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Re:US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat by shajznnckfke on Monday August 03, 2020 @12:06AM (#24034128)
You’d only want to use a mixer where your transaction represents a small fraction of the total volume (otherwise it doesn’t provide much anonymity). An exit scam isn’t so appealing in that case. If a mixer charges a 1% fee, with an average delay of 1 hour, the ongoing fee earns more than a one-time exit scam of all transactions in flight after just four or five days. It takes time to establish a reputable mixer and scale up, so your wouldn’t ruin it just to get under a week of profit early. Maybe they’d choose to do the exit scam if a really anomalous huge sum showed up, which is so large they can’t mix it effectively anyway. I don’t know if $4M is a lot by those standards.
Re:US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat by walrus01 on Monday August 03, 2020 @02:00AM (#24034626)
Maybe I'm woefully out of touch on the scale of the BTC flowing through mixers on a daily and weekly basis, but if they can earn more than 4M USD in a year by just skimming off the 1%, that's a lot of BTC moving...
Re:US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat by bananaface on Monday August 03, 2020 @04:32AM (#24035334)
In that case, you split your initial sum and run through multiple sequential series in parallel. You produce more crackable sequences, but you still need to crack an entire sequence to trace the owner.