What's the best way to spend bitcoins with privacy without getting into trouble

[shinosuke]

If you have coins that you have received in a public address that is known by others (for instance, you post your address to receive payments in a website and get 1 BTC worth of payments years ago, now worth a lot) and you want to spend from this address, how do you do it safely?

If you send coins from this address to someone, they would be able to google your address and find it's linked to your address which is linked to some information about you, now they know you own 1 BTC plus some information about you: not great.

You could send them to yourself in a few different addresses, but that does not obfuscate enough to call it privacy.

I know there is mixers, but nowadays mixers are unfairly demonized and you run a lottery where you may end up with tainted coins, so you pay someone, then this person deposits these funds in an exchange, and they get in trouble when the analysis tool finds some tainted coins, and they point to you as the person that send them these funds: also not great.

So what do you do here to spend some damn coins in goods and services with privacy in a safe way? Maybe you could mix the funds, then run them to some sort of aggregator that whitelists them and then send them back to you? I don't know, please tell me some specific ways to do this. Btw this is what I don't like about BTC, it's so damn annoying trying to spend without entering into some sort of risk while remaining private. And please don't give me deluded answers about how "tainted coins don't exist" or something. Yeah tell that when you or someone you paid deposits coins that are blacklisted in an exchange and then they point to you. This may not be a problem if you are buying something digital and you remain 100% anonymous, but is still not a desirable position to be at. Plus you may want to pay for IRL goods and services so you want to avoid that situation.

[Chibit01]

If you receive the payment from a legit website you shouldn’t have any problem with selling those bitcoin in any centralized exchange at least to the best of my knowledge, and if you are also afraid of using mixer to split the coin and keep it on different addresses maybe the one for spending so that anyone you send coin to for payment don’t link it to your wallet seeing the volume you hold you could also use Bisq which is a decentralized exchange easy to use, or better still you can try out Trêvoid swap service this are two privacy exchange option I can think of. And you don’t have to swap all 1btc at once’s you can go in little numbers until you swap them all.

[Halifat]

There are many ways which you can avoid trouble when spending your BTC. Firstly get a wallet which doesn't have access to your identity, I think the best wallet to use base on my knowledge are Sparrow Wallet and Electrum.

Try avoid wallet that request for your identity like email or your mobile number.
Do not use exchange that request for your kYC.

I think with this you are good to go.

[Ruttoshi]

You can use coinjoin service to send coins to whomever, you want without revealing your address, Sparrow wallet has coinjoin. If it's an exchange, don't use centralized exchange, use decentralized exchange.

After sending your bitcoin to Dex, you can convert it to monero and send it through 3-4 different Dex before converting it back to bitcoin and send it to your wallet or to your final bitcoin address.

[LoyceV]

If you have all your Bitcoin in just one address, then this is indeed the problem you're facing. As a long-term slightly more private solution, it's better to have different wallets for different purposes.
Assuming you're not trying to hide from taxes, even a centralized exchange can help break the link between your old funds and your current spending.

[Cookdata]

If you receive the payment from a legit website you shouldn’t have any problem with selling those bitcoin in any centralized exchange at least to the best of my knowledge,

You want to know how useless centralized exchanges are? Until you becomes a victim of the monsters behind them. You can 100% have a legit coin and you will be asked to proved it, not for for anything but for curiosity, only centralized exchanges are capable of doing it.

@shinosuke

This is what you should do.

I was going through a blog from bisq and I found out they respect privacy. At some points they wanted to implement coinjoin to improve users privacy but they didn't perhaps due to some reasons.

We have rough plans to either add Coinjoin to Bisq in future, integrate an external Coinjoin implementation in a user friendly manner

https://bisq.network/blog/privacy-in-bitsquare/

Use jointmarket to improve to your privacy then send it to Bisq exchange to sell, don't use any centralized swap or exchanges.

[coinlary]

Every address is public , you will always receive Bitcoin on an address that can be traced  but no one knows the identity.behind it  unless you already  declared the address somehow with your  real identity and it seems that's what you meant by public..
You can use coinjoin (it's thepopularanswer you willget here), after which you can send it to whoever you want or swap using a DEX. Using a Cex could give you issues after doing this because the transaction source becomes hard to trace so they might flag it and opt you into an unending advanced kyc  request, trust me you don't  want  to get caught up in hat.

[Chibit01]

If you receive the payment from a legit website you shouldn’t have any problem with selling those bitcoin in any centralized exchange at least to the best of my knowledge,

You want to know how useless centralized exchanges are? Until you becomes a victim of the monsters behind them. You can 100% have a legit coin and you will be asked to proved it, not for for anything but for curiosity, only centralized exchanges are capable of doing it.

I forgot that those centralized exchanges operate no differently from the way the government also does they don’t actually need any reason to freeze your coin they will just make one and force you to provide the information you will know it’s impossible to convince them it’s actually real.

Have you tried using privacy coins? Convert your bitcoins into privacy coins. Privacy coins hide who sent the coins. So once you have converted your bitcoins, the link is practically untraceable. From then on you can convert your now privacy coins to bitcoin again and send it to new wallet addresses. Just remember to swap it on a different platform than the one you first swapped before.

And what means do you propose the Op use in converting the bitcoin into privacy coins? If it’s still from few centralized exchange that still accommodate privacy coin that will be a no area if you ask me because their is nothing like privacy when it comes to centralized exchange they will always bookmark which address you send the coin to after conversion, the best option the op have here is either I use coinjoin as already suggested or go with the popular No KYC exchange we know about in this forum.

[zabzob]

And what means do you propose the Op use in converting the bitcoin into privacy coins?

You can exchange BTC directly for Monero on bisq, with zero KYC

[mrust_mobile]

Spend from that address safely? I think you have a few choices.

1- hit a mixer and anonymize your coins again (a crypto exchange might work too)
2- send it to an exchange, convert to fiat > spend
3- go full anonymous, buy monero (xmr) on bisq

However, none of these solutions solve one fundamental problem. They already know you are rich. Unless you come up with a boating accident story, you’ll only be moving coins from one place to another.

[BlackHatCoiner]

You can try coinjoin using Wasabi Wallet. That would break your bitcoin to several less-valuable outputs that could be deposited to an exchange. If you're afraid of them being labeled 'tainted' then you can use a variety of peer-to-peer exchanges like Peach, Bisq or HodlHodl. If you're concerned about the effectiveness of coinjoins, you can also swap BTC for a privacy-oriented crypto like XMR or ZEC and sell that; that would also break the connection.

Next time be aware and use coin control.

[philipma1957]

Make 10 new wallets put 0.05 into  one. And put .95 into one of the other 9 wallets

And then cash the 0.05 see how it works out.

If it is all good.

Send 0.05 Into one of the empty wallets put 0.90 into another empty wallet


Cash the 0.05

Wait a while decide next move.

No one is sure that the larger wallet is yours.

They only know the 0.05 btc wallets are yours.

[Forsyth Jones]

The first step to having relative privacy with Bitcoin is always receiving coins at a new address. Are you doing this?

Secondly, you can use software that has Coinjoin like wasabi wallet (you have to set up a coordinator manually, just google it.). After that, you might also want to swap to privacy coins like XMR, trade for stablecoins (stablecoins like USDT don't usually have marked coins), and then swap back to BTC.

There're 1001 ways countless ways to achieve greater privacy with BTC.

You can check the AML score of your coins using AML checkers and evaluate whether you should take the next steps based on the score of your UTXOs.

[Ivystar5]

The first step to having relative privacy with Bitcoin is always receiving coins at a new address. Are you doing this?

This is the primary knowledge that I have read severally but I haven't been able to do it either because I'm not privacy oriented but from my new life now privacy with bitcoin will step in.

Basically what I have read is "never reuse an address" but even after practicing that I still don't feel like it's not going to be the end of it, instead of doing so much job with bitcoin why not just buy Monero ? what do you think?

[Forsyth Jones]

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Monero is good for those who want more privacy, but it doesn't have the same stability and acceptance as Bitcoin.

If you want to avoid CEX and trade on DEXs like BISQ, Monero can be good. Monero didn't fall as much compared to Bitcoin in its recent correction, but make your decisions cautiously.

Monero is a good coin, but it has been heavily targeted and notoriously rejected by CEXs due to pressure from governments worldwide. It's best to be careful and use it within the limits of the law to avoid problems.

If you have sufficient funds, consider legal advice (preferably Bitcoin-friendly) to obtain more privacy within the legal limits of your country.

[suzanne5223]

Since you don't want to use Crypto Tumbler so you won't end up with tint coin. The best thing you can do is use a BTC p2p exchange that supports the trading of BTC into privacy coins like XMR. Split the BTC, trade on the P2P exchange, send to CEX, trade the privacy coin for BTC, and move the BTC to your main wallet.
That's the only concept I could suggest.

[LoyceV]

You can exchange BTC directly for Monero on bisq

Split the BTC, trade on the P2P exchange

This doesn't address OPs concern, it just changes the "someone" to someone else:

If you send coins from this address to someone, they would be able to google your address and find it's linked to your address which is linked to some information about you, now they know you own 1 BTC plus some information about you: not great.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

If you have coins that you have received in a public address that is known by others (for instance, you post your address to receive payments in a website and get 1 BTC worth of payments years ago, now worth a lot) and you want to spend from this address, how do you do it safely?

It is big problem if you have very small bitcoin fund like 0.001 BTC or 0.01 BTC but it is no longer problem with 1 BTC fund like your example.

As with 1 BTC fund, you can send that coin to different wallets, addresses and use these smaller splitted UTXOs for your payments later. As your main concern is privacy, don't send round numbers in your UTXOs for splitting the original 1 BTC to different wallets. I would like to do this more than using Coinjoin or Mixers services.

General guidelines for sending BTC transactions.
Bitcoin privacy guide.
Protect your privacy.
Bitcoin Q&A: Blacklists, Taint, and Wallet Fingerprinting.

[FinneysTrueVision]

The most simple and straightforward way of gaining privacy without losing custody is using Wasabi. However, this might give you the same problem as using a mixer, where your coins might be considered tainted by some services.

So what do you do here to spend some damn coins in goods and services with privacy in a safe way? Maybe you could mix the funds, then run them to some sort of aggregator that whitelists them and then send them back to you? I don't know, please tell me some specific ways to do this.

This could be achieved by sending mixed UTXOs individually into the Liquid sidechain through SideSwap’s peg-in feature. A while later you can do a peg-out transaction, where you will get coins that have no connection to your deposit and won’t be flagged as being from a coinjoin.

[Forsyth Jones]

This could be achieved by sending mixed UTXOs individually into the Liquid sidechain through SideSwap’s peg-in feature. A while later you can do a peg-out transaction, where you will get coins that have no connection to your deposit and won’t be flagged as being from a coinjoin.

It's a great solution, that's what I'm saying. If it's a large amount of funds, it might make sense to use a mixer or coinjoin via some Wasabi coordinator, and after choosing one of those two options, swap BTC mainnet for L-BTC (Bitcoin liquid, stablecoins) through SideSwap and then do a peg it out to BTC mainnet again.

SideSwap doesn't freeze users' funds as far as I know, right? Because it's a self-custody wallet.