Bitcoin Forum

i had tried to purchase bitcoin anonymously but ended up purchasing with my paypal which now turned into a huge pain in the ass. i have purchased from p2p market where only the sender knows my paypal and so does my bitcoin address. how can i get out of that? i know bitcoin addresses are transparent and can be traced by others who know my address. how come i be escaped from the tail i left through my paypal and the address?

Bitcoin is designed to be transparent. What you need to do is use a mixer (like the one in my signature) or try using CoinJoin by trying Wasabi wallet to break the link between the coins.

Chipmixer is fairly cheap and efficient at breaking links with fairly little technical knowhows. Wasabi wallet would be more of a long term solution with Tor integration and stuff.

The OP bought bitcoin not from paypal, but from a p2p market using paypal. This means he probably used a wallet to create an address witch was funded by the seller on the P2P market.

This also means a mixer or coinjoin is a sollution to his problem.

Sure, the seller will still know which address he/she funded, but he/she should not be able to trace the trail of unspent outputs post-mix/post-coinjoin. For all that he/she knows, the OP might have sold his BTC, or used it to purchase goods or services.

That's true, Bitcoin created for the purpose of having transparency through public ledger, though it's not designed for anonymous instead, it can give you more than enough privacy if this is your concern.

My question is, is your Bitcoin address linked to your personal identity?  Then how?

You can use mixer service as mentioned above, mixing method is a process that tries to break the linkability or traceability towards your privacy, and in addition above aside from Wasabi that gives free service of mixing coin.  You can also use Bitmix and Samurai Whirlpool to increase your anonymity.

wasabi does not give free service. They charge 0.003% per anonimity set and keep any change that's smaller than 0.3% of the base denomination.... Exceptions do apply from case to case.

Last time i coinjoined with wasabi, i ended up with a 70+ anonimity set, so the fee was 70 * 0.003, so i ended up paying more than 0.2% in fees, since the base denomination is ~0.1 BTC, the fee was a little over 0.002 BTC (about $40 in FIAT at the current preev rate). If your change value is to small, you could end up paying 0.5% (0.2% in fees + 0.3% of the change that's kept by wasabi's owners). The fee is not exceptionally large, cheaper than a lot of other mixers, but not free :)

Chipmixer uses a pay-what-you-want fee structure, but in order to use it, you do have to read up about their chip sizes... So they could theoretically work for free, eventough i usually do tip them (if everybody would use them for free, they'd stop existing).

Other mixers usually charge between 0.5 and 1,5%... I'd recommand doing your homework before using one... I'd stay clear from the ones with a negative rep on bitcointalk (or the ones without any bitcointalk representation). I'd also stay clear from the ones using cloudflare or missing security headers, or forcing you to use javascript, or the ones without a presense on the darknet (an onion domain)...

Use the options already given to you. A mixer or coinjoin would effectively blur the trail of transactions and make it untraceable back to you. It's fairly easy to create a new wallet address, so you may consider abandoning the compromised address and moving the already moved coins into a new private one.

You should note that changing the receiving address after every transaction is a good practice to maintain your pseudo anonymity, some wallet softwares do this by default.
You may also want to consider using platforms that do not require KYC, as it puts your personal information at risk of exposure, through hacks or government request.

You can't get out of the fact that the seller knows your PayPal but as for your bitcoin address. There's the solution that has been mentioned above.

Isn't the seller already note the PayPal and BTC address? PayPal is verified with personal identity. This means the seller knows that this PayPal owner using Bitcoin either he is using the address from Mixer. Bitcoin mixer is to cut the link with your address, OP already provides a bitcoin address to the seller. Even the mixed the received Bitcoin doesn't mean he could hide now as a Bitcoin user.

@OP, you should take care before buying bitcoin. Remember, you can use a mixer to hide your Bitcoin but it's quite complicated to hide your money sending source. Not sure if it's possible to send via western union to hide your identity for sending source. For now, just mix your coin and don't use that address anymore. Everytime should use a new BTC receiving address.

Send it through CoinJoin, ChipMixer or JoinMarket. Keep in mind that CoinJoin requires ~0.1 BTC to be used while ChipMixer requires at least 0.001 BTC and JoinMarket (which is a bit more advanced) has basically no minimum requirement although it is easier to find a match from 0.01 BTC on.

If you're looking for anonymity through crypto, you could look into Monero as well. You could use Bisq/HodlHodl to exchange BTC to XMR in a decentralized way (I personally prefer Bisq). Maybe it fits your needs better than Bitcoin does - and considering Monero is privacy-oriented, it has a future as great as Bitcoin does imo. :)

Not only that, but tipping is also good for the user since it means you are depositing and withdrawing different amounts, and so provides a privacy boost. Also consider withdrawing your chips over as long a time period as you can, or even leaving some behind to top up with your next deposit to further obfuscate things.

But by mixing the coins the seller has no idea if OP has simply bought bitcoin to pay a single bill or merchant, or is combining the coins with other coins, sending to an exchange, or something else which would represent ongoing bitcoin use.

I'm just going to add: Since your full name is revealed when transacting with PayPal using your personal account, the trick I do is to create a PayPal business account(name it whatever you want) and accept the money there, then I instantly proceed to move the money from my business account to my personal account. That way, only your PayPal business account name is exposed.

tldr; person <---> business account <---> personal account

OP is not looking for that. As OP used paypal and thus his identity along with an address has been revealed. OP wants to get escaped from that address so that BTC sender can't trace him anymore.

Sure OP was looking to break the link on his BTC address, but some extra privacy protection on the PayPal side probably wouldn't hurt, wouldn't it? Knowing that getting access to your personal information isn't something you should just scoff at.

If you want to remain anonymous in the crypto space I suggest you use privacy coins like monero, zcash, verge, dash. That way your transactions is hidden from the public

Bitcoin is designed to be transparent not anonymous because at the end all transactions can be traced and if your personal identity is ever linked to any account then your location isn’t safe.

Technically, sure you're going to have more privacy; but if you're buying bitcoin as an investment/hedge or to use it sometime in the future for buying stuff, then best of luck. Most altcoins(99%) has always been in a downtrend vs bitcoin, and good luck using them to pay for stuff as bitcoin is the de-facto cryptocurrency that's being accepted online.

Take a look at XMR's chart itself(which is the best performing coin compared to the other coins you've listed) vs bitcoin. Imagine how much worse the charts are with ZEC, XVG, and DASH.

https://i.imgur.com/lGnsrGP.png

And if he does then I'm sure he will see the fact that bitcoin charts are superior to altcoin. Bitcoin is one of the far better asset than altcoin in term of investing (long or short term). So in essence, for investment option, I think bitcoin is second to none compared to altcoin.

If it's privacy, I think bitcoin has also offered good privacy so far to its user. It's just that users should realize how well they are doing without having to choose an altcoin as an alternative venture. Bitcoin is made quite ideal for a variety of user need, that's really an advantage for bitcoin.

I use monero quite frequently, and the vast majority of the time it is the only coin I am holding other than bitcoin unless I need another one for a specific purpose or payment. I am under no illusion that it will most likely lose value in terms of bitcoin over time (although its price in USD has been increasing pretty steadily for the last 9 months or so), but that's not why I am holding it. I was spending bitcoin last year at $3k and I am spending it this year at $23k, as I am using it because of its technology, not because of its price. The same is true for my use of monero. If you are serious about looking to an altcoin for privacy technology then monero is the way to go, but its performance against bitcoin is the price you have to pay.

The other coins that have been mentioned are trash.

If you want to make your btc anonymous.
You can just exchange your btc to wrap bitcon. Create new wallet to get your wrapped btc (WBTC) in Erc20 token in Ethereum Blockchain. Make new btc wallet. And exchange your Wrapped btc to Btc and Transfer to the new wallet address you made.
This may require a lot of charges but with this, I don't think it will be easy to track all the transactions from bitcoin blockchain to Ethereum Blockchain and back to bitcoin blockchain with different wallets. I use im Token app for this.

Depends who you are trying to hide from.  You now have a Bitcoin purchase potentially attached to your legal identity, so if it is more than a trivial amount and you are expecting to evade taxes or something, at some point your government could wonder at what price you cashed out your BTC regardless of the use of mixers or coin swaps.  If you're just trying to hide it casually from other users here or something, then you messed up with how you purchased and you should start over and try again using an anonymous account that isn't tied to your IP or identity and a means of payment that can't be traced back to you.

As for whoever sold you BTC for paypal, they should be alerted that accepting paypal for BTC is asking to be scammed.

Totally get what you mean. My reply was more of as a quick note for the other readers that while Monero might be the best option to use right now for payments(obviously because of privacy), it doesn't necessarily mean that Monero would be the best option to hold most of your funds in.

If you are converting bitcoin to any other coin and back again using the same app, then your privacy is still at risk. The owners and developers of that app can still see exactly what you have done, will likely have kept logs which are open to being leaked or hacked, and may share that information with any number of third parties. This is true regardless of what coin you are swapping in to, even if you are using a privacy focused coin like monero, and certainly when you are using a token based on a centralized coin. The coin's features are irrelevant when using the same exchange for both trades.

If you want to do something like this in a secure manner, then you need to trade from BTC to XMR, move the XMR to another wallet (preferably in a number of smaller transactions over several hops rather than just one transaction sending everything), and then use a different service to swap the XMR back to BTC and send to a bran new BTC Wallet, and do all this over Tor.

Yeah, agreed. I tend to only hold what I need for the near future in XMR, and buy more with BTC when I run low.