Bitcoin Forum

I would like to know if i use Instant Exchange https://exch.cx/ and convert my bitcoins to litecoin, will it serve as a mixing too and my coins can't be traced (act as a mixer) ?

Meaning if i do multiple transactions using that Instant Exchange and convert Bitcoin to Litecoin. (The destination address of LTC remains the same in all the transactions )

Exchanges do not replace a mixer or a proper coinjoining service. You can sue it it you're trying to blur the transaction trail at a basic from family and friends but your transactions are logged by the exchange and they are liable to share that information and can lose it through a breach.

AFAIK exchanges use multiple addresses and you will not get the same one each time except at the point of deposit (which they change sparingly for each user).

i always get a different btc deposit addresses at exch.cx which is instant exchange, not a trading exchange.

I haven't used https://exch.cx/ but some exchanges allow change of deposit address at each transaction and some do not.

I will advice you to use monero.

That should not be a prove that it acts as a mixer. If you are not exchanging to a privacy coin like monero, the transaction can be traced by the government and https://exch.cx/

Monero is the primary coin that you can use. I will recommend you to exchange it on a decentralized exchange like bisq.

Well, i want to use LTC. Other than government and the exchanges (exch.cx) themselves, other people can't trace it like you , me and other people only access to the public blockchain ? Please tell.

Yes, that's true. If that's what you're worried about then yes, other individuals are probably not going to be able to see much but then you should keep in mind that there are platforms like Arkham Intelligence that allow people to post bounties for this type of thing.

If you do not care about the government and the exchanges to trace you, you can go for any exchange of your choice. Even you can go for other no KYC exchanges. Because you are depositing to the same address on other centralized exchanges, your withdraw would be in another address entirely. This is how exchanges works. So, if you are not looking for anything more than that, you can go for https://exch.cx/. It is one of the instant exchanges that I can recommend.

No matter how many times you send bitcoin to the exchanges like exch.cx, they will always give you a new bitcoin address where you will deposit the bitcoin and in return they will send you whichever coin you want to exchange (in your case Litecoin). Usually, each time the Litecoin you will receive will be from a different address. Now there is no link between your bitcoin you have send and the Litecoin you have received.


exch.cx is by far the most economical one to use for these types of transactions but i haven't tested it for any big amount. Their exchange rate is the best, close to the centralized exchanges like binance etc. Usually, it is better to conduct small transactions from these centralized instant exchanges, so the chances for their scam are minimal. No matter we do a multiple 50$ transactions or a one 500$ transactions, the fee will be same (1% Fixed or 0.5% dynamic).

exch.cx is a no-kyc (https://kycnot.me/service/exch) instant swap exchange, there is no registration and they don't have any private information about their customers to share, only their addresses. eXch may not be a mixer in itself, but it is a swap exchange that is privacy focused and they also do not aggregate utxo's in one address, so it becomes very difficult for blockchain surveillance companies to trace or track where the coins came from.
It is a good option for privacy, but you have to do your own part and use a different address in receiving your LTC. Exch.cx will provide you with a different address to deposit your BTC and since they don't aggregate utxo's your LTC will come from a different address, so when swapping multiple times, it is great for your own privay to not reuse receiving addresses.

My answer to your question on exch.cx is that it does not serve as a mixer, so your coins do not merge. Instead, your coins can be like a trace when you use them, dude. Maybe you should understand what a crypto mixer is and how it works. How does crypto Mixer work? (https://cointelegraph.com/explained/what-is-a-cryptocurrency-mixer-and-how-does-it-work)

We know that the mixer can be centralized or decentralized. Now,  if you really want to use a mixer, what I can recommend to you is /blog/coinjoin]Coinjoin (https://[banned mixer) You can use it because it's not an exchange, but you should also know that mixing still has risks involved if you're not careful.

This is fairly easy for a blockchain analysis company to trace.

Blockchain analysis companies obviously know about the existence of these instant exchangers, and also know that they are popular for swapping bitcoin to other coins. They also know how they work, know the fees they charge, and probably have identified their wallet addresses on multiple chains. If they see you sending $100 worth of bitcoin to one of them, and then a few minutes after it is confirmed they see $98 worth of litecoin leave, then they can link those transactions together. If you send all the litecoin to the same address, then they can probably work backwards and link all your bitcoin transactions together too.

If you don't want to be traced, then you'll either need to mix or coinjoin your bitcoin first, or swap it for monero which cannot be traced in this way.

If, as you said , destination address in all transactions  is the same, then the mixing via  https://exch.cx/ has no sense,you will be traced by chain-analysis agencies. On the other hand, if those  addresses  are different and you will make a few swap rounds using Instant Exchange/s  as well  a few intermediate transactions (that don't reuse addresses)  between those rounds then your coins  will become less traceable.

Chain-analysis uses heuristics to trace coins thus, in my view, it would be helpful if you could read the relevant  guide  divided into four parts  ^[1] (#post_ANK01), ^[2] (#post_ANK02), ^[3] (#post_ANK03) and ^[4] (#post_ANK04).  

[1]. Understanding Bitcoin Privacy with OXT — Part 1/4  (https://medium.com/oxt-research/understanding-bitcoin-privacy-with-oxt-part-1-4-8177a40a5923)
[2].  Understanding Bitcoin Privacy with OXT — Part 2/4  (https://medium.com/oxt-research/understanding-bitcoin-privacy-with-oxt-part-2-4-20010e0dab97)
[3].  Understanding Bitcoin Privacy with OXT — Part 3/4  (https://medium.com/oxt-research/understanding-bitcoin-privacy-with-oxt-part-3-4-9a1b2b572a8)
[4].  Understanding Bitcoin Privacy with OXT — Part 4/4  (https://medium.com/oxt-research/understanding-bitcoin-privacy-with-oxt-part-4-4-16cc0a8759d5)

In addition to what was mentioned, Blockchain analysis does not depend on information received from the Blockchain, but rather runs full nodes, cooperates with closed-source wallets, exchnages, block explorers, and some mixing services can be tracked as it relies on the principle of dividing and delaying the arrival of currencies, which makes tracking process difficult, but Doesn't make it impossible.

Using a full node via Tor, Monero, splitting output across multiple addresses, delaying the withdrawal time, and stopping using block explorers are all things that enhance your privacy.
 
What I would like to say is that you make it difficult to be tracked, but that does not make it impossible, but it is an effort that rarely happens to a regular account.

Using the instant exchange may not be a perfect way to hide your privacy but if we look at the OP point of view, he is only concerned with that ordinary people can't trace him.

In this case, any Instant exchange can be suitable for him. Blockchain analysis companies won't investigate unless they are hired by someone to trace anyone and in this case, OP have no concerns about it.

Still depends. Many exchanges have their central wallets publicly identified. If someone knows that OP is using one of these exchanges to swap his bitcoin to litecoin, for example, then they can simply look for any litecoin transactions of the same value at the same time.

There are almost certainly blockchain analysis companies which passively scan all transactions and make any easy links or easy identifications they can. Far easier for them when they need to investigate some specific transactions to already have all the groundwork done already.

I don't think this is a good idea. While it is unlikely that a company will investigate him out of nowhere, the chance of his data being sold or accessed by malicious parties still exists. Not to mention the risk of using instant exchange for his fund is quite high (KYC, terrible rate, etc). If I learn anything from Chipmixer or how mixing companies store their customer's data while they claim the opposite, it is unwise to assume nothing can go wrong at all.

I don't know about other instant exchanges, but the one op proposed to use: exch.cx does not collect any personal data from their customers, so nothing can be sold, all you need to swap your coins is to send it to the unique address provided by eXch and provide a destination address to receive the coins you've swapped to.
No kyc on exch.cx, and they have a flat rate of 1% and dynamic rate of 0.5%.
We don't know what was in the 7TB of data that was seized.

Yep, ChipMixer is one among many "mixing sites" that scammed an enormous amount of Bitcoin and ended up turning over their customer's data to the government anyway.  Only coinjoins give you the guarantee of privacy without trusting third parties.

ChipMixer did not scam their customers, neither did they "hand over" customer's data to the government. ChipMixer were provably taken down by authorities and their servers as well as 7TB of data we don't know what's in it was seized. There is a different between a platform being taken down by authorities and one that scams or rug-pulls customers.

You shouldn't be using an exchange as a mixer, I don't know how many times I have to repeat that this month. Exchanges aren't businesses with main scope to make your coins untraceable. Pretty much the opposite. They very much keep track of what's going on, and most are likely to share it with chain analysis companies. There is even a site that lets you search to which exchange an address belongs to: https://www.walletexplorer.com/

Unless you're somewhat informed beforehand, we don't yet know what information was ChipMixer keeping in their hard drives. It could be anything, from 4k movies to several blockchain full nodes. So, it's just false to argue they were keeping customer's data.

It was confirmed ChipMixer was a scam the entire time, many Bitcointalk users confirmed that their coins were stolen from the keys ChipMixer said they deleted:



Mixers aren't businesses with the main scope of making your coins untraceable either, they can keep track of what's going on.  Only coinjoins give you the guarantee of privacy without trusting third parties.

That's confirmation bias at its finest, to put it lightly.

You assume the worst for business A, all while assuming the best for business B. No business is a saint, that's the cold harsh truth.

4k movies? Why not 4k porn? That's a silly argument. We're not talking about Netflix.

You didn't read the whole thing and the comment @BlackHatCoiner is responding to.
It is one thing to say that business X may have stored customers' data, it is another thing to say business X definitely kept customers' data while we have no proof of that. All we know of ChipMixer is that the mainstream media claimed the authorities have seized the owner's hard disks. The authorities never said what those disks contained. It may have been customers' data or it may have been the indexed bitcoin blockchain for easy searchability.

Besides, anybody who uses a centralized service should already know the risks of them keeping a record or even being a honeypot. Be it ChipMixer or Wasabi centralized coordinator which we know for sure is working with anti privacy companies and actively censoring transactions.

The ability to keep track of what's going on doesn't mean they do, it only means there's more trust involved. But, yes, coinjoins and swapping for XMR provide guaranteed privacy, not mixers.

He doesn't care. He's busy trying to prove I'm having confirmation bias, because I had the audacity to call him biased in our local board.

The facts are:
- We can't call anti-privacy a company that was just having 7 TB of unknown data.
- We can't call pro-privacy a company that actively cooperates with chain analysis companies, shares user info and doesn't call itself pro-privacy to begin with.

There are never any risks when using Wasabi because there is no data revealed by users for anyone to keep a record of.  Even if a coordinator is operated by a malicious entity, they cannot deanonymize you or link your transactions together.  Chipmixer is entirely the opposite, they gain complete knowledge and access to all of their users' funds.

That could be a mixing but not in a deeper level, but your transactions can be traceable, especially if a particular exchange is obligated to disclose your transaction information on their platform. We have a government agency that oversees this, known as the Anti-Money Laundering Council. So, if you simply desire privacy for mixing and haven't engaged in any illegal activities, that should be sufficient to achieve your purpose.

When exchanging non-privacy coins, some transactions on eXch still can be linked by external blockchain analysis, which can be done by correlating time, amount and a fiat equivalent between various chains. Anyway, in practice, this mostly applies to big amounts, while it's very improbable this technique could be efficient on insignificant amounts. We will probably implement an option to split outputs between multiple addresses to prevent these attacks.

It's worth to mention that we don't aggregate UTXOs on single addresses for BTC and LTC, which makes blockchain analysis more complicated to perform.

I recommend to use an MWEB address as a destination in your BTC to LTC exchange to increase your privacy after exchange.

However, eXch absolutely serves for mixing when you exchange some coin to XMR, which is a privacy coin that is proven to be untraceable.


Now, in regards to law enforcement requests:

eXch was built with an idea to make operators identity disclosure practically impossible so the service can be resistant to law enforcement. Operational security was our priority #1 from the first steps of the project creation.

We have very strict data retention policies that can be compared to most mixers on this forum. We do not log IP addresses (having .onion domain is a proof for that) or any other user metadata and delete order database records 15 days after order completion. We also provide users with an option to request data deletion immediately after order completion which can be done by pressing the "Delete data" button at the order's page (you can find more information at https://exch.cx/tos).

Keep in mind that we don't differ from any mixer on this forum in regards to risks associated with unwanted data disclosure, since any mixer is also a centralized entity that uses the same database technology as we do and a single database can become a weak point of any service anytime, independently of how many times their marketing speech repeats the words "privacy" and "anonymity". We don't use these words much and instead we use full disk encryption on all our servers to prevent any unwanted situations as much as possible. An unexplained reboot of some server is a sign that a server was compromised and it's a clear attempt to compromise our LUKS keys with a modified bootloader.

We do not cooperate with law enforcement nor have to do so, since we are an anonymous entity that works with cryptocurrency only. A few events that could serve as a proof:

• A notorious blockchain analysis company SlowMist listed eXch as a mixer after Tornado Cash in their 2023 mid-year report https://www.slowmist.com/report/first-half-of-the-2023-report(EN).pdf because we haven't handled any data to them when they were providing assistance to some law enforcement agency in an investigation. SlowMist is a contractor of many LE agencies and if we were their friends who provide all the data, this is how they would treat us: https://twitter.com/MistTrack_io/status/1699926525229863003 (Nitter link) (https://nitter.cz/MistTrack_io/status/1699926525229863003)

(Note: they were only able to gather these statistics on the Ethereum blockchain, since we use a single aggregation address 0xf1da173228fcf015f43f3ea15abbb51f0d8f1123 (https://etherscan.io/address/0xf1da173228fcf015f43f3ea15abbb51f0d8f1123) for all Ethereum & ERC-20 exchange operations)

• We have rejected all the data disclosure requests from LE regarding this particular event - https://twitter.com/MistTrack_io/status/1626786730392305664 (Nitter link) (https://nitter.cz/MistTrack_io/status/1626786730392305664) - then the same entity comes back because they know we haven't disclosed anything - https://twitter.com/MistTrack_io/status/1701608380941717938  (Nitter link) (https://nitter.cz/MistTrack_io/status/1701608380941717938)
• Rejected to disclose any information to LE regarding this event: https://twitter.com/MistTrack_io/status/1698665043288834502 (Nitter link) (https://nitter.cz/MistTrack_io/status/1698665043288834502)
• None of the countless LE requests addressed to us were satisfied since our platform launch, because we know what we are doing and why we are here

We also have sufficient technical capabilities to mitigate DDoS attacks without recurring to Cloudflare, DDoS-Guard or any other third-party reverse proxy servers, which is something that most mixers on this forum don't or can't do.

https://i.ibb.co/dM48Mf0/Capture-d-cran-2023-08-03-014157.png

Nevertheless, when some users ask us questions regarding BTC mixing in our support ticketing system, we always forward them to appropriate non-custodial CoinJoin solutions available on the market that we used ourselves in the past and that are proven to be the safest alternative to custodial mixers.

Do you offer MWEB deposit addresses for LTC?


Thank you for the thorough response.

Not yet, but we would like to provide a such option and eventually will. The only reason why we don't yet is a current version of Litecoin Core having serious issues with MWEB accounting and considerable development inactivity. We will have to wait at least for a next Litecoin Core release to add MWEB deposit addresses. For now we only provide ability to use MWEB addresses for receiving coins from eXch.

Or it may have been 4k movies (like Angelo claims)? Is that a serious argument?

There's a higher chance (never said 100%) of keeping customer data (especially if it's a honeypot), rather than keeping worthless 4k movies (we're not talking about Netflix, that's pretty much obvious).

Selling data is the new goldmine for many companies. I thought that was common sense.

I agree with that. Government honeypots have existed for a long time.

Centralized services (mixers, CEX) will always be shady by their own nature, so people shouldn't trust them too much.

Saying "mixers are good, CEX are bad" is the very definition of being biased, especially when you make money from shilling them.

I would say the same if someone appeared with a CEX banner and tried to shill that business.

Angelo, come the fuck on, you have confessed to me personally that you visit this board (even making worthless shitposting just to raise your post count!) to advertise shady centralized mixer services and you call me biased?

I don't visit this board to make money and you know it. I only visit forums for discussion, unlike you.

Aren't you biased? Don't you have a conflict of interest?

Be honest, you made $1500/month via ChipMixer. Don't make me post screenshots.

I have made $0 from forums. I don't mind if you make money, as long as you don't have the audacity to call me biased, even though you're biased and I explained why.

It's as serious as claiming that 7 TB is log. What were they logging anyway? Transactions? The blockchain, which contains them all, is less than a terabyte. Unless ChipMixer was a data center, which is as probable as being just an ordinary person with 7 TB of personal stuff.

I don't remember shit of what I've talked with you about, we were exchanging messages for like a dozen of times a day once. The fact that you want to doxx me (by publishing my private messages) to prove a point says a lot.

Everyone's biased to an extent. That's all I can admit.

No, it's definitely not an ordinary person with 7TB of porn/movies, but it could have been a honeypot.

Don't play dumb to me and don't victimize yourself (I'm not doxxing anything). You provided info with your own consent.

You will definitely "remember" if I find those messages and translate them (I don't wanna do it, but I will be forced to do it, if you keep insinuating I'm a liar). You've told me that you love arguing/making shitposts (even with Franky) just to increase your post count and your merit.

I get it, you need to have a high post count/merit to make money on this forum via signature campaigns.

Nothing wrong with making money in capitalism, as long as you don't portray yourself in a sanctimonious manner ("innocent, unbiased victim of doxxing").

That's a fair answer that I will accept and end it here. Maybe then you shouldn't start calling others biased, unless you're unbiased yourself in the first place.

We all know that you are promoting Wasabi Wallet and for that purpose, you will try to prove Chipmixer and other mixing services as scam (When they are not).  ???


So if he uses exch.cx or any instant exchange and convert his money into XMR, then i think he is more secure and even the blockchain analysis companies won't be able to figure out much as once the coins are converted to XMR, then to trace it further becomes impossible.

Small problem is that you aka eXch don't always have XMR available in reserves for exchanging with other coins  ;)
Some people reported this back to me several times and I confirmed it, but I think even Binance exchange had liquidity issues with that specific coin.

There is not much we can do about it because even when we have 5000 XMR it gets sold within an hour or two. There are some people that are monitoring our XMR balance with scripts via API to receive notifications when it's up then come and buy it all. However this problem (which is not really a problem) will get some workarounds eventually.

Also, it's possible to backorder XMR on eXch. What some of our users do while no XMR reserves are available is creating and funding an order so it gets executed in a first place when XMR reserves reappear with sufficient balance to cover their order. Usually backorders get executed in less than 24 hours, because we get constant movement in the XMR wallet. Backorders are also a reason for our XMR balance to be reported as zero, because when backorders are present and there are some XMR they will appear unavailable due to amount reservation in our system.

Is it possible that some big centralized exchanges are buying coins from eXch?
I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, but I noticed other coins can also dry out sometimes , for example there is not a lot of Bitcoin at the moment ^{(a bit more than 0.92 BTC)}.
At least we can see balance of reserves, that is impossible with big exchanges, so it appears like they always have them even if they don't.

Sounds good.