Bitcoin Forum

I used to be the guy that trashed bitcoin but i decided to do alot of research and finally bought in at around 15.5K; needless to say i am happy with my overall return thus far.

Question on anonymity.  I bought my Bitcoin from Coinbase (like i said newbie), anyway, I learned what a wallet is and decided to transfer my bitcoin.  I also learned i can be tracked via my bitcoin address because of my initial purchase from Coinbase (KYC).

Can i clean my bitcoin by sending it to an exchange like Houbi, then sell and repurchase, then send it to a brand new wallet?

Or convert to Ethereum wait a few days and then reconvert to bitcoin?

Am i overthinking this?   Anybody wanna help a brother out.  Thanks.

Welcome! Glad you've bought early.

While you can send your Bitcoins across various exchanges, it doesn't guarantee that the intermediary exchange will not keep logs and it's thus not beneficial to the privacy.

You can use Wasabi wallet which can incorporate CoinJoin to obfuscate the path of the coins. Alternatively, you can look into using mixers like the one in my signature to get coins that are unlinked. Altcoins like Monero are designed for privacy but it'll mean that you would need to go through another exchange.

In addition to what has been said above, let me Welcome you to the forum as this is the right place to be to have all the knowledge you may need in your journey as a bitcoiner,
and also congratulations for making the right decision to buy btc at 15k, now you can relax and smile at your wallet.
And sorry I can't help with the btc mixing stuff since am not knowledgeable in that aspect.

...

Ponce75

Welcome.  bitcointalk.org has taught me a LOT over the years.  Take your time, read, learn and have fun.

Don't do anything drastic or at large scale until you learn more about the many facets of the Bitcoin Ecosystem.  Be specially careful at first, don't ruin more than one day making a big mistake (I've been there).

Anonymity is a big topic:

-- OPSEC (military acronym: Operational Security)

-- TOR and VPNs (TOR is free, a good VPN not too expensive)

-- BTC mixing and coinjoin  <== these two topics are discussed at some length at various places here at the Forum.

In addition to what others have said above, selling and repurchasing won't buy you much, if anything.  Merely depositing it, waiting and then withdrawing a different amount first, and then the balance later would probably do as much.  You should make sure you are complying with the laws of your jurisdiction whatever you do though.  Converting to ether or something else works too, but if you convert 1.23456789 bitcoins to ether and then the exact same back a few days later, someone might notice.

Much also depends on your goals and timeframe. 

- If you intend to hold it for some long time period, you can just leave it where it is.  Once taproot is active, it will create some additional privacy improvements that you will be able to use to protect your privacy.
- If you intend to gamble with it now and IF online gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, then you should consider different options.

So, is your goal to hold or something else?

Thanks.  I am excited to be part of the cryptoverse.  I have brought along a few converts from my family into Bitcoin as well.  I intend on HODLing but do not feel comfortable leaving it on the exchanges, especially non KYC exchanges which seem to be useful but shady as all heck.   It sounds like sending it to a non-KYC and then sending it back to a new wallet in smaller increments may be a viable option (according to some responses). 

I will also research some mixers (already looking at Wasabi Wallet). 

When it comes to anonymity, then as you mentioned on buying coins from coinbase but in the time that you had sent out those coins in other wallet then it would already be enough
when you are really that mattering on anonymity issues. Platform wont know if that wallet on where the coins sent from is actually owned by you or into other person since
transferring out bitcoin from a custodial wallet wont really be that keen to follow if that one is a payment to other person or would just simply a single transaction to transfer to other wallet.
If you are really that serious on cleaning your trace then you can actually follow on what you had mentioned here.

Yes you can do that if it's not that big amount you can use binance without the need to verify your account for a limit of 2BTC daily if I'm  not mistaken ,you just need to update your account with Google authenticator . Mixer only use if you want to clean your Bitcoin since you legally bought it from exchange I don't think you still need to do that . You only want is to hide your main address from exchange that you bought your BTC  No kyc exchange is enough for that.

If you are going to use centralize exchange for such purpose, you have messed up. Binance will all the time keep the LOG of your history. So, even though Binance won't know the man behind the tx, Binance will certainly know the BTC origin (where you sent from) and the destination (where you are withdrawing) & thus, they can trace you. On the other hand, a mixer doesn't keep such log if they are good one like CM.

This is not correct. Coinbase monitor all withdrawals from their exchange and employ advanced blockchain analysis technology to track these coins and the people who bought them. If OP bought from Coinbase and wants privacy, then he absolutely must take action here.

This is also not correct. All exchanges, be they KYC or non-KYC, keep logs of deposits, trades, withdrawals, etc., and can be forced at any time to hand that over to governments, law enforcement, three letter agencies, or anyone else who comes knocking or offers to pay. Using exchanges to "mix" coins is probably making your privacy worse, not better. Using real mixers is also for anyone who wants privacy - it has nothing to do with whether the coins were obtained legally or not.

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The best advice given in this thread is from ranochigo. If you want to break the link between your coins and your real identity, then you need to use a service which is designed for doing just that, such as ChipMixer to mix your coins, or Wasabi Wallet to CoinJoin them.

Privacy, anonymity and Bitcoin are quite sensible subjects to say the least. You cannot achieve a high level of privacy unless you become paranoid. You have potential backdoors and flaws everywhere, so what I like to do is I consider everything I do as a potential danger for my privacy.

Example: you want to transfer funds from your Electrum wallet. The easiest way to do it is just go to the Send tab and use the simple UI to send a tx. However, the convenient way of using Electrum to send txs may harm your privacy because you might end up using together anonymized with non-anonymized coins. The solution is.. coin control (https://en.bitcoin.it/Privacy#Coin_control).

If you want to break the chain of coins linked to your identity, you could consider:
 1. Using Bisq and/or HodlHodl as an exchange for your future transactions
 2. Using a reputable mixer such as ChipMixer
 3. Using Wasabi's CoinJoin to join coins together anonymously (remember: you need a minimum of ~0.1 BTC to do that, the fees may be higher than you wish and you will get a change you should take care of (https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/using-wasabi/ChangeCoins.html).
 4. If you're not in a hurry, you could even use JoinMarket's Yield Generator (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/JoinMarket#Yield_generator) to make (very small amounts of) Bitcoin while continuously anonymizing your coins.

Jumping from exchange to exchange only probably makes an authority question your txs even more than they would normally do so. Imagine having 2 suspects out of which one of them exchanges normally and withdraws to their personal wallet while the other just keeps jumping from deposit to deposit addresses.

The cheapest way to anonymize your coins is currently ChipMixer or JoinMarket. Out of these two, the most convenient is ChipMixer. Remember: if you mix/join coins, be careful not to ever use them together with non-mixed/non-joined addresses again!

Awesome breakdown thanks.  Currently using Wasabi Wallet (showing registration 30 mins remaining)  I will provide an update for any other newbies who might be interested on how it turned out.

Even though this should be in Beginners & Help rather than being here. But coming back to the point I think it's better that you use a mixer to clean the slate. I have seen some people have mentioned XMR. Definitely, Monero is the safest among the rest of the cryptos and most anonymous. Talking about Mixers and as you are new to the forum I would give a caveat from my side, I have recently seen agencies especially in the US don't have a very positive attitude towards these mixers. I have read a lot of news where the Mixers owners were actually arrested for operating these mixers but no such news is heard about the users. While on an exchange I think it's safe but that seriously depends a lot on exchange to exchange. It's not that difficult to trace out your Deposit & Withdrawal History once they have your exchange account.

This is something that's unfortunately becoming more and more common, but if you start using mixers and breaking the chain then I honestly don't think it makes sense, after breaking it, to send the coins again through mixers. You either go anonymous or you don't.

It might be "safe" (depends what you mean by that), but it's not privacy-enhancing. In fact, it is most often the opposite. Once your IP is recorded with a withdrawal request, they know it's also you who deposited. Sending money from exchange to exchange is like moving money from bank to bank hoping the government will not find you.

Well, if for some reason someone really wanted to track you even if you used another wallet with the initial KYC you had made is still possible that you can be trace. But it does need to have a special access in regards with data privacy in which coinbase was holding it in your case. No ome will know that you are the one holding that bitcoin with coinbase provided unless they will going to share it to someone wanted to gey track on your btc holdings. In my case, probably my wife starting to trace my btc holdings because she wanted me not to hide anything from her. Fortunately she haf a hard time learning about bitcoin so I am safe that she will not know I had small savings in btc.

Since you are a beginner, learn a lot and experiment in small quantities as the same rules that apply to 1 Bitcoin will apply to .1 Bitcoin if you understand how it works?
I am learning from watching videos and experimenting, so follow some of these channels:

 - https://www.youtube.com/user/aantonop
 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQQ_fGcMDxlKre3SEqEWrLA
and you can learn from reading books.

Privacy requires that a person knows what to do, just because you used wasabi does not mean that you are safe unless you know how to protect yourself, for example, it is necessary to run fullnode wallet, use VPN, and so on.

How much privacy do you want to learn? What is the reason to hide your identity?

For every coins or exchanges you switch to you can still be tracked, even if you change from Bitcoin to BCH for example you have leave a footprint in the ground to follow, to stay anonymous you need bitcoin mixer, I haven't used such before but I heard this is the way to truly stay anonymous with bitcoin

Not every coins but most of the coins can be tracked which also includes bitcoin when we buy them from any centralized services.Bitcoin mixers are great to leave to leave the track of our bitcoin traces but still it is not 100% like coinjoin method.Since the user already mentioned that he is using Wasabi wallet then everything is good so far.

There are many anonymous cryptocurrencies, examples are monero and dash. These coins can not be tracked because it is not possible to track the coins using blockchian. Making use of coinjoin or mixer are perfect but converting bitcoin to such anonymous coins like monero then back to bitcoin is also good which will make the bitcoin not to be traced to the previous transactions.

Dash is not anonymous by any stretch of the imagination.

Monero is a good intermediary coin, but converting from Bitcoin to Monero and straight back again achieves very little. If you use the same exchange or swap service to do that, then it is entirely obvious to them what you have done, and they will keep logs of these transactions. If you want something approaching actual anonymity using this method, then you need to swap Bitcoin for Monero, move the Monero in multiple transactions of different amounts with intermediary hops (as many as possible over as long as possible) to a new wallet, and then swap it back for Bitcoin again in multiple transactions of different amounts, and do all of that over Tor.

While this is a very good method, it is also time consuming and complicated, and so most people will use a mixer or coinjoin instead.

Yes Mixers are a pretty safe option to break the chain but what I am trying to explain is that maybe authorities these days are trying to decode this mixing process too. I have seen in a few cases a couple of mixers were decoded.
It's not that easy. Governments aren't just two common people or companies. If an exchange is situated in some other country and another country wants to request some information it has to go through a pretty lengthy process and there has to be a bilateral treaties between the countries. Moreover, Most of the exchanges are located in These tax heavens which are not willing to share information about their companies too quickly. All this happens considering the amount of fraud involved. They aren't going to go through this process for a few hundred thousand dollars because all this takes some cost.

Oh, they surely are, no doubt! Authorities are on a mission to link back transactions together through blockchain analysis + external information, and mixers should be on their blacklist.

Well, the main target isn't a specific customer of the exchange. It's usually an attempt to find out multiple law-breakers by requesting information about a specific exchange's customers. One exchange doing that makes everything really bad for your privacy.

They now have the IP you've used the website through and the address your BTC came from. And now, if you jump from exchange to exchange starting with an amount of 0.15 BTC, you're going to keep jumping the approximately same amount of BTC (minus fees).

So in the end, what you're really doing is.. you're making it easier for authorities to identify not only who the owner of your address is, but also other accounts you have on other exchanges!

Not the first time I've linked to this post: Breaking Mixing Services (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5117328)

The thesis included in the post is a great read, not just from the breaking mixers point of view, but also as a general education about how most mixing services work. The TL;DR is that every mixer except ChipMixer can be broken to various degrees.

They very well might. And they can quite easily prevent an exchange from operating in your country unless they cough up the information, which will be more than enough for most exchanges to roll over and hand over all your details. Even if this never happens, the fact remains that it could happen at any time. There is no good reason to use a log keeping exchange to inadequately mix coins when you can do so more privately and cheaper by using a good mixer.

It's difficult to clean anything once you went through KYC on coinbase. What happened is your bank account was forever associated with cryptocurrency.

Your bank, coinbase and any government agency will now know your name, address, bank account, the amount of coins you were able to buy and if you send them to another exchange they will know where those coins ended and can ask that exchange to give them the account details of the person who received them.

You can send coins to a mixer but your name will still be listed as a buyer of a certain number of bitcoins. If you want to erase as much as you can you should sell coins on coinbase, withdraw money to your bank account and ask them to close the account. Then start over somewhere else where KYC is not required.

If I were you I'd try to buy bitcoins with cash.

I would like to know why anyone would want to be anonymous with the bitcoin asset they have bought so far. In fact, some of them are constantly looking for ways to get rid of the transaction trail and make it very vague to study. Does this have something to do with the factor of individual interest in wanting to own wealth without being able to be tracked by the government ?

Bitcoin has never facilitated illegal acts and also various other cases that violate the law. But we know that these people continue to use bitcoin for illegal activities. What I think is when we buy bitcoin for net cash why should we have them anonymously and obscure all transaction.

It's not about having things I want to hide or obscure; rather, it is that I have nothing I want to share. I have never done anything illegal with my bitcoin, but that doesn't mean I want governments, three letter agencies, exchanges, ad companies, any number of third parties, or random strangers tracking all my transactions and sticking their noses in to my financial history.

Everyone values privacy. If you didn't, then why have curtains on your windows? Why even wear clothes? If you think financial privacy is unnecessary, then please feel free to upload your bank statements and credit card history for everyone on this forum to look at. While you are at it, why not also share your real name, address, email passwords, and browsing history? Obviously don't actually do this, I'm just making a point!

Privacy is a fundamental human right. Without it, you are constantly modifying your behavior to what is deemed "acceptable" by the state and/or society. Without privacy, there is no freedom.

I'd also invite you to read this previous post of mine, and the links contained within: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5214200.msg53499357#msg53499357

Thank you for answering me. That is a very pleasant answer to read. I understand that privacy for most people is a right they need. Financial privacy is the most important thing that needs to be maintained and does not need to be published. Even a hacker needs privacy never to be found out online. And on this occasion I don't blame anyone for having the privacy that is truly their right.

Have also read and understand the content of the posts that you make on this link. This makes me understand how stupid we are when it comes to respecting the privacy we should have. We are not completely safe because many important things in our lives are recorded by well-known companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. They have a good record of knowing nearly every user behavior more than we do.

Anyway, I really can't do anything to get a decent privacy in exchange. I use local exchange to convert my digital assets to fiat but they require users to pass KYC. This is a government rule that I need to follow. I hope I'll stay safe with KYC on that exchange and be fine until now.

People do not realize just how important their privacy is until it is too late. There are a quarter of a million Ledger customers who are current being targeted by email, SMS, and phone call spam and phishing, including threats of physical violence, because their privacy was compromised. There are people who have had their lives ruined and been left liable for tens of thousands of dollars of debt or even with a criminal record because of identity theft.

Absolutely. You can mitigate some of this by keeping accounts separate, using different browsers, limiting how much information you share, and so on, but the best solution when it comes to companies like this is to simply stop using them. There are better alternatives to everything Google offers, and not only can you live without social media, but research shows those who do are happier and more productive.

Try looking at peer to peer exchanges such as Bisq, LocalCryptos, or Hodl Hodl.

@o_e_l_e_o, I can understand almost all the points that you have tried to explain well. It's all like you are telling me that you care deeply about privacy in this online world. For a long time I was less active on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, telegram and others. I don't really like publishing what I do to large numbers of people online. In my opinion, all of that is not too important to show people because basically I am not a public figure. lol

Like most people, I have been using Google for a long time to surf the web. I know they record almost everything we've done to date. So far I have also used the tor browser for PC in an attempt to better maintain my privacy. But I haven't found the best recommendation for Android. Is there a proper way to continue using Google on android but not give them a chance to record our data ? I currently don't give Google permission to record my activity and location and have turned off the chimes. Is there any other way after that ?

There is no completely safe way to use Google. The best option is to cut it out altogether. Instead of Chrome use Firefox or Tor Browser. Use the app Orbot to route everything via Tor. Instead of Google search use DuckDuckGo. Instead of GoogleMail use ProtonMail. Instead of Google Maps use OpenStreetMaps. And so on. Take a look at the following sites:

https://prism-break.org/en/
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google

Unfortunately, with all Android devices Google is pretty much built in. Without rooting your phone and installing a custom firmware, you will never escape Google entirely. When it comes to bitcoin, it means trading peer to peer over Tor, not using GoogleMail for accounts or sign ups, and using F-Droid store to download wallet apps.