[ANN] Whirlwind.money | ⚡No Fee⚡ | Ultimate Privacy | Anonymity Mining 12% APR🔥

[LoyceV]

We built a product that is light-years ahead of the competition from a technical point of view

After reading this, Betamax vs VHS came to mind. "Being the best" doesn't guarantee winning the market.

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[sam00]

@whirlwindmoney excuse me if you don't want me telling you this again (I can delete this post if you want) but for me, the clearnet site is down again.
Here's a screenshot of the error message I get:



I figured since you just went live with the new update and the site was supposed to stay online, I'd let you know :/

[JollyGood]

I think they mentioned using TOR would be the best way to browse their website because there is an ongoing issue with the clearnet which really has no resolution in sight because those that are perpetrating the DDoS are determined.

I figured since you just went live with the new update and the site was supposed to stay online, I'd let you know :/

[sam00]

I think they mentioned using TOR would be the best way to browse their website because there is an ongoing issue with the clearnet which really has no resolution in sight because those that are perpetrating the DDoS are determined.

Yeah the TOR link is working just fine right now. I can access it.

Since @whirlwindmoney stated that the clearnet problems should be resolved with the next patch/update which they went live with today I just figured I'd let them know that they are still under heavy fire.

Clearnet is still down because it wasn't a priority until now, we wanted to finish up all changes on the actual product before dealing with this. It's on the list for tomorrow, and once we solve it we don't expect any more downtime.

[whirlwindmoney]

After reading this, Betamax vs VHS came to mind. "Being the best" doesn't mean guarantee winning the market.

While the bolded part is completely accurate, we don't think that specific comparison makes sense in this case because with our approach we are solving some fundamental issues that our competitor's systems suffer from instead of only having a few small differences so it's more like Blockbuster vs Netflix.

We could choose the easy way and use an existing popular model and only marginally improve whatever we could, but starting from a system that again, is fundamentally flawed, we could have never been satisfied with what we were offering and it would feel like we are stabbing our users in the back since we knew we could do way better.

We took the risk and implemented what we believe is the best privacy service currently available and later today we will also completely eliminate the withdraw fee making the service completely free for those that don't donate voluntarily. So if even in these conditions we won't become the most popular solution after a few months at most it certainly means that there is no true demand for real Bitcoin privacy and in that case with regret we will shut the service down, but it'd really be a shame if that happens.

By taking this route we basically made a bet that users will understand the unique features and advantages that we offer and we hope that it will pay off in the end. If not then we only lost the funds that we spent on marketing and that's not a big hit for us by any means, we'd just be incredibly frustrated knowing that all this work was for nothing.

@whirlwindmoney excuse me if you don't want me telling you this again (I can delete this post if you want) but for me, the clearnet site is down again.

Thank you for telling us, but we are making some changes as we speak and it will be online again after we are done. Tor is online as usual

[TryNinja]

Thank you for telling us, but we are making some changes as we speak and it will be online again after we are done. Tor is online as usual

May be a good idea to have some kind of maintenance page?

Something like "the clearnet page is in maintenance, please use the Tor version if you're in a hurry"...

[whirlwindmoney]

Below you can find the changelog with the latest updates -

Fees were eliminated altogether, unless you choose to donate voluntarily if you send 0.01 BTC to Whirlwind you can withdraw the full 0.01 BTC without even paying the transaction fees.

Clearnet should work flawlessly from now on, keep in mind that Tor is still the recommended way to access our service and if Clearnet is ever down again you can use the Tor version without any issues.

Open question/s: Would you find it useful if we made it possible to withdraw custom amounts like before? We could implement a checkbox that you'd have to click acknowledging that in certain cases you may not benefit from the same level of anonymity if you withdraw a custom amount.

You can still withdraw a custom amount in 1 transaction, we just made it harder since we want to discourage users from doing it. For example if you deposit 0.007BTC you'd need to make at least 3 separate withdrawals, 0.005/0.001/0.001. If you want to have them all sent in a single transaction you could first withdraw 0.005 to address A with a 1 hour delay, then refresh the page, input your Note private key and make another 0.001 withdrawal to the same address A with the same 1 hour delay and repeat the process again for the last 0.001. Doing this will result in receiving 0.007BTC to address A after 1 hour.

Do you feel like 'Fast' mode was useful and not having it is a problem? Should we make it available again?

We made the choices to switch to fungible outputs and deprecate the Fast mode for better overall Anonymity, but we are aware that this may lead to Whirlwind being slightly harder/more inconvenient to use in certain cases.

Changelog

04.27.2023 01:30:00 AM UTC
-Clearnet is online and stable
-Clearnet end-to-end encryption implemented
-Withdraw fees lowered to 0 - Whirlwind is now free to use unless you choose to donate

May be a good idea to have some kind of maintenance page?

Something like "the clearnet page is in maintenance, please use the Tor version if you're in a hurry"...

Thank you for the suggestion, we still have some work to do in regards to alerts and overall UX. We just completed pretty much every task we had on the backlog so now we will focus more on the remaining 'cosmetic' issues and explaining the service better by creating video tutorials and comparisons with other alternatives.

[nioctib_100]

Open question/s: Would you find it useful if we made it possible to withdraw custom amounts like before? We could implement a checkbox that you'd have to click acknowledging that in certain cases you may not benefit from the same level of anonymity if you withdraw a custom amount.

I think almost everyone would want the option to choose their withdrawal amount. A simple text-notice that privacy is enhanced when the withdrawal amount is not customized is probably sufficient. I don't think there's any need to overthink it by making it something that you have to click on a check-box or in an alert box or anything. There are some great web design tricks to convey something important like this without requiring the user to take excessive, extra steps like clicking a checkbox.  And it's counterintuitive, but sometimes we actually gloss over the text associated with a checkbox (think how reflexively we click "I agree to the Terms and Service," probably often without even reading that line). If the checkbox is in the way of a user completing a form, they quite occasionally just click the box without reading it.

[whirlwindmoney]

All remaining tasks on the backlog were completed. Starting today there won't be any more stability issues and we expect perfect uptime besides occasional very short periods of maintenance which will be announced in advance here on the forum and through a maintenance page shown on both Clearnet and Tor. We made some great progress during these past few weeks and we appreciate all the feedback that we received, it's been very useful.

Now that the updates are finished at least for at least the next weeks and the service is completely free to use we will switch our focus to solving the only remaining 'issue', which is the Anonymity Set being quite low because we only just started.

IMO there are multiple reasons why our service doesen't see that much usage yet and I'll list them below and afterwards reveal our plans to deal with each one of them:
-It's a fact that Whirlwind is a real innovation in the Bitcoin space and it may seem harder to use at first because users are simply not familiarized with our mechanism. This makes it harder to get them to try our service, but there's no doubt in our mind that once they do they won't go back to using something else since there is simply no reason to do that. Obviously this is a biased opinion since it's coming from ourselves, but the numbers and facts are on our side so you don't need to trust us, do your own research and most likely you will come to the same conclusion

-We are a new service so users don't trust us that much for now

-Anonymity set is currently too low

We are planning to solve these issues in the following ways:
1. Create a detailed comparison between Whirlwind and most relevant privacy solutions that currently exist/ existed before and explain mathematically why our implementation is superior in every aspect compared to any of them. Again only verifiable facts

2. Create a twitter account and start discussions about all aspects of our service

3. Start an Anonymity Mining campaign with the goal of growing the Anonymity Set

The details will be finalized in the following hours/days but it will work in a similar fashion to this: https://docs.tornadoeth.cash/docs/anonymity-mining

Since we do not have a Whirlwind token to use for this we will reward users with Bitcoin in the following way (ignore numbers, it's just an example):

Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service. Each month we will allocate 1BTC to distribute between all funded Notes proportionally to their balance. Payments will be made every day and you are free to withdraw your deposit anytime. If the amount allocated for rewards is 1BTC a month that means 1/30 = 0.0333BTC will be distributed every day.

If the multi-sig balance is 10BTC and you have a Note with a 1BTC balance you will automatically receive 10% of 0.0333BTC every day you keep your Note funded, which is 0.0033BTC a day.

Most importantly this campaign should help us achieve a strong Anonymity Set, which as discussed before is the only weak link remaining to be dealt with. At the same time the growing multi-sig balance will also give us a great chance to prove that we're not here to steal anyone's funds so after some time most concerns in this regard should be eliminated. We understand some may still have doubts and if there are any specific questions you want answered do not hesitate to ask.

The 40,000 DAI are still in escrow with minerjones and we are able to send much more than that if the risk of us stealing the funds proves to be the problem, but at a certain point our users would have to trust us regardless until we completely decentralize the service so we are not sure it makes much sense to do that.

Ready to answer any questions or concerns!


Below is the changelog with the latest updates, our ANN thread design and signature will be updated sometimes in the next 48 hours.

Changelog

04.28.2023 01:30:00 AM UTC
-Improved UX
-Implemented alerts for all completed actions/errors
-Updated output size options: 0.001BTC, 0.0025BTC, 0.005BTC, 0.01BTC, 0.025BTC, 0.05BTC, 0.1BTC, 0.25BTC, 0.5BTC, 1BTC, 2.5BTC, 5BTC
-Withdraws are now sent once an hour instead of 2 times an hour
-Cloudflare tweaked and should now be less annoying, our custom encryption works exactly as intended

I think almost everyone would want the option to choose their withdrawal amount. A simple text-notice that privacy is enhanced when the withdrawal amount is not customized is probably sufficient. I don't think there's any need to overthink it by making it something that you have to click on a check-box or in an alert box or anything. There are some great web design tricks to convey something important like this without requiring the user to take excessive, extra steps like clicking a checkbox.  And it's counterintuitive, but sometimes we actually gloss over the text associated with a checkbox (think how reflexively we click "I agree to the Terms and Service," probably often without even reading that line). If the checkbox is in the way of a user completing a form, they quite occasionally just click the box without reading it.

We are concerned that if we offer this option most people would use it and it'd be way better for everyone if they don't. We just added some more output size options so it's a bit more convenient, but for a privacy service we believe that security should come first. Besides this you don't need to withdraw the entire Note balance at one time and as said in a previous message you can still withdraw a custom amount, the process is just a bit more complicated. We will wait for more feedback on this and make changes only if they are necessarily needed.

[LoyceV]

The 40,000 DAI are still in escrow with minerjones and we are able to send much more than that if the risk of us stealing the funds proves to be the problem

Is this confirmed by minerjones somewhere? I only found this post, but there are no details.

Also (I remember this case): what are the details of the escrow deal? Considering the purpose, it would be good if the deal includes a 7 day delay once you request to pay it back, including the escrow publicly announcing the change 7 days ahead.

[hugeblack]

Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service. Each month we will allocate 1BTC to distribute between all funded Notes proportionally to their balance. Payments will be made every day and you are free to withdraw your deposit anytime. If the amount allocated for rewards is 1BTC a month that means 1/30 = 0.0333BTC will be distributed every day.

Will this list be available to everyone? Or is it private because many are trying to stay away from mixing services due to the lack of clarity in government decisions regarding them, and the issue of Mining campaign may mean linking any user directly to your business, so the legal risks are greater.

In general, I hope that you will strive to empirically explain your ideas, because they seem complicated at the moment.
and then a beta version is released before activated any update on the site. The continuous update of the service may leave backdoors that can be exploited in the future then completely destroy the project, especially since any problems related to privacy now will cause others to lose confidence in you.

[vv181]

You may be surprised that we are using Cloudflare after all the discussions we had in regards to MITM, but continue reading until the end and you'll find out why in our case it's safe and what's the difference between Whirlwind and any other competitor when it comes to this.

A suggestion, I think you should also explain or list why'd you use Cloudflare and how you overcome its problem on the FAQ page.

[sam00]

Most importantly this campaign should help us achieve a strong Anonymity Set, which as discussed before is the only weak link remaining to be dealt with. At the same time the growing multi-sig balance will also give us a great chance to prove that we're not here to steal anyone's funds so after some time most concerns in this regard should be eliminated. We understand some may still have doubts and if there are any specific questions you want answered do not hesitate to ask.

The 40,000 DAI are still in escrow with minerjones and we are able to send much more than that if the risk of us stealing the funds proves to be the problem, but at a certain point our users would have to trust us regardless until we completely decentralize the service so we are not sure it makes much sense to do that.

If you have the capital to put more than the expected amount that will be "staked" into an escrow, I would suggest doing so.
I believe that there will be far greater participation if there is no doubt that participants will receive their coins back one way or another.
As @LoyceV stated, the escrow deal should be made public/transparent and tied to no real complaints being made by participants.

Just curious, are you planning to launch a targeted signature campaign for that purpose to gain visibility for the campaign?

[LoyceV]

Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service. Each month we will allocate 1BTC to distribute between all funded Notes proportionally to their balance. Payments will be made every day and you are free to withdraw your deposit anytime. If the amount allocated for rewards is 1BTC a month that means 1/30 = 0.0333BTC will be distributed every day.

If the multi-sig balance is 10BTC and you have a Note with a 1BTC balance you will automatically receive 10% of 0.0333BTC every day you keep your Note funded, which is 0.0033BTC a day.

On second thought: this sounds a lot like the many "services" in the past that paid interest on Bitcoin deposits. Usually, that didn't end well.
Are you sure you want to be associated with those?

[whirlwindmoney]

ANN design was updated, see first post in this thread. It now includes a step-by-step walkthrough showing all actions you can make on our our website.

The 40,000 DAI are still in escrow with minerjones and we are able to send much more than that if the risk of us stealing the funds proves to be the problem

Is this confirmed by minerjones somewhere? I only found this post, but there are no details.

Also (I remember this case): what are the details of the escrow deal? Considering the purpose, it would be good if the deal includes a 7 day delay once you request to pay it back, including the escrow publicly announcing the change 7 days ahead.

The initial escrow deal was that we were supposed to receive the funds back when the review campaign ended a while ago. We did not request the funds back so they are still with minerjones. We'd be happy to adhere to the 7 day delay rule you proposed, and I will ask minerjones if it's possible for him to confirm here that this rule will be enforced and the amount held by him at the moment.

Will this list be available to everyone? Or is it private because many are trying to stay away from mixing services due to the lack of clarity in government decisions regarding them, and the issue of Mining campaign may mean linking any user directly to your business, so the legal risks are greater.

Daily payments will be made to all funded Notes (balance >0) automatically. They will be sent through the "Pay to Note' feature from a Note we funded ourselves, so all payments are anonymous. You do not have to send us any info or interact with us in any way. As long as you made a deposit you will receive your share every day. The multi-sig balance is public so you can calculate exactly how much you are supposed to receive at all times. Everything will be explained in detail before launching the campaign.

In general, I hope that you will strive to empirically explain your ideas, because they seem complicated at the moment.
and then a beta version is released before activated any update on the site. The continuous update of the service may leave backdoors that can be exploited in the future then completely destroy the project, especially since any problems related to privacy now will cause others to lose confidence in you.

We will create some graphics/videos explaining Whirlwind in a much easier to understand manner. Until now the only focus was improving the product and discussing the technical reasons behind our infrastructure/architecture choices. For the record we intentionally left an easy to follow trail through our posts on this forum that allows anyone now or in the future to do his own research and evaluate our competence and truthfulness. Actions speak louder than words

No update to the backend or signers gets to production before being thoroughly tested, we have no reasons to be concerned in that regard. Security comes first in everything we do. Without an attacker gaining access to our entire infrastructure including the physical server it's impossible to exploit Whirlwind.

Our word is our bond and to prove this point again we will remind you of the challenge we launched when we first started the service. If anyone is able to find the IP of any of our signers we will offer a 1BTC bounty and it would have to be publicly disclosed.

A suggestion, I think you should also explain or list why'd you use Cloudflare and how you overcome its problem on the FAQ page.

Thank you for the suggestion, it will be added.

If you have the capital to put more than the expected amount that will be "staked" into an escrow, I would suggest doing so.
I believe that there will be far greater participation if there is no doubt that participants will receive their coins back one way or another.
As @LoyceV stated, the escrow deal should be made public/transparent and tied to no real complaints being made by participants.

Just curious, are you planning to launch a targeted signature campaign for that purpose to gain visibility for the campaign?

Currently there is ~250k in the multi-sig, we could send another 200k to minerjones for escrow to cover that but how should we act when the balance will continuously grow? Add more every day? If users don't trust that they'll get their funds back they shouldn't use the service in the first place regardless of the escrow. Not trying to downplay this risk by any means, but it's the same with any other centralized solution.

Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service. Each month we will allocate 1BTC to distribute between all funded Notes proportionally to their balance. Payments will be made every day and you are free to withdraw your deposit anytime. If the amount allocated for rewards is 1BTC a month that means 1/30 = 0.0333BTC will be distributed every day.

If the multi-sig balance is 10BTC and you have a Note with a 1BTC balance you will automatically receive 10% of 0.0333BTC every day you keep your Note funded, which is 0.0033BTC a day.

On second thought: this sounds a lot like the many "services" in the past that paid interest on Bitcoin deposits. Usually, that didn't end well.
Are you sure you want to be associated with those?

Do you have any example of a service that had an actual reason for offering a reward on Bitcoin deposits?

The goal of this campaign is to grow the Anonymity Set, not to attract users with some 'sustainable interest' on their Bitcoin deposits. We are also not the first ones to do something like this, I linked an example in the previous post. We are transparent about the fact that rewards are coming from us, it's basically an operational expense until we have a strong enough Anonymity Set where it doesen't make sense to use another alternative.

As said in the previous message we are aware this campaign may raise red flags for some but we couldn't find any other reasonable alternative to grow the Anonymity Set without doing this. If anyone has a better idea we would be more than happy to go down that route, but keep in mind that after a certain point users would have to trust us regardless. People are investing millions in different projects/ICOs before ever seeing proof that anything even exists, so considering what we've shown until now it should be quite clear that we're not here to mess around for a few Bitcoins.

We are not trying to force anyone to deposit by any means, if you don't trust us that's fine and there is nothing we can do to address that other than running the service professionally or decentralizing it.

[examplens]

On second thought: this sounds a lot like the many "services" in the past that paid interest on Bitcoin deposits. Usually, that didn't end well.
Are you sure you want to be associated with those?

Do you have any example of a service that had an actual reason for offering a reward on Bitcoin deposits?

It seems to me that LoyceV was not directly aiming at the mixer that pays out "staking" profit, but generally at the hold of Bitcoins with a third service. I am personally of the same opinion that it is a very risky move, especially when it comes to the mixing service.
Mixers play on a very tiny line, and once they cross it, the authorities react quickly and we all know what happens after that. When you add to that the ever-present risk (hack, theft, scam...) for all online money keepers, this idea does not look encouraging.

Chipmixer had a more than good reputation, they could implement this kind of idea safely. Imagine how it would all look today.

[whirlwindmoney]

It seems to me that LoyceV was not directly aiming at the mixer that pays out "staking" profit, but generally at the hold of Bitcoins with a third service. I am personally of the same opinion that it is a very risky move, especially when it comes to the mixing service.

Our perspective is that we are not paying 'staking profits', we are paying users to grow the Anonymity Set and that doesen't necessarily imply storing your Bitcoin on Whirlwind for a long period of time. You could deposit, receive a day worth of rewards and then withdraw. That would still help us achieve our goal while minimizing your risk. You could also monitor the multi-sig balance and withdraw whenever you feel like the amount is too big.

In any case there is still risk involved and I want to emphasize that we are not downplaying it by any means, we are presenting the details of how everything will work and you are free to decide for yourself if it makes sense to use Whirlwind or not.

Open question: Let's assume we don't go ahead with the Anonymity mining campaign, what other alternative exists to grow the Anonymity set? We need to bootstrap this in one way or another until we get to a decent number, for example 10,000 deposits. After that point it won't be necessary to pay anyone anything since the service would already be secure enough, that is the whole point.

Mixers play on a very tiny line, and once they cross it, the authorities react quickly and we all know what happens after that. When you add to that the ever-present risk (hack, theft, scam...) for all online money keepers, this idea does not look encouraging.

There are major differences between our service and CM and the way they are operated, for these reasons we don't believe we will suffer the same fate. Keep in mind that we are doing nothing illegal and privacy does not equal criminal activity.

1.Whirlwind is not a traditional 'mixer' by any means, it's way more than that. In fact we do not think that term is appropriate, a better description would be one of the following: Privacy Pool/Privacy Protocol/Privacy Tool/Permissioned Privacy Oriented Bitcoin Sidechain.
2.Their mixing method was to provide you with an address funded before your deposit, that could already be considered money laundering. We on the other hand don't use any shady mechanisms while achieving superior privacy.
3.They openly encouraged the use of their service for illegal purposes. We do not encourage this kind of behaviour and do not advertise in any places where this is the case.
4.We offer users all the tools that they need in order to stay compliant. You can prove the origin of funds if you ever need to and that responsibility lies solely with the user, not with us. If a service deems outputs from Whirlwind as risky they can ask for more info whenever a user deposits those outputs there, it's none of our business and it's the users choice if he wants to comply or not.
5.We didn't commit any crimes while creating/operating Whirlwind as opposed to CM's identity theft and other things
6.CM opsec was ridiculously bad on a personal level as well as regarding the service itself. If 2 servers paid with Paypal accounts that are linked together in multiple ways is all you need to find in order to take the service down then noone should be surprised when it happens. Whirlwind's infrastructure is way more complex than that and for this reason funds can't just dissapear out of the blue unless we exit-scam ourselves.

Chipmixer had a more than good reputation, they could implement this kind of idea safely. Imagine how it would all look today.

Our Anonymity mining campaign will run until we get to a certain number of total deposits and that will probably take 1-3 months. If CM implemented a similar thing only for their first 4 months of existence there would be no issue. They didn't need to do that because their system works in a fundamentally different way, we on the other hand need a strong Anonymity Set in order to provide real privacy, and the higher it is the better. While the current figure (291 total deposits) is more than enough for low amounts, we need it to be way higher in order to be able to process higher amounts in a timely manner with the same level of privacy.

[LeGaulois]

Open question: Let's assume we don't go ahead with the Anonymity mining campaign, what other alternative exists to grow the Anonymity set?

Time?
Especially since it has been ~1 month only and you surely haven't explored all the possible channels to market Whirlwind. And as you pointed before, people don't understand correctly how Whirlwind can be superior compared to other services.

How many deposits will you  consider the Anonymity set good enough so it doesn't need an Anonymity mining campaign or doesn't need to continue it?

I would also say for an Anonymity mining campaign, the words to promote it have to be choosen wisely...
I prefer to see people know Whirlwind as a mixer, rather than people telling me "yeah, I know Whirlwind. You can invest BTC and make a few bucks for profits"

[LoyceV]

Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service.

On second thought: this sounds a lot like the many "services" in the past that paid interest on Bitcoin deposits. Usually, that didn't end well.
Are you sure you want to be associated with those?

Do you have any example of a service that had an actual reason for offering a reward on Bitcoin deposits?

No. I agree that you have a good reason, but that doesn't change the risk involved. I'm not saying you are, but if you'd be planning an exit scam, this would be a great way to increase the amount. That is what you risk getting associated with.

People are investing millions in different projects/ICOs before ever seeing proof that anything even exists

They preyed on greedy people's stupidity, I assume you don't want to compare yourself to them.

There are major differences between our service and CM and the way they are operated
~
2.Their mixing method was to provide you with an address funded before your deposit, that could already be considered money laundering.

By that definition, selling a funded Collectible could be considered money laundering too.

3.They openly encouraged the use of their service for illegal purposes.

I've been around for a while, and I've never seen this from ChipMixer. Can you provide a link to back up this claim?

4.We offer users all the tools that they need in order to stay compliant. You can prove the origin of funds

CM offered the same.

Open question: Let's assume we don't go ahead with the Anonymity mining campaign, what other alternative exists to grow the Anonymity set?

Time?

Agreed.

[yidrukesti]

It would be nice to have the option to deposit less than 0.001 btc. For example, if I have 2 addresses that have 0.0005 btc each, it would be nice to have the option to combine these amounts without showing directly on the blockchain that they both belong to the same person. (Preferably, this option should allow one to send these two amounts of 0.0005 BTC to two different whirlwind's BTC addresses.)

So, the option to deposit less than 0.001 BTC in a single transaction would be useful even if withdrawals are only possible with fixed values, and the lowest of these values is 0.001 BTC. It becomes even more useful if "fast" withdrawals of non-fixed amounts are possible again, and yet more useful when exchange to monero is available. If such deposits are disabled now because the blockchain fees constitute too much percentage of the deposit amount, I don't see any problems with charging a corresponding fee to such mixes, even if you want to keep the mixes with a single top-up of >= 0.001 BTC fee-free.