I would say: "the more the merrier"!

First, I know SegWit got activated, but I have no idea how I can use it. As far as I understand now, my Bitcoin client has to support it, and with all the fighting about how to allow Bitcoin scaling, I haven't seen a client that lets me use SegWit.

Second, I assume that once SegWit is in use, any other Hub will also promise they won't keep logs, just like I now hope/assume Bitcoin hubs don't store IP addresses.

As far as I understand, SegWit and Lighning Network risk being a centralized service with only a few big Hubs. You could have a first mover advantage by creating one before others do.

But, from your mixer's point of view, aren't you taking away the need for your own service if in the future most transactions are done off-chain?



I'd love to see Bitcoin scale to allow more transactions, and I don't really care if that's through bigger blocks or secure off-chain transactions. All I know is, it's taking way too long and fees are crazy high now. When I started using Bitcoin back in 2015, 0.00001 BTC fee was enough for a fast transaction. Now, fees are 100 times higher and Bitcoin is 20 times more expensive. That makes fees 2000 times more expensive in terms of dollars. It used to be cheaper than bank transactions, now it's 50 times more expensive than the commercial SEPA rate in Europe.

Using SegWit to reduce fees will be trivial once wallets start supporting it: just upgrade to a SegWit wallet and start generating SegWit addresses instead of normal addresses. There are no further considerations needed. Everything is 100% compatible.

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It's a good idea to use LN, but I think that it will be difficult right now to act as a robustly-anonymous LN hub. It is technically possible, but I think that you'd have to make extensive modifications to the code of something like c-lightning. (By default, LN nodes should be mostly private, but they don't go out of their way to break connections or anything like that.)

One thing you could do is to just have deposits and withdrawals happen via LN. A user would set up a LN channel with you (or route to you via LN nodes), and then rather than getting a chip's private key, users could deposit/withdraw via LN without having any on-chain transactions.

Note that although LN node software like c-lightning is working, and people can test it out, it's not production-ready yet. It'll be quite some time before ordinary people are using LN, I think.

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You should also look into TumbleBit.

I use mixer services to protect my family from possible kidnappers and hackers. You become a target, when people figure out how much money you have. A public Blockchain on it's own, do not protect you from corrupt governments agents and criminals who wants to harm you or your family.

I want a mixer services without a lot of complexity and cheap fees. If Bitcoin and the LN enables micro transactions, I want the mixer service to protect those micro transactions too, because they might also link me to those bad actors I have highlighted above.

I am glad to see that my favourite mixer service are already looking ahead to adapt to the changing technology. ^smile^