Europol and the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation in last November confiscated from Cryptomixer, a business specialized in mixing and thus anonymizing cryptocurrency transactions, three servers, several mail accounts, twelve Terabyte of data, Bitcoin worth twenty-five-million Euro, and the domain cryptomixer.io, so that Cryptomixer doesn’t exist anymore. Cryptomixer was a Swiss service, which was online since 2016 and was known as one of the biggest Bitcoin-mixers. Services of this kind try to repair what many Bitcoin users perceive as a fundamental flaw in the design of Bitcoin. This flaw is that Bitcoin doesn’t allow any privacy.

How did Cryptomixer deserve to get destroyed? Cryptomixer had done nothing illegal! But in Germany, and meanwhile obviously also in Europe in general, you can be hold responsible for what other people do if you did something, which enabled them to do something illegal. This even if you enabled them involuntarily! To increase the anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions in this sense is treated as money laundering. Cryptomixer is accused of having obscured Bitcoin transactions with a total worth of 1.3 billion Euro and this enabled money laundering. So Cryptomixer got destroyed by Swiss and German authorities.

Rights? For example the right to some privacy? Governments don’t care anymore.

The exchange rate of Monero meanwhile spiked. Monero is a cryptocurrency designed for being inherently anonymous. The governments of many jurisdictions hence already work at outlawing Monero. Even developing software for this cryptocurrency and even when not exclusively for this cryptocurrency could be punished.