[ANNOUNCE] TORwallet - anonymous mixing wallet service

[cryptoanarchist]

Very nice! Thank you for creating this. If I were starting any sort of new Bitcoin venture, it would likely be Tor accessible only. We really need to migrate to Onionland, IMO.

If we're legal and COM/ORG/NET land doesn't have a problem, then why?

Because we won't be legal forever. I'd be willing to bet cash money FedGov attacks Bitcoin within 3-5 years.

Unless the FedGov is insolvent in the next 3-5 years. They won't have a lot of money if their "notes" become worthless.

If people keep coming up with great services like this, it'll be too hard for the Fed to go after them all anyway.

[Akemashite Omedetou]

So why pay for laundrying? Laundry service probably provides you coins that someone else wanted to launder previously. So I see no difference to actually just depositing your coins to some random web service, and then withdrawing them after a while. Usually it is fraction of the cost.

Well because you don't actually KNOW that the service is going to launder your coins.
And because all "normal" services can and do keep logs of usernames/ip addresses linked to deposits.
Should the time come, the police won't try to guess what happened from the block chain, they will simply come to the service and ask for the information from the logs, which any legitimate service will provide because they don't want any problems with the law.
They are also much easier to find and contact for the authorities than an anonymous-good-luck-to-find tor hidden service.

[Deafboy]

Its not too kind to advertise ones own, basically identical service in a competitor's thread

From the users point of view this is awsome. You have list of launderies (or other services) in one place

Like the feature on online shops "Customers who buy this item also buy these..."

[davout]

Site hosted on TOR ? Trying to collect BTC to "launder" them...
Sounds legit. Sounds like it could disappear any minute without customers having any recourse.

Protip : if you want to launder coins, mix them with *clean* coins, not other tainted coins
And use a service that has enough coins in its shared wallet fot it to actually work.

[tgmarks]

I'm glad to see another service in this area.  I haven't used one yet, but another step towards the ability of anonymity is always welcome.

[TORwallet]

Just wanted to point out that we've been operating a similar service for about 7 months now, with the focus on the security, we haven't had a single breach of security, our fees are around 2% (1%-3% randomized, to increase obscurity), and we have a solid user base and thousands of bitcoins going through every day, and volume means a lot in an anonymization service.
www.bitcoinfog.com (a freenet page with some information)
http://fogcore5n3ov3tui.onion (the address you must use, only accessible through Tor)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50037.0 (main discussion topic)

But hey, competition is always good for users, new features get developed faster

I would appreciate it if you didn't advertise in our announcement thread.

However, we do have a couple advantages. We use a different mixing method, that allows instant mixing, by sending all coins to a single address in a single transaction. Its a bit more convenient since there is no need to create an account and faster. If you leave your coins on the service long enough, they are likely to be mixed for free when someone else mixes theirs.

I don't see the reasons why people use mixing services, and pay a hefty fee:

- Almost all exchanges tumble their coins to my knowledge
- Almost all web services tumble their coins (this is just easiest way to implement a service, one wallet for all users).
- Silk Road tumbles their coins, etc.
- etc etc

So why pay for laundrying? Laundry service probably provides you coins that someone else wanted to launder previously. So I see no difference to actually just depositing your coins to some random web service, and then withdrawing them after a while. Usually it is fraction of the cost.

Because any service not on tor probably keeps logs of your IP address, and could be coerced into giving up your information. Anyone wanting to force us to talk would have to find us first.

Site hosted on TOR ? Trying to collect BTC to "launder" them...
Sounds legit. Sounds like it could disappear any minute without customers having any recourse.

Protip : if you want to launder coins, mix them with *clean* coins, not other tainted coins
And use a service that has enough coins in its shared wallet fot it to actually work.

We are working on getting clean coins and a larger pool. As of now, we are manually moving a pool of coins (ours, never customers) in and out, through a number of sites including silk road and instawallet. We are working on automating this process but have to take into account the risk of one of these services taking, freezing or losing our coins.

[davout]

Because any service not on tor probably keeps logs of your IP address, and could be coerced into giving up your information. Anyone wanting to force us to talk would have to find us first.

Connect to these services through Tor ?

We are working on getting clean coins and a larger pool. As of now, we are manually moving a pool of coins (ours, never customers) in and out, through a number of sites including silk road and instawallet. We are working on automating this process but have to take into account the risk of one of these services taking, freezing or losing our coins.

Moving coins to and from silk road is a quite original way to get clean coins...
Your service is quite irrelevant since going directly to any big shared wallet through Tor pretty much achieves the same thing.

[Akemashite Omedetou]

I would appreciate it if you didn't advertise in our announcement thread.

Sorry, didn't mean to steal your thread or anything. It just seemed only fair and open I could at least inform users about our service, since you have basically copied the exact idea with some small changes, and many users may not know that both services exist. We won't *advertise* anything here anymore of course.

[TORwallet]

Because any service not on tor probably keeps logs of your IP address, and could be coerced into giving up your information. Anyone wanting to force us to talk would have to find us first.

Connect to these services through Tor ?

We are working on getting clean coins and a larger pool. As of now, we are manually moving a pool of coins (ours, never customers) in and out, through a number of sites including silk road and instawallet. We are working on automating this process but have to take into account the risk of one of these services taking, freezing or losing our coins.

Moving coins to and from silk road is a quite original way to get clean coins...
Your service is quite irrelevant since going directly to any big shared wallet through Tor pretty much achieves the same thing.

Perhaps sr is not the best example, just a large part of our initial pool of coins. We also use a few exchanges and gambling sites for clean coins, but will not name them to reduce risks of having out accounts suspended.

Using a big service with your own coins does not help. They can still link the inputs to outputs. Since we are using a pool of many people's coins, simply linking the input to output only links us to ourselves, but introduces clean coins into the mix and makes it even more difficult to trace our client's coins. The worst case is that someone tracing can determine you used our service, but mixing with other services increases our pool size and makes this much more difficult.

[TORwallet]

We apologize to anyone who experienced some strange error messages while accessing the site. We accidentally broke the site for a few minutes while implementing the QR code generation code.

On the upside, you can now scan a qr code with your phone and send directly to torwallet.

[davout]

Using a big service with your own coins does not help. They can still link the inputs to outputs. Since we are using a pool of many people's coins, simply linking the input to output only links us to ourselves, but introduces clean coins into the mix and makes it even more difficult to trace our client's coins. The worst case is that someone tracing can determine you used our service, but mixing with other services increases our pool size and makes this much more difficult.

I fail to understand how it's different, send coins to Instawallet, withdraw coins half an hour later, you won't get the same coins since it's a shared wallet.
Repeat this step with a second shared wallet, in another country preferably => coins cleaned.
And all this without handing your coins to a onion service that could instantly disappear with all the users funds.

[Ente]

Using a big service with your own coins does not help. They can still link the inputs to outputs. Since we are using a pool of many people's coins, simply linking the input to output only links us to ourselves, but introduces clean coins into the mix and makes it even more difficult to trace our client's coins. The worst case is that someone tracing can determine you used our service, but mixing with other services increases our pool size and makes this much more difficult.

I fail to understand how it's different, send coins to Instawallet, withdraw coins half an hour later, you won't get the same coins since it's a shared wallet.
Repeat this step with a second shared wallet, in another country preferably => coins cleaned.
And all this without handing your coins to a onion service that could instantly disappear with all the users funds.

..same problem with anonymous surfing: Sure, you can use one regular proxy. You are then anonymous to outsiders. But not to the proxy people, and not to the guys with the rubber hose talking to the proxy people. All right, use two, three, many proxys in a row? It only costs more time and effort to de-anonymize you, thats all. Maybe less than one workday, with scary confidential emails from three letter agencies.
The real solution, of course, is TOR.

And yes, you still have to trust TORwallet to not do something fishy with the logs. I, personally, already trust them more than other services to tumble coins. I will eventually try it out, with small amounts.

edit:
or, see it as a tradeoff:
- Regular services (yohndonym, instawallet): You can be pretty sure they work (and not steal your stuff), and you can be pretty sure they will eventually break (court order, raided servers, rubberhose)
- itself anonymous services (TOR, TORwallet): You will never be sure they will not run, once they have xy Bitcoin collected, or will be a honeypot to begin with (90% TOR nodes from three letter agencies?), but at least it it technically possible for them to not give out data in any event

Ente

[rjk]

Using a big service with your own coins does not help. They can still link the inputs to outputs. Since we are using a pool of many people's coins, simply linking the input to output only links us to ourselves, but introduces clean coins into the mix and makes it even more difficult to trace our client's coins. The worst case is that someone tracing can determine you used our service, but mixing with other services increases our pool size and makes this much more difficult.

I fail to understand how it's different, send coins to Instawallet, withdraw coins half an hour later, you won't get the same coins since it's a shared wallet.
Repeat this step with a second shared wallet, in another country preferably => coins cleaned.
And all this without handing your coins to a onion service that could instantly disappear with all the users funds.

So are you going to swear to us that you keep no logs of incoming and outgoing transactions? And that you too won't disappear suddenly? Obviously you aren't quite as anonymous as a Tor operator, so you can't bill your service as equivalent in terms of privacy.

[davout]

So are you going to swear to us that you keep no logs of incoming and outgoing transactions? And that you too won't disappear suddenly? Obviously you aren't quite as anonymous as a Tor operator, so you can't bill your service as equivalent in terms of privacy.

I never said there were no logs kept.

Any incentive to remain honest for a hidden service collecting bitcoins instantly disappears when they see that their customer holdings exceed the revenue they could expect from fees over X years.

Go for it, I'll happily pass.

[Serith]

So are you going to swear to us that you keep no logs of incoming and outgoing transactions? And that you too won't disappear suddenly? Obviously you aren't quite as anonymous as a Tor operator, so you can't bill your service as equivalent in terms of privacy.

I never said there were no logs kept.

Any incentive to remain honest for a hidden service collecting bitcoins instantly disappears when they see that their customer holdings exceed the revenue they could expect from fees over X years.

Go for it, I'll happily pass.

That's a good point, is there a way to exclude a human from the process? Something like open source botnet, that has sole purpose to act as giant mixer.

[TORwallet]

We assure you that there are no logs of transactions kept whatsoever. HTTP logging is minimal and purged every 6 hours. Our database structure consists of 4 columns, wallet id, address, previous-getreceivedbyaddress, and balance. (and no, those are not the actual column names for you SQL injectors out there)

As for us disappearing, I'm sure the operator of silk road could run right now with 10+ years of profits and virtually eliminate his risk of getting caught by the DEA, but he hasn't.

[marcus_of_augustus]

So are you going to swear to us that you keep no logs of incoming and outgoing transactions? And that you too won't disappear suddenly? Obviously you aren't quite as anonymous as a Tor operator, so you can't bill your service as equivalent in terms of privacy.

I never said there were no logs kept.

Any incentive to remain honest for a hidden service collecting bitcoins instantly disappears when they see that their customer holdings exceed the revenue they could expect from fees over X years.

Go for it, I'll happily pass.

That's a good point, is there a way to exclude a human from the process? Something like open source botnet, that has sole purpose to act as giant mixer.

Done, it's called bitcoin

[evoorhees]

OP - really glad to see this new mixing service! The more the better. I hope you guys realize you can make al ot of money if you stick around and operate honestly. If you steal the coins and the service goes down, you get a short-term payout but lose a huge money making asset and it would be the height of foolishness. So, please stay honest and you will be rewarded with time.

Also, I wonder if anyone is using SatoshiDice to clean coins? The coins sent in are not the same as those sent back, and with a house edge of 1.5% one could consider that a "mixing" fee

[Gladamas]

OP - really glad to see this new mixing service! The more the better. I hope you guys realize you can make al ot of money if you stick around and operate honestly. If you steal the coins and the service goes down, you get a short-term payout but lose a huge money making asset and it would be the height of foolishness. So, please stay honest and you will be rewarded with time.

I agree with this. Torwallet could become a gigantic service if you stay honest.

Also, I wonder if anyone is using SatoshiDice to clean coins? The coins sent in are not the same as those sent back, and with a house edge of 1.5% one could consider that a "mixing" fee

Really? I thought the payout of a bet always included the bet transaction as one of its inputs.

[mb300sd]

OP - really glad to see this new mixing service! The more the better. I hope you guys realize you can make al ot of money if you stick around and operate honestly. If you steal the coins and the service goes down, you get a short-term payout but lose a huge money making asset and it would be the height of foolishness. So, please stay honest and you will be rewarded with time.

I agree with this. Torwallet could become a gigantic service if you stay honest.

Also, I wonder if anyone is using SatoshiDice to clean coins? The coins sent in are not the same as those sent back, and with a house edge of 1.5% one could consider that a "mixing" fee

Really? I thought the payout of a bet always included the bet transaction as one of its inputs.

It does, thats how they prevent double spends.