One of the largest and most popular mixer services in the world, BitMixer, unexpectedly announced the end of work at the end of last week. Such services help to "confuse traces", turning a simple transfer of funds from one account to another into a complicated scheme: instead of one transaction, the service breaks the desired payment into hundreds or thousands of small transfers that are sent to different accounts and pass through a lot of purses before they reach the goal.

In the official statement of BitMixer operators it is said that the resource ceases to work due to the fact that the work of mixers contradicts the very essence of Bitcoin, a transparent and non-anonymous by its nature system. Service operators write that earlier it seemed to them that users of bitcoin have the right to anonymity and privacy, but time has shown that this is not at all, and "blocking is an open book".

It is worth noting that the closure of BitMixer was announced a few days after the law enforcement authorities reported on the coordinated termination of the work of the two largest trading platforms in the darknet, AlphaBay and Hansa. In their farewell message, BitMixer administrators acknowledge that such services have always been popular among cybercriminals:.

"I believe that Bitcoin is waiting for a great future outside of the darknet transactions. If you want to buy herbs, use Dash or Zerocoin. Not Bitcoin. I hope our solution will help make the Bitcoin ecosystem cleaner and more transparent. I hope that our competitors will listen to our message and also close their services. Very soon such activities will be regarded as illegal in most countries ".

Let me remind you that last week law enforcement authorities arrested one of the creators of the BTC-e crypto exchange, Alexander Vinnik, and the exchange itself went off-line and does not work until now.

Shortly after Winnick's arrest, Google and Chainalysis researchers presented a large-scale study on the mechanisms of work of 34 families of extortion software. The cornerstone of the report was precisely the analysis of the financial flows of cybercriminals, which is an excellent illustration of the thesis about the transparency of bitcoin. For example, experts found that in 95% of cases the money received by extortionists ended their way in purses on the BTC-e exchange, after which the criminals cashed in money.