[zionic]

>They are explicitly a product to facilitate money laundering

How is HN so consistently cryptophobic?

Imagine the reaction you’d get here suggesting say, E2EE is “explicitly a product for {crime}”. You’d be rightly mocked, but throw in crypto and it’s like 75% of the people here lose basic reasoning skills. I’d be less frustrated if it wasn’t so common.

[qeternity]

No, it’s like saying E2EE encryption is designed to secure private communications between two parties, which is what it’s designed to do.

Mixers are designed to facilitate money laundering. You can claim it’s for legitimate privacy, etc but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s money laundering.

[Infinitesimus]

I have no horse in this race and pardon my nitpicking but those two phrases are not equivalent.

For E2EE,you describe the base level capability: Secure message between two parties.

For Mixers, you describe an act that the capability of making money hard to trace enables: Money laundering. If you applied a similar argument to E2EE (as many have and will keep doing), encrypted communications are a way for people to do illegal things away from the eyes of the law. Trade illegal items, send banned/illegal/questionable content, etc.

From a pure capability standpoint, mixers, like E2EE, are a way to secure XYZ activity (Which happens to be money transfer) from prying eyes.

[qeternity]

TC was designed to obscure the source of funds. Obscuring the source of funds is money laundering.

You're drawing a distinction between illicit and privacy-seeking transaction and I'm saying the act of obscuring the source is all that matters.

[zionic]

Money laundering means concealing dirty cash, clean money doesn’t need to be laundered by definition.

A mixer concealing the public address of clean money is not nefarious in any way and should be perfectly legal.

[chrischattin]

Cash is a private form of transaction. You aren't inherently money laundering when you use cash.