[ANN] ChipMixer.com - Bitcoin mixer / Bitcoin tumbler - mixing reinvented

[stevario]

Thanks for responding.  I guess time will tell if this is an exit scam or a honest downtime.

I can confirm the same error.
Clearnet website is opening just fine, but I was not able to open Chipmixer onion link, and I tried changing identity several times.
I checked official Tor status page and they are currently experiencing disruptions (Directory Authorities and DDOS), so this could be related with Chipmixer.
https://status.torproject.org/

This is why I see when I try to open Chipmixer website:

Onionsite Not Found

The most likely cause is that the onionsite is offline. Contact the onionsite administrator.

Details: 0xF0 — The requested onion service descriptor can't be found on the hashring and therefore the service is not reachable by the client.

[1714227854]

1714227854

[1714227854]

1714227854

[1714227854]

1714227854

[1714227854]

1714227854

[1714227854]

1714227854

[1714227854]

1714227854

[bloooodddddy]

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

[eaLiTy]

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

It is better not to speculate about shutting down, if that is the case they would inform the community regarding that. For the past week they were under heavy DDOS attack and hopefully that is the situation now as well. Wait for them to mitigate the situation and they will update the community on the situation.

~
I am a new ChipMixer user.  I spent 3-4 days testing with trivial amounts of BTC.  When I was satisfied that the service worked exactly as documented, I started to move much larger amount of BTC through. 

Regarding the reputation, they are active from 2017.

@Lucius mentioned about the TOR DDOS attack and most probably that is the case.

[stevario]

I see in the thread Signature Thread campaign there is a post from @DarkStar on July 24 (page 232)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935179.4620

That post says "ChipMixer hasn't been online since last week".  Then a post a couple days later would indicate that ChipMixer did come back online and make payments.  Hopefully that is the case right now.

I do hear what @eaLiTy is saying about speculation.  At the same time... when a reputable business/service/anything is unable to service the community AND says nothing... it generates doubt.  That doubt is amplified when the service revolves around emerging technologies (crypto), touts anonymity and lives on a hidden network (TOR).  The simple nature of an exist scam is that you take the assets and leave without saying anything... so saying nothing just makes it worse.

I am a new ChipMixer user.  I spent 3-4 days testing with trivial amounts of BTC.  When I was satisfied that the service worked exactly as documented, I started to move much larger amount of BTC through.  I also made a donation for the use of the service.

If this is just DDOS downtime... that is some bad luck on my part. 

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

It is better not to speculate about shutting down, if that is the case they would inform the community regarding that. For the past week they were under heavy DDOS attack and hopefully that is the situation now as well. Wait for them to mitigate the situation and they will update the community on the situation.

[n0nce]

I am a new ChipMixer user.  I spent 3-4 days testing with trivial amounts of BTC.  When I was satisfied that the service worked exactly as documented, I started to move much larger amount of BTC through.  I also made a donation for the use of the service.

If this is just DDOS downtime... that is some bad luck on my part.

I have no official information to give you guys, but it most probably is a little bit of bad luck, indeed. There were ChipMixer downtimes before and they will most likely happen again - probably partly for scheduled maintenance, but also simply due to the challenges that come with running such an anonymous website, offering such anonymous services (attacks, hacking attempts, ...).

From what I can tell, it is likely there are so many users using ChipMixer at any point in time that whenever such a downtime happens, someone will be the 'unlucky' one who just deposited some funds or just wanted to redeem a voucher.

[Lucius]

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

It's not a problem in CM, but in Tor itself - see the previous page where a similar discussion was held.


https://status.torproject.org/

[stevario]

I do not completely believe that is accurate.  I can load other pages... both clearnet and onion pages.  But not CM.  Sure... not every page loads every time.  But CM has not loaded for 48 hours... and I have tried at least 100 times.

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

It's not a problem in CM, but in Tor itself - see the previous page where a similar discussion was held.

https://i.imgur.com/o5EXtn1.png
https://status.torproject.org/

[jackg]

I do not completely believe that is accurate.  I can load other pages... both clearnet and onion pages.  But not CM.  Sure... not every page loads every time.  But CM has not loaded for 48 hours... and I have tried at least 100 times.

Are you noticing a pattern between ones you can access a lot easier and ones you can't?

I don't know many tor sites to access but if exit nodes host their own dns servers then it's very likely they're favouring connections to sites they know (and don't have to ping other servers to find).

I'd imagine chipmixer hosts their own exit node that's able to dns to their website and a lot of requests might go straight through them.


The network looks like it's being aggressively restructured in order to handle the ongoing ddos and this might've caused other unintended disruptions.

(I don't want to mention the other reason they might be suffering because I don't want to educate others on how to perform ddos attacks but @chipmixer it might be necessary to look at making your nodes throttle outgoing connections or disconnecting ones that look unfavourable/spammy/are big).

[NeuroticFish]

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

Do you try to get a problem fixed or you want to create panic?! Asking same question on every corner will get you nothing new.
Chill. Keep in mind that it's week-end and also holiday season. Also, as said, Tor is in trouble itself...
I'd say you should wait until the new week starts...


PS. If it helps, I've reproduced your first error both yesterday and today.

[stevario]

OK... fair enough.  I do understand the "chill and do not create panic." 

One thing that concerns me... the value of washing coins is based on the time between the deposit and the withdraw.  If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing.  On top of that... the ChipMixer paradigm is based on creating a session that terminates after 7 days.  Meaning... if I create a session and deposit some bitcoin I need to preserve the chips or withdraw the BTC within 7 days.

So what if the BTC is sitting in my session and the 7 day session expires while the site is down?  In this case I never really had the chance to withdraw the funds.

why chipmixer representative didnt tell anything here? is chipmixer closing

Do you try to get a problem fixed or you want to create panic?! Asking same question on every corner will get you nothing new.
Chill. Keep in mind that it's week-end and also holiday season. Also, as said, Tor is in trouble itself...
I'd say you should wait until the new week starts...


PS. If it helps, I've reproduced your first error both yesterday and today.

[NeuroticFish]

If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing.

I am almost sure that the engine doing the mixing is not down (I expect its uptime not being related to onion, instead related to bitcoin network and some machine running 24/7 in the cloud).

On top of that... the ChipMixer paradigm is based on creating a session that terminates after 7 days.  Meaning... if I create a session and deposit some bitcoin I need to preserve the chips or withdraw the BTC within 7 days.

I guess that OP, when he's back, can easily handle that (and also give more insightful answers too).

[jackg]

If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing.

I am almost sure that the engine doing the mixing is not down (I expect its uptime not being related to onion, instead related to bitcoin network and some machine running 24/7 in the cloud).

It also might have checks to know when it's down so that sessions can be extended based off the downtime.

ChipMixer will also be able to trace deposits from the blockchain/their own wallets and offer withdrawals based off that after then (especially if session tokens have some relationship to deposit addresses).

[n0nce]

One thing that concerns me... the value of washing coins is based on the time between the deposit and the withdraw.  If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing.  On top of that... the ChipMixer paradigm is based on creating a session that terminates after 7 days.  Meaning... if I create a session and deposit some bitcoin I need to preserve the chips or withdraw the BTC within 7 days.

So what if the BTC is sitting in my session and the 7 day session expires while the site is down?  In this case I never really had the chance to withdraw the funds.

First of all, the best anonymity is achieved by keeping some time between deposit and withdrawal, that's correct.
But you don't have to withdraw within 7 days; you're supposed to 'withdraw' vouchers right away, and redeem and 'actually withdraw' the coins days or potentially months or years later. Not supposed to just close the browser and restore it using session token. The session token is more intended to, well, restore a session after there was a technical issue such as now.

In the rare chance that you did create a session, deposited and had no time to withdraw keys or chips / vouchers before it suddenly went down, don't worry. ChipMixer extends session times by the amount of days that it was offline. That's at least how they did it so far.

[vv181]

I'd imagine chipmixer hosts their own exit node that's able to dns to their website and a lot of requests might go straight through them.

You didn't get to the point of exit node when you are visiting onion service, it happens within the network at a rendezvous point[1]. It doesn't get "exit".

[1] https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/overview/

@chipmixer it might be necessary to look at making your nodes throttle outgoing connections or disconnecting ones that look unfavourable/spammy/are big).

Umm, it wouldn't be possible due to how onion service works. If you can distinguish an user, there is no privacy/anonymity.

So what if the BTC is sitting in my session and the 7 day session expires while the site is down? 

What happens with a user's deposit if the site doesn't come back online 7 days after the session expires, but he couldn't use the service or extend the session due to the downtime?   

We make refund if user couldn't use the service due to the downtime. In cases of longer DDoS attacks we extended sessions time.

[stevario]

One thing that concerns me... the value of washing coins is based on the time between the deposit and the withdraw.  If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing.  On top of that... the ChipMixer paradigm is based on creating a session that terminates after 7 days.  Meaning... if I create a session and deposit some bitcoin I need to preserve the chips or withdraw the BTC within 7 days.

So what if the BTC is sitting in my session and the 7 day session expires while the site is down?  In this case I never really had the chance to withdraw the funds.

First of all, the best anonymity is achieved by keeping some time between deposit and withdrawal, that's correct.
But you don't have to withdraw within 7 days; you're supposed to 'withdraw' vouchers right away, and redeem and 'actually withdraw' the coins days or potentially months or years later. Not supposed to just close the browser and restore it using session token. The session token is more intended to, well, restore a session after there was a technical issue such as now.

In the rare chance that you did create a session, deposited and had no time to withdraw keys or chips / vouchers before it suddenly went down, don't worry. ChipMixer extends session times by the amount of days that it was offline. That's at least how they did it so far.

Thanks!  That is a good tip.  I was planning to do three withdraws over four days.  The first withdraw happened 24 hours after the deposit and was successful.  The next day the site went down.  I have been trying to get back into complete the withdraws.  I did see the voucher but did not plan to wait more than 7 days... so I did not pull vouchers.  I now understand that it is better to just pull vouchers immediately and use them over time.

I appreciate the note that ChipMixer will extend the session times.  That does give me some comfort.

I would also just love ChipMixer to update the clearnet site and say something like "We are experiencing problems at the moment.  Do not worry... we expect to be back online soon and your funds are safe."  Or something similar.

[LoyceV]

I am pretty concerned that I have lost some BTC.

For what it's worth: downtime has happened before, and ChipMixer always resolved everything in the end. They're in the privacy business, they too want to remain anonymous, and I can imagine that makes updates in cases like this more difficult. Note that this is only speculation from my end, based on what I've seen so far.

I see in the thread Signature Thread campaign there is a post from @DarkStar on July 24 (page 232)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935179.4620

That post says "ChipMixer hasn't been online since last week".

That post was about the Bitcointalk user ChipMixer not being online, it wasn't about the website itself.

[stevario]

That post was about the Bitcointalk user ChipMixer not being online, it wasn't about the website itself.

Thanks for clarifying.  That was not clear to me... but I am a newbie.

[dkbit98]

Thanks for responding.  I guess time will tell if this is an exit scam or a honest downtime.

Just be patient and wait for official reply from ChipMixer.
You could also try contacting them yourself with writing an email explaining them your exact situation.
I don't know if they are still using the same email address for support, but if I remember correctly this one was used previously:

chipmixer@protonmail.com

I do not completely believe that is accurate.  I can load other pages... both clearnet and onion pages.  But not CM.  Sure... not every page loads every time.  But CM has not loaded for 48 hours... and I have tried at least 100 times.

Sure, but Chipmixer is constantly under attack, and scammers are always trying to scam people with fake website and new techniques.
Sometimes it's better to have no service to fix some things, instead of people losing coins from attacks.

[stevario]

You could also try contacting them yourself with writing an email explaining them your exact situation.
I don't know if they are still using the same email address for support, but if I remember correctly this one was used previously:

Yep... I had actually sent an email to that address politely mentioning the situation.  I have not heard back.  I will give it some time.

Sure, but Chipmixer is constantly under attack, and scammers are always trying to scam people with fake website and new techniques.
Sometimes it's better to have no service to fix some things, instead of people losing coins from attacks.

Agreed.  And to be honest... now that you have provided me with some level headed thinking... I do feel better.  Thank you for that.  I do believe this is all going to work itself out.

[LeGaulois]

@ChipMixer

Is there any chance that in a near future it will be possible to mix using the .com version if you can fix the troubles that it brought?
Or the decision is final

Secondly, is it possible to share what was the percentage of people using Tor VS the clearnet (approximately of course).
I understand it could be something private, but well it doesn't cost me anything to try

happy holydays folks