Bitcoin Forum

Why is it that MtGox, which has to pay for employees, legal consulting, a physical office, and banking compliance, charges 1% or less for transactions, but Blockchain.info charges 1.5% for something that is automated (coin mixing)?

Because some folks will pay for it even though it doesn't add much value compared to Instawallet.
Wanting 0%-taint is stupid, if you want to mix coins you're after plausible deniability, not 0%-taint, I guess that's just marketing.

You have no idea how fast our logs fill :)
Even if we wanted to keep them we simply wouldn't have enough disk space (we don't have that much of it anyway because all our servers have SSD hard-drives)

The mixing space today is like the exchanger space a year or two ago: few alternatives and lack of competition.

My guess is that this state of affairs will correct itself after one or two high-profile cases of undesirable events facilitated via information leakage through address reuse and unmixed funds.

Because they can! They advertise a lot and are a very well used site.

The big guys always charge a lot, because they spend a lot to advertise and make sure when people use blockchain.info, that they end up using their service.

You should start a bitcoin business yourself.  Put in a buttload of hard work and make the business, THEN start a bitcoin mixing service of only 0.5%.

I'd use it!

o.0

Because we are one of the few services with a sufficiently large transaction volume, large hot wallet and the ability to calculate taint. We also take the risk of accepting zero conf transactions.

I am not adverse to lowering the fees. Those of you who feel a 1.5% fee is too high would you use the service at a 0.5% fee?

I'll happily pay 1,5% if I feel I need to use this service. The reason I've never used it is because I don't need to, not because I think the price is excessive.

+1

I think the fee is fair. It's a great example of the freemium business model.

I'll also chime in and say I think the 1.5% fee is fine. The speed at which you send unconfirmed funds, even for large amounts, is remarkable and as I know very well involves quite a lot of risk. Myself I'm happy to pay for that convenience and use the mixer (really, coin-swapper) all the time. If anything the main thing I want to see is more control, like the ability to set the tx fee for the mixer output, (outputs often take far too long to confirm due to their low priority) and the ability to chose the number of outputs that will be used.

I never used the mixer. But if it is as good as the other blockchain.info's services that I did use, 1.5% fee is fair and reasonable.

Lowering price will increase demand.

While I use Bitcoin completely legitly; I can think of several instances where I would have been glad to pay .1-.5% to sever the audit trail but where 1.5% was too expensive relative to the expected benefit so I did not.

Since the system is already built (sunk or fixed expenses) then what are the variable costs for mixing? It seems like there would be very little if anything. Consequently, you can price in a similar manner as digital downloads like ebooks, mp3s, etc. to maximize profit.

If I were you I would experiment with a variable mixing cost and then gather some analytics to determine what the elasticity of demand is. This would give you the data to price in order to maximize profit. Additionally, a variable mixing cost would help make it even more difficult to try and reverse analyze mixed transactions.

The problem is that 1.5% is so far removed from the actual cost. It is essentially monopoly rent. We need competition in mixing services, just like we need competition among exchanges.

It makes no sense to me that a Bitcoin exchange, which has huge fixed costs, can charge a smaller percentage per transaction than a coin mixing service (which is largely automated and only costs a trivial marginal amount above the base service of computing resources, and bandwidth).

Consider mixing a $500,000 USD balance. Does it make sense that this would cost $7,500? Who in their right mind would spend that much?

We need competition for mixing. The cost for mixing should tend towards zero. It should be some sort of decentralized service that every major vendor provides as a value-add.

Then why don't you start one if you think there is a lot to be made operating one?

The cost of creating or providing a good or service is irrelevant to the price consumers will pay based on their subjective value derived from the service. Piuk should be looking at how to maximize his profit whether that means charging 10% or .1% for the service.

Personally, i would use this service much more often if fee would be in range of 0.1-0.5%

Perhaps a tiered system. 1.5% = full mix, 0.5% = basic mix (possible taint).

People who really want mixing would pay the 1.5% fee, others who just want to make it far harder to track would use the latter.

Sell 3 albums at $15 or 5,000 singles at $.99. Which yields the most net profit?

It is more like 3 albums at 1.5% of $15 each or 5,000 singles at 0.5% of $0.99 each.

1.5% is fine for small tx's but when you want to send >BTC50 you really ask yourself is this worth it?

I think it should be free.

never used this service, if the fee were 0.1% or less I will probably use it for every transaction.

I agree and I think you should build it.

That's not what I'm saying at all, I'm saying that blockchain.info should lower its fee to zero.

Yes it is; you seem to be extremely generous with other people's stuff.

yup if it were 0.5% I'd use it regularly
at 1.5% I would only go for it if I really need to, which hasn't happened yet

Really? You are not forced to use it. Don't use it if the fee is too high. Calling it a rip off is silly.

If not free, then the price should be 1%, with an upper limit of $59 USD for the total fee. Note that I priced the cap in fiat and not Bitcoin. It makes no sense for the cost in purchasing power of coin mixing to rise with a rising Bitcoin price, when the actual cost is measured in fiat.

You can use the SR mixer/tumbler for free afaik. Just deposit and cashout later.

Bitcoinfog charges 1.5%. I think 1.5% is pretty standard (based on taking the mean of the two popular mixers  ;D).

I would like to see some lower fee competitors, but can they offer the security and ease of blockchain.info?

Also, perhaps piuk maybe interested in lowering fees to increase use. He ostensibly has incredibly low variable costs and fixed costs per server, hence a low-fee high-volume coin mixer may be a great economic boom to him  :)  Too bad A/B testing doesn't work when there will be a pitchfork mob forming over discussions of how to get a 1.5% vs 1.4% coin mixing fee  :P

Even at 0.5% (half of one percent) I can't justify spending $2,150 USD to mix 10,000 BTC.

TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!

Using either SR or Instawallet does not remove taint. (confirmed in both cases with manual experiments)

Cheers ...

I'd definitely use it for 0.5 % fee. I feel 1.5 is a bit excessive.

Even at 0.5% (half of one percent) I can't justify spending $2,150 USD to mix 10,000 BTC.

TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!

TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!

Poor you.

Are the main users of this service not legit and therefore are happy to pay to have their btc laundered??
And the operator has an excuse, due to their size, of having so many taint tracks to them from non legit folks???

The fee was lowered to 0.5% a few days ago which is 3-4x cheaper than most similar services.

This is great! Thanks a lot piuk!!!

Hi guys,

I did some experiments with blockchain.info's mixer:

0.5 BTC came out in about 5 minutes w/ zero confirmations as promised
25 BTC  hasn't come out 4 hours later yet.

I guess there is not enough demand/volume in there at least at this late hour of Sunday night Pacific

Cheers...

thank you.