the authorities come a knocking with a warrant to crack open your books when they find out you made a poor decision of people to work/transact with.

[tomjen3]

Why is Monero not a solution either? As far as I know, it is not public which seems to be what you complain about, right?

Surely you accept that illegal trade happens through cash and even through banks, so you will agree that there is some level at which you cannot ban an entire system.