[ANN] [banned mixer] | Best Bitcoin Mixer | Extra Layer of Privacy by XMR Bridge

[ABCbits]

My review about Mixero

Initial visit

Using Tor Browser, i visit both clearnet ([banned mixer]) and onion version of Mixero website. The clearnet version load faster, but it's not surprising since Tor use 6 hops to access onion website while it only use 3 hops to access clearnet website. As i mentioned on earlier post, there are so many JS library used[1]. But this time i also notice clearnet version access fonts.gstatic.com and fonts.googleapis.com. It could be red flag for some people who have very serious privacy concern, so it'd be great if those file is hosted on your own server.

You should know that bitcoin transactions on the blockchain are far from secure and do not ensure the safety of your transactions or their privacy.

When i check "About" page, i see ambiguous claim about Bitcoin/blockchain security. This sentence need to be worded better to let people know you're talking about possible security reduction due to transparent blockchain, not other kind of security (cryptography, PoW, etc.).

If you have any questions or if you are facing a problem you can contact us via our email, [banned mixer]@protonmail.com

When i read about contact method, i notice you only use protonmail. I would recommend you to mention it's more secure if user also use protonmail due to end-to-end encryption[2] and there's free pricing tier option[3]. And adding additional contact method would be great addition.

Mixing Bitcoin

To try mixing, i decide to use Tor Browser and onion version of Mixero website. As i mentioned on earlier post[1], Taproot/P2TR address isn't supported, so i decide to use native SegWit/Bech32 address. And since i only plan to send Bitcoin slightly higher than 0.002BTC, i only choose 1 destination address with 1.8% service fee. Afterwards, i was presented with deposit address and button to download guarantee latter.

I decide to download guarantee latter and then send Bitcoin from my wallet. Shortly after sending the Bitcoin, i click "check transaction" and it shows pop up which say receive the fund and i can close the page. After almost 2 hours i received CoinJoined/mixed coin. I checked received value and it match with 50K satoshi fee/address and 1.8% service fee.

Conclusion

Overall the mixing process is relative easy. But as other user mentioned, choosing percentage of each destination and flexible service fee are important feature which should be added. Obviously there should be lower/upper percentage limit for both destination address and service fee. And personally i feel 0.002BTC lower limit could be turn off for few people people since other mixer such as cryptomixer[4] and Whirlpool CoinJoin on Sparrow Wallet[5] only have 0.001 BTC limit.


[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5422495.msg61365081#msg61365081
[2] https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
[3] https://proton.me/support/create-a-free-email-account-address
[4] http://[banned mixer]/faq.html
[5] https://sparrowwallet.com/docs/mixing-whirlpool.html

[Mixero]

Thank you for your honest opinion. We are taking into account everything you have said and will probably make improvements as a result of your review.

We have already made improvements, it is now possible to change the percentage for each address and also we have added more detail to the Check transaction function which is now much more accurate on the current state of the mixing process.

Have a nice day!

[hugeblack]

[banned mixer] REVIEW- PART I
Quick rating:
Overall Rating: (3.5 Stars)
Website Design & Readability: (4 Stars)
Mixing Process: (3 Stars)
Tor: (4 Stars)
Updates: (5 Stars)
Speed: (4 Stars)

I liked the interface, it's very simple and readable, it needs some edits but it's very good.
The availability of the translation option for several languages is excellent, the response of the support team and the continuous update is good, you need to gain more trust and add things that are not available to competitors such as mixing with the lightning network, controlling the time of receipt, sending coins after a specific block number, and any feature that proves that you are You destroy logs.


.Questions that need to be answered:.

Can the address be reused? I noticed that the home page leads to this page (,) and therefore if I update it or open it in a new browser, I will get a different address, so can I reuse my old address? then how service fees will be calculated, If not, there is no express rule forbidding it.

LETTER OF GUARANTEE massage: It does not contain the date, fees, receiver's address, or any other details. you can see ----START DATE----- but its out of signed massage.

Why there are no PGP signature? In other words, if someone gets access to the private key of this address "32soLWBMMyH2RkkH7xaMcsAyrKjiaGXwU5," all your old LETTER OF GUARANTEE massages will be useless.

Proof of Receipt: Can I obtain proof that I have received the coins from [banned mixer]? In the event that it was sent to an exchange and it was frozen because it came from a casino or gambling site.

.Urgent things to add:.

1) Privacy Level: You can call it any name, but applying it will be useful on the home page an indicator that measures the degree of privacy so that if you add more addresses and different fees, you will get a higher level in the "Privacy Level" indicator while give a warning for the same address or low fees.


Just re-phrase this sentence in a slider and add it to the home page.

In the same way, a higher fee allows your transaction to take faster to arrive. So it's fix delay which can go as fast as two hours with a high fee and as long as 4 hours with a lower fee. In fact, the real delay is impossible to know in advance because of the blockchain variations. That's why Mixero tells an average thanks to all tests and transactions already did

Choosing the lowest fee for a simple shipment provides you with the basic routing protocol that is more than sufficient and secure for smaller amounts.

2) BTC mempool: It would be nice to give an estimate of the fees so that the user does not send too many fees in the transaction.
3)Token ID for each transaction: Almost the only way to prove ownership is Letter Of Guarantee, but if you add a token for each transaction, this will end the confusion in the issue of address reuse.
Modified service fees: It is better to have them dynamic rather than a fixed fee (a slider between them 0.9% to 2.4%) as this will make it difficult to track transactions.
API: You can add it for developers or for those who do not want to use the site directly, and you can also try to integrate the site as an addition to Electrum wallet.


Please contact and pay to @madu -----> Breaking Mixing Services He has proven that most mixing services can be traced, if he proves that your mixing service cannot be traced then you will get a privilege on all mixing services, at least on this forum.

I'm going to write a second part that talks about how your mixing service work, but I'm busy now and I'll see how all the updates will be before I start writing it.

[Mixero]

Hello and thank you for your opinion. Every opinion is important and we take them all into account for future improvements.

Concerning the reuse of an address used previously it is not possible and indeed we do not notify it so we will add a message in relation to that.

For the privacy level we will add this option directly on the homepage that will of course be linked to the service fee and we will detail this more on our about section. We are currently working on a new way to obfuscate transactions for fees from 2%. This is based on swapping to monero and other techniques which makes tracking much harder knowing the degree of privacy that the monero blockchain provides.

For developers an api could be integrated in a few months.

Thanks again for your opinion and have a nice day!

[khaled0111]

I've just finished testing [banned mixer] and I've to say that there are many improvements from the last time I checked it, a week ago!
Bellow i'll share my experience and what I've noticed during the whole process:

* When you open [banned mixer] you will be requested to provide a destination address and here is what I noticed:
  - taproot is not supported although it helps improve users' privacy which is the main purpose of using a mixer.
  - if you add more destination address fields, enter the address then adjust the percentage, the percentage of the first address will be auto-adjusted accordingly and you can proceed. However, if you add more fields, adjust the percentages without entering the destination addresses first, there will be no auto-adjustment. You won't be able to proceed but it won't tell you what's the error either.
  -! you can provide an invalid address and [banned mixer] will accept it as long as it starts with the right chars and has the right length (take this one as an example: 3HGky2M2JsLsmRqoQkBwsf8Ts9W3mnb9rG)

* When you click proceed, you will be redirected to a new page where you can download the letter of guarantee and will be given the address to send your coins to:
  - maybe am missing something but I couldn't / didn't know how to verify the authenticity of the LoG. There is no guide on how to do it and most importantly I couldn't find the address it was signed with! Again, I may've missed something.
  - while waiting for the transaction to get confirmed, I opened a new tab and started a new session. When I went back to the first tab I was surprised that it's the same session as the new one and there is no way to restore the old one! A session id should be provided for each mixing order.

Now the most important part:
Surprisingly, few seconds after the mixing process started, I received the allegedly mixed coins.
The transaction I received was flagged as CPFP which made me curious and looked it up on a block explorer and after going few hops back I was surprised to see the address I sent the coins from!!
So what happened: I sent the coins to be mixed, mixero deducted the fees, sent the coins to few new addresses then sent the remaining to the destination address!

I hope I'm missing something or this is just due to a bug or something, but this isn't coin mixing!

For transparency purposes:
this is the sent transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/9f9271c8f0cb3c9fe90b95b85d68eecec32ebd9c6764dc84e342b46f6330891d
This is the received transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/cfe5c0fe4d6098fffb07a1382bb40da1ac694fc0733c68297b1f1a252b18fc35

[Mixero]

Hello and thank you for your opinion.

Concerning the small bug of address this one is going to be fixed as soon as possible it looks like a bug with the regex.

Concerning the sessions we should integrate a system of restoration of sessions what would facilitate the management of the payments for the users.

The fact that you received your funds within seconds of seeing the message that we are starting to mix your funds is very strange. Since most clients receive their funds on average after 1 to 2 hours after seeing this message.

You say that you were able to find the address from which you send the money? This does not actually prove that the owner of the address that received the money is the one who sent it. In reality everything has been done so that the funds received at the destination do not link the address with which you with send your funds. Each mixer has different ways of doing this but the goal is to provide a way to remove any link with the owner of the wallet that sends it and the one that receives it.

Have a nice day and thank you.

[dkbit98]

First I have to say that Mixero has nothing to so with original CoinJoin technology so it's misleading to include that term in description on this website.
CoinJoin is trustless and decentralized method for combining Bitcoin from multiple addresses into single transaction, and we have something different with Mixero.
I won't go deeply into comparison and I would leave that to experts, but I will shortly write about my experience with using Mixero one time.

I opened website, entered my receiving Bitcoin address and selected lowest possible fee that was 0.9%, after that I sent my coins to address shown on next page.
After few hours I received my coins but I was surprised to see that I received much lower amount of coins than I originally sent.
I won't say exact amount of coins I sent to keep my privacy, but I will say that Mixero took more than 5% fee, that is something they don't even offer on their website!
Imagine if you sent 1 Bitcoin and you receive 0.95 Bitcoin back... that is over $840 just on fees!
I selected 0.9% fee so I should have received around 0.991 BTC, but htis was not the case.
Highest fee they offer on Mixero website 2.4% but you need to select this manually, so there is clear mistake or misleading information from Mixero.

I didn't contact Mixero support for this, but this is very wrong and it doesn't look good to me, so I would suggest people to stay away from Mixero website.

[Mixero]

Hello, we are a little surprised to hear this review. If you took a look at our about section you can read that we take an additional fee of 0.0005 BTC fixed and 0.0002 BTC per additional address. If you have sent a small amount of money this explains why the fees seem high. For example, if you sent 30$ (0.0018 BTC) and selected 0.9% fee you would have to deduct 0.9% of this amount + 0.0005 BTC fee which equals a final amount of 0.0012838 BTC (21.67$).

So if someone sends 1 BTC using 0.9% fee he will pay about 160$ in fees.

To conclude, for smaller amounts the percentage may seem higher but this is due to the fixed fee of 0.0005 BTC.

Thank you for your understanding, have a nice day!

[dkbit98]

Hello, we are a little surprised to hear this review. If you took a look at our about section you can read that we take an additional fee of 0.0005 BTC fixed and 0.0002 BTC per additional address. If you have sent a small amount of money this explains why the fees seem high. For example, if you sent 30$ (0.0018 BTC) and selected 0.9% fee you would have to deduct 0.9% of this amount + 0.0005 BTC fee which equals a final amount of 0.0012838 BTC (21.67$).

This information should be clearly written on the main page, fixed fee will be charged plus service fee, but this makes your service almost unusable for sending smaller amount of coins.
I only glimpsed FAQ and About page, and my math was wrong for 1 Bitcoin sent, but I sent more than 30$ of Bitcoin and I expected to receive that amount minus service and transaction fees.

[digaran]

Do you provide bitcoin for test or tbtc to do that? I would like to test and compare it with other mixers.

[Mixero]

Hello, we are a little surprised to hear this review. If you took a look at our about section you can read that we take an additional fee of 0.0005 BTC fixed and 0.0002 BTC per additional address. If you have sent a small amount of money this explains why the fees seem high. For example, if you sent 30$ (0.0018 BTC) and selected 0.9% fee you would have to deduct 0.9% of this amount + 0.0005 BTC fee which equals a final amount of 0.0012838 BTC (21.67$).

This information should be clearly written on the main page, fixed fee will be charged plus service fee, but this makes your service almost unusable for sending smaller amount of coins.
I only glimpsed FAQ and About page, and my math was wrong for 1 Bitcoin sent, but I sent more than 30$ of Bitcoin and I expected to receive that amount minus service and transaction fees.

Hello we have made some changes to our about section to make it a little more accurate and detailed.

Do you provide bitcoin for test or tbtc to do that? I would like to test and compare it with other mixers.

Hello, a review campaign with earnings as a reward was launched about 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately this one is now over. A new campaign could be launched in the coming weeks. We will keep you informed.

Have a nice day !

[digaran]

Well if you have already done the review campaign then there is no need to repeat it, unless you'd like for new features to be tested and reviewed. One of the best ways to gain trust and popularity is by escrowing whatever the accepted max amount on your site is to give confidence to people using your service, you could tell your customers about such escrowed funds. You will soon find out how that would work in your interest.
Don't forget the zero fee option, at least for a while, not earning money and even spending from pocket for a few month to gather more and more clients is a powerful advertisement.
You could set a time limit for zeroo fee policy, something like 6 month, when you get enough traffic and gained enough trust, you could start charging fees, not too much but stay competetive since competition is tough in this business especially with giants like chipmonks aka chipmixer.😜

[Mixero]

Hello everyone, we have decided to lower the minimum service fee to 0.2% until February 2nd. We are lowering the minimum fee to encourage people to try our service.

Have a nice day!

[saxydev]

~

For transparency purposes:
this is the sent transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/9f9271c8f0cb3c9fe90b95b85d68eecec32ebd9c6764dc84e342b46f6330891d
This is the received transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/cfe5c0fe4d6098fffb07a1382bb40da1ac694fc0733c68297b1f1a252b18fc35

Thanks a lot for the feedback, I was looking forward some txd from this mixer! And you are right, just by using the explorer itself you can find that basically it moved the coins between same addresses. This is more like doing mixing yourself with some random pubkeys ending up in the same place. I was a bit excited about this new mixer but now I am feeling dissapointed.

[Mixero]

~

For transparency purposes:
this is the sent transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/9f9271c8f0cb3c9fe90b95b85d68eecec32ebd9c6764dc84e342b46f6330891d
This is the received transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/cfe5c0fe4d6098fffb07a1382bb40da1ac694fc0733c68297b1f1a252b18fc35

Thanks a lot for the feedback, I was looking forward some txd from this mixer! And you are right, just by using the explorer itself you can find that basically it moved the coins between same addresses. This is more like doing mixing yourself with some random pubkeys ending up in the same place. I was a bit excited about this new mixer but now I am feeling dissapointed.

Hi, can you be more clear when you say "it moved the coins between same addresses"? This person you are talking about says that he was surprised to be able to find the address where the funds were sent from using the blockchain. Also we do not reuse any previous addresses.

If you want to mix your funds yourself you are free to do it yourself and many tools like Wasabi Wallet or Joinmarket and many others will allow you to do it. Our service allows you to simplify all this with a few clicks.

Sincerely yours!

[coupable]

Hi Mixero Team

I am one of the three participants in the review campaign who were late in publishing their work. And since the deadline for publishing the review is tomorrow, I decided to try the mixer tonight using my chrome browser with metamask addon installed. But the problem I encountered is that the mixero link is not working. Each time I try to access the site, the link changes and I see this red screen with a warning text :



Official link:

Code:

https://[banned mixer]/

MetaMask warning link:

Code:

https://metamask.github.io/phishing-warning/v1.2.1/#hostname=[banned mixer]&href=https%3A%2F%2F[banned mixer]%2F&newIssueUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmetamask%2Feth-phishing-detect%2Fissues%2Fnew

Changing the browser to Firefox, the link works without a problem. It's clear that it's a warning from metamask app in my browser. Any explanation why i got that warning then why it's necessary to disable metamask. I didn't disable metamask and i won't too. I will continue with Firefox.


All previous published reviews were good, in my opinion, and mentioned all the necessary details and notes. I will be documenting my experience with the mixer by describing each step :

1- I chose to use Segwit's address and pay the largest percentage of the fees 2.4%.

At this point I noticed the fee percentage set as the highest value which is 2.4%. I find it reasonable to specify the lowest percentage that the user can pay, but why do you specify the highest percentage? One of the users may wish to pay an additional percentage as a thank you or support reward. I also did not like the association of the fee rate with the speed of the process. I think it is better to set a fixed fee for completing the service for all users at a unified time, and not according to the percentage of the fees paid by each of them. You can imagine one of the users who wants to do the process quickly and does not have an additional amount to pay as a fee for a quick service, of course he will choose another mixer.

2- After clicking the proceed button, i got this page:

I choose to send the minimum amount which is 0.002. But why i see the "View Transaction" option before i broadcast the transaction? I think it's better to show that command once detect the deposit transaction. I have also downloaded the Letter of Garantee which contain basic info about the operation.

3- The system detects my deposit transaction so fast and i can finally see this message by clicking the "View Transaction" command:

In the message it says "waiting for 1 confirmation". But after the transaction got one block confirmation the message changes to:

What does it mean "we just start mixing your funds" or is it just a greeting message instead of saying that the system is waiting for more network confirmations? As right after the transaction got the second confirmation, i got this happy screen:


In total, i have sent 0.002 btc and received 0.00142611 btc. I am not that good in maths but it seems to me that the deducted amount is much more higher than 2.4%. In dollars, i sent 33$ and only receive 23$, the fee is about 10$. Or maybe i will receive another transaction?

[Mixero]

Hello thank you for your honest opinion!

Regarding the Metamask alert we have already notified and it is very strange we do not see the connection with "phishing" metamask may automatically restrict domains providing a service related to crypto-currencies that are not official according to them.

Regarding the status messages, when you send your btc we need at least 1 confirmation from the network to proceed with the mixing process.

Finally, regarding the fees, we keep repeating that everyone should absolutely read the about section of our site. All users of bitcoin mixer should do so. We clearly specify in Service Fees that a fixed fee of 0.005 BTC will be deducted in addition to the service fee.

Have a nice day!

[coupable]

Regarding the Metamask alert we have already notified and it is very strange we do not see the connection with "phishing" metamask may automatically restrict domains providing a service related to crypto-currencies that are not official according to them.

I think it is necessary to work on resolving this problem and verifying whether it is the same problem with phone users. Only that I was able to dispense with a large market of users and potential customers. Metamask has millions of users and you can imagine their opinions about Mixer when you see this page.

Regarding the status messages, when you send your btc we need at least 1 confirmation from the network to proceed with the mixing process.

You received the bitcoin once the transaction received a second network confirmation. Are all operations sent immediately after the second confirmation, or does this vary by deducting the fees that each user will pay?

Finally, regarding the fees, we keep repeating that everyone should absolutely read the about section of our site. All users of bitcoin mixer should do so. We clearly specify in Service Fees that a fixed fee of 0.005 BTC will be deducted in addition to the service fee.

I see that this information should be shown on the home page in the fees field. There is no sense in placing it on the "About" page, because you should expect that the user will not visit that page because of his confidence in your service, and even if he visits it once, he will not necessarily remember every piece of information. When he discovers that an additional fee has been deducted without it appearing in the Mix process, do not expect him to return to using the Mixer.

[Mixero]

Hello everyone, a new way to mix your funds should be available in the coming days. This way will not cost any extra fee except the service fee unlike the current method (0.0005BTC per address + Service fees).

This way of mixing is a method rarely seen in the world of crypto mixers. Indeed this one is based on swapping, BTC->XMR->BTC. After exchanging your funds into XMR the funds will go through automatically generated wallets which are not linked to any exchange making it virtually «impossible» to trace.

An on-chain analysis is not possible because Monero is a privacy-based crypto and it is not possible to track these transactions on the blockchain. All links to the Monero addresses of the exchanges will be broken, as the funds will go through several Monero wallet. Also no correlation can be made with the amount of funds that will be exchanged from Monero to Bitcoin since the funds will be split into random pieces.

After that the funds will finally be exchanged back into BTC with transiting through some wallet and finally arriving at your destination address.

A message will be published to announce the release of this method.

Have a nice day!

[dkbit98]

This way of mixing is a method rarely seen in the world of crypto mixers. Indeed this one is based on swapping, BTC->XMR->BTC. After exchanging your funds into XMR the funds will go through automatically generated wallets which are not linked to any exchange making it virtually «impossible» to trace.

I don0t think this method is rarely seen.
I already seen this swap being done on other websites in a manual way, and one website is even offering this automatically conversion already (I won't advertise it here publicly).
However, source of ''mixed'' Bitcoin that is sent to receiving address is not clear to me, and how is this any different than other mixers.

An on-chain analysis is not possible because Monero is a privacy-based crypto and it is not possible to track these transactions on the blockchain. All links to the Monero addresses of the exchanges will be broken, as the funds will go through several Monero wallet. Also no correlation can be made with the amount of funds that will be exchanged from Monero to Bitcoin since the funds will be split into random pieces.

On-chain analysis is still going to be available for Bitcoin that is sent both ways, and unless you have freshly mined coins it's not going to be impossible to make connection, especially if there is connection with sent and received Bitcoin.