8
A tumbler is used to hide/disguise/make it difficult to prove where bitcoins came from.
It might help to first understand that every bitcoin transaction, right back to the genesis (very first) block is available for public inspection in the block chain.
Note that the actual bitcoins are not trackable, only the amounts, addresses and the transactions - ...
7
Bitcoin transactions are traceable, public and are recorded permanently. Although, there are some ways to minimize that, by not reusing addresses and have multiple wallets for different purposes. But even that is not foolproof because there are analysis services that can group addresses through data crunching.
Now imagine you get coins from someone that got ...
7
It probably doesn't give you more security, and in fact if the mixer service's coin volumes are low, which they likely are, and dependent on whatever their turn around time may be, and dependent on how many coins you are asking them to mix, it is very possible for you to get back some of the same coins you sent to them. Unless they were verifiably in a ...
5
There are a number of reasons why this kind of blacklisting is problematic in practice, but take it with a grain of salt, because I'm the creator of Wasabi, so I am biased.
This Elliptic report identifies 0.65% of all Bitcoin transactions are mixing transactions. This means, if that kind of blacklisting would happen, they would have to blacklist most ...
4
Either of these solutions would work.
If you mix it first to a previously unused address or send it directly to the merchant via the service (ignoring the issue of timeouts on a merchant terminal if they have such a feature) the effect is the same.
The only thing to make sure is any change does not go back into an address which has not been via a coin ...
4
I would say connect to tor, create a blockchain.info account, send you bitcoin there, then send the bitcoin to https://shapeshift.io to another currency which you have a wallet setup, then back to a second blockchain account, then to wherever you want.
This is pretty much 100% untraceable, as it goes via anonymous wallet - anonymouswallet - converted to ...
4
It depends what you mean by "knows" and "proof".
You're right that an analyst will not be able to be prove with absolute certainty that you sent the coins to address 3, because it is possible, consistent with the blockchain evidence, that address 2 belongs to some third party.
But in the real world, people and organizations don't need absolute certainty to ...
4
No. Monero's ring signatures draw on Monero's complete TXO set to create a larger anonymity set.
Monero's method has the disadvantage that since it is unclear which TXO were actually spent, they can never be marked as spent and therefore spent TXO hardly ever leave the TXO set.
In Bitcoin mixers, you're actually dependent on other users also using the ...
3
No, you do need a mixer. Even if you were to generate a million random transactions with your wallet, 100% of the value in the unspent output from the mixing could be linked to the original wallet through simple breadth-first search.
Transactions are value-preserving (except for the coinbase), have one or more inputs, and have one or more outputs. So you ...
3
The tool for complete history of all bitcoin minted already exist and its called blockchain. You can see all history here (random transaction selected)
https://blockchain.info/tx/ff698f3e5321448d4d889fcd3c91f9e5f5767542d2f0fd7e4aa41a83abec3ab7
There is a term taint and it's meaning how two addresses are connected. It partially explained here What are ...
3
Well, "mixing" can be seen as different things. At it simplest, every transaction mixes up your coins a little, especially when you split or combine them. However, what makes a "mixing service" is somehow more specialised.
So, there are several differences with exchanges:
Mixing services usually have a static pile of coins, distributed over a big web of ...
3
It's unlikely that this would be a problem. Yes, coins that you send to a mixing service might end up in sketchy transactions. But they are, by definition, going through an intermediary. It's not that your coins are being sent to a drug dealer. Your coins are going to the mixing service. And then the mixing services are sending new completely transactions to ...
3
I recently came across an article that clearly articulates what a tumbler intends to accomplish. The analogy they gave was a collection plate at a church:
You may have seen collection bags that go around churches, where you put a bill in your closed fist and stick your hand in the bag, so no one knows how much you put in or took out. Imagine that we come ...
2
Their shared sending feature simply combines payments from multiple users making it very difficult to know which funding inputs (Bitcoin addresses) were used to pay which outputs (Addresses being paid).
Think of it like collecting money at the office to pay for a coffee run. Five people are buying coffee, each costing $3.
Bob puts in a $5, for a latte
...
2
The mixing service could use various means to obfuscate the mixing - for example:
It can make you send coins to some off-line address, then send you your coins from its own supply of bitcoins before introducing your coins into the circulation again. This way it would appear that the transaction took place before you send the coins to the mixing service, and ...
2
The idea behind Coinjoin or Sharedcoin is that funds can be pooled and mixed with several other Bitcoin users to fund new transactions that can't be easily traced back to you.
Here is a trivial example: imagine 3 users, that want the funds from 3 addresses the each control A (0.5 BTC), B (0.5 BTC) and C (1 BTC) to be sent to addresses X, Y and Z ...
2
Take a look at the Bitcoin wiki page on Transaction Fees.
First of all, a transaction fee is not always required. Miners decide whether to accept transactions without a fee and most miners follow the same decision protocol for that.
A transaction may be safely sent without fees if these conditions are met:
It is smaller than 10,000 bytes.
All ...
2
Even if you use a mixing service it is not guaranteed that the link between the two+ addresses will disappear. Actually, as far as I know it cannot be guaranteed by any mixing service, decentralized or not, including extra fees or not...
In theory, a good mixing scenario would use a purely decentralized service with a consistently huge amount of ...
2
The counter-parties are different.
In Ripple chain: BTC has an issuer, it can be Bitstamp, Snapswap, Gatehub or any other gateway. So if you send your BTC to Bitstamp, they will give you BTC (issued by Bitstamp), if you send BTC to GateHub, you will get BTC (issued by Gatehub).
If you have BTC (SnapSwap) and you want to withdraw BTC from your Bitstamp ...
2
This mixing service seems solid overall.
You could improve it in several ways:
Don't shapeshift your mixed BTC into Zcash. Shapeshift uses "transparent addresses" - which means the Zcash transaction is exactly as transparent as a regular bitcoin transaction. This is because Zcash requires upwards of 8GB of ram and approximately a minute of processing time ...
2
I'll do my best. SharedCoin is no longer around. It used to have a centralized server which collected inputs and outputs from users then merged them into one big coinjoin transaction. They allowed you to do multiple "rounds" where the outputs from one round would roll over into the next and be coinjoined again, and they charged a small fee. A few years ago ...
2
With option 2, most analyses will conclude that Alice owned A1, A2 and A3, because the transactions which spent them have no change address. Typically, you assume that the amount you have held in a TXO never exactly matches the amount you're making as a payment, so transactions usually have change outputs too.
I think you have a little misunderstanding ...
2
Using a mixer helps preserve your financial privacy. The question is: who are you protecting your privacy from?
Bitcoin transactions are public record, so anybody can view any historical transaction at their leisure. So when considering your privacy, there are a few different situations worth exploring, for example:
An unrelated third party is looking at ...
1
Take a look at Wasabi Wallet https://www.wasabiwallet.io/ it is a privacy focused wallet and comes with a built-in coinjoin feature.
1
As I see it, the techniques you are referring to are two possible but different ways of doing mixing. The first one, explained in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies book is referring to a kind of mixing technique like CoinJoin.
CoinJoin is a mixing technique in which several users create a transaction by joining their inputs. In order to maintain their ...
1
Yes. There's a project called Lighthouse that does something very similar. Bitcoin transactions either completely succeed or completely fail. We can use this by starting with a transaction that has the outputs we want.
--> TX -- 0.5 BTC --> Charlie
This is invalid, because it doesn't have any inputs.
We add Alice's input.
Alice --> 0.25 BTC --+
...
1
Bitcoin addresses are pseudonymous, in other words they aren't linked to anybody's ID without that user somehow linking the address to their ID (for example by withdrawing from an exchange service where they have provided their ID to the exchange).
There are various known tricks/tools to reveal IP addresses of transactions and to link various addresses to ...
1
Check out Bitmixer.io, it even has an API.
You could do that, but personally, I think it's a much better idea to generate a new wallet per customer transaction. That way, all your coins aren't grouped together, so the customers won't know how much you make. Just how much they paid. Personally, my app creates addresses through the Coinbase API, all of which ...
1
The coin shuffling feature is on the product roadmap but I don't know when it will make to the mainnet:
https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/issue/135/coin-shuffling-monetary-system
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