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A comment on Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down. Parent comment

Re:Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down by belorn on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @05:01AM (#14846268)
At least it doesn't have as bad ratio of criminal vs legal use as email services. A email address normally receive several scams, spam, and hacking attempts for each legit email, and its only thanks to client side filters that the illegitimate use case of email don't overwhelm the legitimate.

Would you say that the industry that use bitcoin mixers is bigger and involve more illicit money than the spam/scam/malware industry that use email?

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Re:Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down by Anderkent on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @07:00AM (#14846737)
Because for email the benefit for legitimate user is greater than the benefit for the spammer/scammer/malware emails. Whereas for bitcoin mixers the benefit to legitimate users is smaller than the benefit to the thief/scammer.
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Re:Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down by belorn on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @08:01AM (#14847039)
I see this kind of argument/counter argument popping up from such different topics such as cashless society, tor, BitTorrent, cryptography bans and so on.

To have a honest discussion, how would we measure the benefits and drawbacks of a bitcoin mixers? One way to measure the drawbacks is to look at how much money is involved in the by criminals, but I suspect that the collective of criminals that use email to conduct crime is bigger and involve much more money than those that use bitcoin mixers, so it seems we need to also measure the benefits. How would we do that? Redirecting the question to researchers and have them conduct anonymous surveys of legitimate users of such service?

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