Is CoinJoining/Mixing/Whirlpooling worth it in the end?

[witcher_sense]

Your statement reminds me that with 'Poison' or 'Haircut' heuristic model, almost all Bitcoin would be deemed as tainted coins

I doubt it that it will be possible to taint all bitcoins, because some of them are constantly being cleared through transaction fees, coinbase transactions don't consume any UTXO, so modern heuristic used by surveillance companies is not suitable in such cases. However, some governments can start punishing those miners who include tainted transactions in a block, if miners fail to somehow check legitimacy of every transaction they include, they will be immediately shutdown. If they include suspicious transactions with very high fees, they may also be punished as money launderers.

[ranochigo]

If you're going to be receiving Bitcoins, there is a high chance that your coins are already tainted. If the adoption rises even more in the future, most of the coins that you're going to receive would've been tainted, albeit just through a few hops. Unfortunately, the authorities don't care about your reasoning because they are not concerned about whether you can spend the coins.

I'll say, just go for it. You're better off protecting your privacy than trying to stay on the safer side. If you get banned off any platform, at least you'll know that they aren't conscious about your privacy. They also can't prove that you're doing anything illegal since using a mixer doesn't directly constitute you doing illegal things.

[BrewMaster]

the more people use mixing options to mix their bitcoins the harder it is going to get for these centralized services to block deposits and cause any trouble for their users because eventually a large portion of their users could have mixed coins and any limitation could cost them a lot of revenue.
right now they can put up the restrictions because of low number of users and the stronger government pressure.

[figmentofmyass]

But the risks? Read OP. I believe privacy is less-important for a trader who is here only to profit in fiat in my opinion. Exchange - wallet - exchange.

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

For example, you earned a lot of money in this forum already in your signature campaign. Have you paid taxes from that earnings?
Did you send your coins from crypto-games campaign straight to an exchange, linking your ID with crypto-games (a casino) and your bitcointalk profile?

Are casinos legal in your country? Shouldn't you pay taxes on your earnings? Can you explain all that to the authorities?

i think these risks are being overblown. the people that really need to mix outputs are those withdrawing from darknet marketplaces and gambling sites. that's what will get your exchanges accounts shut down, and possibly attention from law enforcement.

some people get too hung up on tax issues IMO, thinking the tax authorities are gonna demand an immaculate, provable record of every transaction ever made in your life since you acquired your first mBTC. i simply don't buy into that sort of paranoia---and if i did, i don't see why mixing would do you much good since you couldn't prove anything about the source of your coins.

tax authorities are always trying to minimize time spent on any case. more than anything, they want to quickly reconcile your fiat transfers (assuming they are income) with the expected taxes due. they have no interest in coordinating an expensive multi-agency criminal investigation because someone is advertising a casino in their bitcointalk profile.

[hatshepsut93]

2. Send the mixed coins(on different batches) on some addresses that I own, probably more than 10 times(preferably around 25 just to be sure). Pretty much a manual version of Samourai Wallet's Ricochet[1] because I'm cheap. This is to hopefully not sound alarms on anti-mixing(or soon to be) centralized exchanges as the coins were moved a lot of times after the time it was mixed. Or if they actually went that far and "detected" the past mixing and asked you about it, you can just say that you don't know about it lol because the mixing was like 25 transactions ago. 🤷‍♀️

If you are spending the whole UTXO, a chainanalysis algorithm might assume that the coin didn't change owner.

As an example, if you have an output with 0.24235958 BTC, it would be strange if this amount minus the fee was moved to another address - either it's a deposit to some service, which is easy to check because of how hot wallets operate, or you're sending to your own new address. A natural transaction would look like 0.24 BTC + change + fee.

[bitmover]

But the risks? Read OP. I believe privacy is less-important for a trader who is here only to profit in fiat in my opinion. Exchange - wallet - exchange.

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

tax authorities are always trying to minimize time spent on any case. more than anything, they want to quickly reconcile your fiat transfers (assuming they are income) with the expected taxes due. they have no interest in coordinating an expensive multi-agency criminal investigation because someone is advertising a casino in their bitcointalk profile.

I agree with this as well... But, anyway, there is a risk in not mixing coins.
Even though it is improbable that government will be asking more taxes for people who come to bitcointalk, I don't doubt they would do it if it is convenient for them (depending on the country you live in)

[buwaytress]

2. Send the mixed coins(on different batches) on some addresses that I own, probably more than 10 times(preferably around 25 just to be sure). Pretty much a manual version of Samourai Wallet's Ricochet[1] because I'm cheap. This is to hopefully not sound alarms on anti-mixing(or soon to be) centralized exchanges as the coins were moved a lot of times after the time it was mixed. Or if they actually went that far and "detected" the past mixing and asked you about it, you can just say that you don't know about it lol because the mixing was like 25 transactions ago. 🤷‍♀️

If you are spending the whole UTXO, a chainanalysis algorithm might assume that the coin didn't change owner.

As an example, if you have an output with 0.24235958 BTC, it would be strange if this amount minus the fee was moved to another address - either it's a deposit to some service, which is easy to check because of how hot wallets operate, or you're sending to your own new address. A natural transaction would look like 0.24 BTC + change + fee.

Correct, never mind chainanalysis algo, any algo, including the new Coinbase one, should reliably assume entirely spent UTXOs are mainly with the same owner, which is why chronologically illogical and sum illogical mixing is still a great way to break that chain analysis.

I even use most of my actual spends to consolidate, and I'm sure algos identify this behaviour as well.

[Wind_FURY]

But the risks? Read OP. I believe privacy is less-important for a trader who is here only to profit in fiat in my opinion. Exchange - wallet - exchange.

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

Read what I said, it's different for some users, and I believe it's more risky to mix coins if you're only doing Bitstamp - Your Wallet - Bitstamp/your other KYC/AML exchange.

[gentlemand]

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

But they are fully known to you. The risk with mixing is that attitudes, techniques and surveillance will change over time. If staying put and doing nothing is a minimal or manageable risk then the path of least resistance makes most sense.

[figmentofmyass]

But the risks? Read OP. I believe privacy is less-important for a trader who is here only to profit in fiat in my opinion. Exchange - wallet - exchange.

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

Read what I said, it's different for some users, and I believe it's more risky to mix coins if you're only doing Bitstamp - Your Wallet - Bitstamp/your other KYC/AML exchange.

i think that's a fair assumption. coins derived from exchanges are generally treated as "clean".

spending outputs should be treated with care and on a case-by-case basis. one should always consider where their outputs come from, and at what times it is appropriate to use them.

i have several different wallets with outputs from different sources, some of which generally need to be mixed or otherwise transferred through a third party service that is unlikely to flag them before i can deposit funds to a regulated exchange. for example, binance and kucoin have no policies against gambling. coinbase does. when i need to sell gambling winnings into dollars, one way is to deposit to one of these more lenient exchanges, trade the BTC into USDC, then transfer to coinbase and convert to dollars. this has the added bonus of saving me a ton on trading fees.

[bitmover]

But they are fully known to you. The risk with mixing is that attitudes, techniques and surveillance will change over time. If staying put and doing nothing is a minimal or manageable risk then the path of least resistance makes most sense.

I think this should be threated case by case, as figmentofmyass said.

I prefer to keep some of my bitcoin anonymous. It depends on which country you live, what are your bitcoin sources and so on.

Just like attitudes,techniques  and  surveillance  regarding mixers will change over time, those things may also change over time for bitcoin holders and people who receive bitcoin as payment.

I agree it is safer to "do nothing", but it is even safer to play both: do nothing with some coins and mix others.

There are risks when you don't mix them as well.

Read what I said, it's different for some users, and I believe it's more risky to mix coins if you're only doing Bitstamp - Your Wallet - Bitstamp/your other KYC/AML exchange.

Almost everyone who replied in this thread receive bitcoin as payment from casino or mixers.

Ofc if you only do bitstamp > wallet > bitstamp you have no reason to mix. Then you shouldn't mix. There are many risks involved, even the mixer service can run away with your money.

[perfect999]

This privacy of a thing is something I’m no longer looking into since I discovered that Bitcoin is not 100 percent anonymous. So since then I am just using Bitcoin and not caring about anonymity and all that, I just use it because I like the technology and all that. But if it’s all about staying anonymous, nah I don’t stress myself for that.

I have known about these coin–mixers for long now, but I have not had interest in making use of them. Someone once posted in this forum how his coins were seized by an exchange because they suspect that it was mixed. I didn’t get to know whether he got it back or not, it’s a long story, but I hope he did. That’s something I wouldn’t try.