The way to provide coins to the mixer is to send them through the mixer. Then there are (supposedly) no fees and 0.5% bonus.
Which is how it worked for my 1BTC transaction. For the big one the missing  3.458087223  is actually more than 1.5% (which is 3)
but the fee should not apply anyway.

From what I understand, if the mixer is requested to transfer X coins it needs at least X "clean" (=just different, unrelated coins)
to perform it. If it doesn't have X coins it asks them from others and offering 0.5% bonus. Since he charges 1.5% from X he makes profit anyway.

you'll have to deposit some coins to that address first. So you have to use the address at least twice.

But yeah, I don't see much point in paid anonimzers since you can use any collective wallet like instawallet or any exchange
to do just the same.

According to blockchain.info the fee was not supposed to be applied when the bonus was offered.
It was not applied to my first (test) transaction (except for miner's fee of 0.0002) of 1BTC.
 And this does not explain the weird "uncomfired" transaction.

short version: blockchain.info anonimizer sent 3.4BTC less than it received, the transaction
for 3.4BTC was hanging as "unconfirmed" on blockchain.info (and there only) then disappeared.

long version:
blockchain.info anonimizer is a mixer and anonimizing proxy for sending coins.
On Tuesday I saw that it was giving away 0.5% "bonus" because they needed fresh coins to mix with.
I decided to test it, so first I sent  1 BTC through it to myself, it went smoothly and gave me the bonus 0.005.
Fine. Next goes 200BTC.  I requested a transaction to 1BKp56zc9UgAxqQjku8UXiGwEriABZGYW7 and was given the address
1Boob22SYZMGPrniV8Yp4amWEvzBV5F1Ru (yep. its firstbits is 1boob2)  to send to.
Sent 200BTC, received a bonus  of 1 BTC on the sender, but here goes the weird part -  I only received 196.54171277 BTC
on the receiving address. There was another transaction of 3.4xxx BTC that would make the total right. It's been hanging
as "uncomfirmed" on blockchain.info for at least 10 hours (I checked the next morning), but my  client never saw it (it was not broadcast?) and then it disappeared from blockchain.info as well.

So I think blockchain.info has got a bug and I lost my hard-earned coins.

anyone had anything similar going on?
I guess some people may want to keep what they do on "anonimizer" secret, but to me it doesn't matter,
I was just sending some coins to myself to see if I get a bonus...

Edit: I've got 3.4BTC back from blockchain.info (piuk)  now

has there been an attempt to wash some of the recently stolen money using instawallet?

I'd guess this might be one of the reasons for it to close.

the escrow mechanism in the OP looks pretty cool. And it's not from those contracts in 'smart money' examples.

it could be used to make a P2P market.

Setting up and maintaining  a botnet takes time and effort. It's not "free."

OK I understand you want to go "legal." But why in the US?
Weren't you located in Singapore?
If not, why not register in Belize or some other financial haven?
you don't even need to travel there for that.

here, I got a simple estimate for you.
on SR front page, they have 10 most recent feedbacks.
You can check the time when they were left. just now, the last one of the 10 was left half an hour ago.


which gives a (very rough) estimate of  20 purchases per hour.

if you are interested you can collect more data, along with the average price, daily fluctuations, etc.,
but i can't be bothered.

it did change. a lot.

SR has over 130000 registered members. Note that you have to register just to look in, so lots of these may have never been used.

It says it has 251 sellers. Seller accounts cost money, so people don't get them just for fun.

indeed, a guy with 100 000 BTC is not a problem, but a (potential) solution:  he's interested in the success of BTC. I think there are enough people who have a lot of BTC and have already made enough USD with them to be able to support bitcoin in the described way.

How much is needed for that? It's not 21 mil$, it's less. To begin with, in the next couple of years there will not be more than 11 mil bitcoins, so to guarantee the price at $1 for a couple of years you need at most that much. And then, it doesn't have to be 1$ per coin. Already $0.1 and even $0.01 per coin means some considerable stability.

so I see the question "why" and "how"

Why would anybody do it? I think it's pretty clear. If you have  100 000 BTC on hands (and yes, some people do), you are  interested in their price to grow. If you have zero BTC and consider starting using them for you business, you are worried that their price may drop to $0.0001 next week.   The 100000 BTC guy can attract 0 BTC guys by guaranteeing that the price will never go below (say) $1 (or $0.1). This will help expand the economy and consequently bring the price up.

How? I don't think it's difficult, really. Some ways have already been mentioned in this thread, but on a high level having some reputation and backing your "guarantee" by some legal statement is the way to go.

the idea is not to control the volatility, but just to guarantee that BTC will never become worthless.
This guarantee may become useless if the price soars, but is important in the beginning (now)

Think of it as face value of the bullion coins. Like, 1 South African Rand on a "krugerrand."

Putting a huge "buy" wall on MtGox is not the same, since everybody knows the wall can disappear any time.

I'm not sure how a "legal-binding obligation" can be formalized, but if a company with considerable reputation and market value simply publishes such a statement, it's already a big deal. I'm sure there are better and more "binding" ways to do it though.

faith is easier to incite with legally-binding obligation rather than just words.

Can somebody just promise to back the price up?
Say, somebody with a real name (or a real company)
could issue a legally binding obligation to buy BTC
for at least 0.1$, no matter what. This only takes 2 100 000 USD to guarantee that forever  and less than a million for the next couple of years.

Most likely you will never need to actually buy BTC at that price; just proving that you are able
to do that is good enough.

I guess there are enough people with much BTC and much USD
to be able to do that and to have interest in that. The benefits are obvious: more trust in the currency,
hence wider acceptance.



--
long-time lurker, scarce poster

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Starting with fake statements about reputation is a great way to gain reputation.

most currencies lister in the "add funds" section are just stubs.

but I guess the fact that INR are supported may open quite a market.

+1 for EUR support.

I enabled that UPnP mapping and suddenly there are over 100 connections.
cool. It even seems bitcoin is throttling my connection a bit now 0.o