Listen up please to learn some new technical information...Got any good suggestions for trustless and low-fee mixers? I think all the P2P mixer projects are not yet fully ready, as far as I know.
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Tumblers like bitcoinfog provide better obfuscation, but the (huge) trade-off is that you should trust an unknown third party. I'd never risk more than 1% of my holdings to such services, but I think the service they provide is necessary and should be used, albeit with care and with just a very minor portion of ones funds at a time.
Problem is there is no way to know if a centralized service (VPN, exchange, mixer, tumbler, laundry) is hacked, under NSA gag order, dishonest, buggy, etc..
Also using the centralized (VPN, mixer, tumbler, laundry) identifies you as someone that deserves extra monitoring by the authorities.
A decentralized solution is always best, as
it should look like regular transactions.
Yes, I think CoinJoin should be a very good start. But do any really decentralised and fully working implementations of CoinJoin exist already? I don't think so and would be interested to know if they are.
I'm not aware of any either but don't let that deter you from using one of the already existing solutions even if they aren't perfect.
A
decentralized CoinJoin will have difficulty forming transactions (including unequal or equal transaction amounts) that look like this if anyone can join:
https://blockchain.info/tx/e4abb15310348edc606e597effc81697bfce4b6de7598347f17c2befd4febf3b?show_adv=trueA sharedcoin transaction will look something like this:
https://blockchain.info/tx/e4abb15310348edc606e597effc81697bfce4b6de7598347f17c2befd4febf3b (picked at random). As you can see multiple inputs and outputs make the determining the actual sender and receiver more difficult.
The server does not need to keep any logs and transactions are only kept in memory for a short time. However If the server was compromised or under subpoena it could be force...
Because the way it must work is the users sign the transaction first with their requested outputs, then in the second round they sign their payments as inputs to the transaction. If the payment inputs are less than the total, then the transaction is invalid. There is no way to determine who cheated and rate limit them. Thus the saboteur can stomp on every attempt to create a CoinJoin transaction and destroy the decentralized system.
DarkCoin says they can solve this by charging a fee, but you will see I originally proposed that idea in the CoinJoin thread and the requirement is all the participants must be permanently identified and then must use divide-and-conquer to whittle down to who was the saboteur. But identification defeats the mixing!
Thus I have not yet seen a workable decentralized CoinJoin that can scale. And I don't expect one.
I posted this to the CoinJoin thread to get their technical peer-review of my statement.
Now, if the zerocoin concept would be implemented in bitcoin, it would be cool.
Just forget zerocoin even in an altcoin it won't work. Because it requires a trusted person to hold the private key that can unlock everything including taking all the zerocoins. This can't be fixed (contrary to ruminations otherwise), it is a fundamental mathematical property of the way zero knowledge proofs work when combined with an accumulator.
Also zerocoin has to be dedicated to preset transactions amounts (e.g. 1 BTC) else the anonymity set can be trivially collapsed by comparing input and output transaction amounts.
Never recommend noobs to use Tor, it's a honeypot where they are worse off than not using Tor at all.
Noobs should use a trustworthy VPN instead.
The optimal solution is VPN + Tor.
Not if you stay in-network. Unfortunately, my services (bitcoin node) are not tor-enabled yet. Namecoin has the potential to facilitate this with human-readable addresses as well.
Not true. Tor is always subject to timing analysis by an entity such as the NSA (which is recording ans storing nearly all global encrypted traffic in Utah) which can see the encrypted packets running between Tor nodes.
Popular VPNs are also very likely all honeypots and unpopular ones give only a small anonymity set.
Currently the only known way to be reliably anonymous is use a connection to the internet that can't be traced to you, e.g. netcafe without cameras any where and don't drive your car as that has secret tracking built-in according to CEO of Ford, a throw-away mobile device and simm that doesn't have your id registered and used for no other activity, etc.