I received the payment and just sent my coins to the mixer's address. Will post my review when I receive the coins. Sorry for the delay.
[banned mixer] review:
What is [banned mixer] (beginner's POV): [banned mixer] is a website that mixes your crypto coins and sends them from addresses that is very difficult/impossible to track. So this way the source from which you received the crypto coins can never be tracked.
How does it work: The steps are as follows:
1. You need to visit https://[banned mixer]/
2. Then click "Mix My Coins" which is a blue-colored button.
3. You'll be redirected to the page: https://[banned mixer]/?mix. Enter your 2 "receiving" address/s: one is mandatory and second is optional.
4. Click "Mix My Coins".
5. You'll be redirected to the page where a "sending" address would be displayed. You need to either scan the QR code and send bitcoins or send them manually. Note: The amount should be >= 0.001 BTC and should be max 50 BTC. You will have 168 hours to send the BTC.
6. Once you send the BTC, you will notice this text below the QR code: "A transaction is detected, the sum is X.X BTC, awaiting confirmation"
Optional: You can choose to download the "Letter of Guarantee" which is a button displayed below "Bitcoin Mixer 2.0" which shows the PGP Signed Message. You can even close the page as you wish or bookmark it if you need to visit it later. You can also choose to mix more coins for which you need to follow the same process (steps 3-6).
7. Your coins will appear at your "receiving" address within a time interval of 6 hours.
My experience: I tested the website yesterday and since it was the first time I ever used a mixer, I was a bit clueless of how it works. I thought it would require some tedious steps of creating an account or something more but it was not the case. The website had too much information on the home page which made it look little bit confusing as there were no steps mentioned of how to go about. I had to figure it out on my own and hence I added the steps above (hope they are useful). I entered my "receiving" address (noticed you could add one more address) and then sent 0.0015 BTC to the address mentioned on the website. It displayed the text "A transaction is detected, the sum is 0.0015 BTC, awaiting confirmation". This message did not change even after refreshing the page and it kept displaying "awaiting confirmation" after receiving about 20+ confirmations. Note: This transaction got confirmed in less than 5 minutes. I wasn't sure to close the page or leave it open as I felt I may require to revisit it in case I don't receive my coins. I left it open for 3 hours and was ready to wait for 2 more hours till I receive the coins but to my surprise I saw a micro transaction after 3 hours in my wallet and after few minutes, the second and last one arrived. The fee was 50+ sats/byte which was more than sufficient to get the transactions confirmed in time. However, I did not know they would be sent in parts as I did not ask for the same. End of the story is I received my coins after waiting for 3 hours but still the website kept displaying the same text as before as if it was still "awaiting confirmation". I downloaded the Letter of Guarantee which showed the PGP Signed Message.
Pros:
1. Transaction fee added is good enough.
2. Letter of Guarantee assures anonymity.
3. Mixing coins does not require too many tedious steps to follow.
Cons:
1. No explanation on how to mix coins was given on the website.
2. Even after the transaction was confirmed, it said "awaiting confirmation". It does not show how many confirmations does it need to send out the mixed coins.
3. Sending micro transactions was not something I prefer as it sometimes increases the fee while sending out those coins. Users should get the option to choose if they want to receive the coins in one transaction or multiple transactions.
4. Time taken was long. As some users would require to receive the coins urgently, this may be an issue for them.
Some recommendations/changes required:
1. This text is grammatically incorrect "Enter your Bitcoin forward to address below:"
2. A user can be given an option to create an account wherein he could receive the Letter of Guarantee via email then and be notified of his transaction getting confirmed and that he received the coins. While downloading "Letter of Guarantee" it's better if the text document is named the same instead of "LetterGuarantee".
3. Add steps on how to use the website or a video tutorial if possible.
4. A user should know how many confirmations are required to confirm the transaction instead of displaying "awaiting confirmation". Till now I can see the same text even though I have receive the coins and the transaction is confirmed on blockchain. When the transaction is confirmed, the page can be refreshed and also he should know if it's safe to close the page.
Final Verdict: Overall, the mixer is good and I couldn't myself trace the source. I feel that unlike many the 5% fee charged for my transaction is fine as I can see that the mixer needs to send the transactions through various addresses where the fee that need to be paid for the transaction to get confirmed is high so in cases where the transaction amount is below 0.1 BTC, the fee is fine else a fixed fee should be charged.
