I read it slightly differently.

He said "I was convinced of a right to privacy" and "I was wrong". This is someone who has either seen (or perhaps been shown) the sort of thing that is enabled when you give criminals a way to exchange value anonymously. And found that he did not want to be the agent enabling that sort of thing.

If an officer came to you and said, "Here is a photo of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave. The payments were all in bitcoin and we would have caught the criminals involved if they had not used your service to hide their transactions." I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who would look at that situation and decide to turn off their service and forego any more profit to keep from being a part of that pipeline.

>If an officer came to you and said, "Here is a photo of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave. The payments were all in bitcoin and we would have caught the criminals involved if they had not used your service to hide their transactions."

They'd just use cash. The argument against anonymous transactions and tumblers is the same as the argument against cash. Besides, this kind of emotional blackmail is the reason people avoid talking to the police.

You can't send cash over the internet. That's what Bitcoin enables.

You just use WU. May be even more anonymous than bitcoins if you bribe the agents well enough.

> You just use WU. [Western Union]

While true, criminals dislike getting ripped off just as much as normal people and have a wider variety of remediation techniques at their disposal. Cash pipelines are really really hard to manage without losses and/or disclosing identifiable/traceable information.

Well a: he could work with LE if he felt this was some strong moral point, and b: LE saying that is definitely lying. There are other services, and there's now more solid ways (e.g. Monero) to hide cryptocurrency. So it's super unlikely it was just his service providing a totally unique thing and without bitmixer.io oh no criminals would just give up and return their sex slaves.

What about people writing secure messaging services? "This terrorist attack would have been prevented if it wasn't for your encryption!"

No one said law enforcement literally went to him and tried to convince him it was a bad idea. And if they did, he still made the decision himself, right? Unless we're subscribing to the theory that he was compelled to shut down.

I would personally refuse to work on a secure messaging service because the thought of making a product that will be used by awful people to do awful things would actually be offputting. If that's less of a concern to you than having secure communication, whatever, go nuts. Not everyone is a gung-ho privacy advocate though.

> You may use Dash or Zerocoin if you want to buy some weed. Not Bitcoin.

Sounds like when TrueCrypt shut down and they recommended Microsoft's BitLocker.

Yeah why not recommend Monero, another cryptonight coin, which has way more traction and is actually used on some "illegal" sites? And has hardforked a few times to continually improve privacy?

The story of truecrypt and Paul Le Roux is one of the, if not the, most fascinating stories in technology there has ever been.

https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

That's crazy. I imagine that's not the only crazy thing going on around us that most of us will never know about unless it's published in a magazine. And for every story that's uncovered, there's probably many more that will never be. Just imagine all the drug networks and such that must be operating in the United States, and to think that's in a developed country - what about all the lesser developed countries? There's crime everywhere that most of us will never see.

It's unfortunate that such crime exists, and it's also fascinating that we can operate as a civilization with such crime going on. It's also unfortunate that such criminals will most likely adopt cryptocurrencies. Criminals are innovative, but that doesn't mean all innovations come from criminals or are used for criminal activities. Just like criminals use cash; that doesn't mean all cash is used for crime, and if criminals use cryptocurrencies, that doesn't mean all cryptocurrency is used for crime.

I suppose that's a conundrum that crypto creators face: knowing that criminals will use your work to protect their criminal activities. For some people, something should be avoided if it allows for even one single instance of the smallest crime. Other people understand that if you want something good, you have to accept that some people will use it for evil. Like the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution; Free Speech and the right to bear arms can both be used for good and bad.

Thank you for sharing the link, that was a very interesting read.

That sounds more like he no longer believes that privacy is a good goal for legitimate cryptocurrencies and is stopping the service as an ideological stand against using bitcoin for anonymous transactions.