The first bitcoin mixers appeared at the dawn of the industry. Who uses them today and how do coin mixing services keep privacy?
It is generally accepted that Bitcoin is distinguished from fiat money by anonymity and decentralization. But this is not entirely correct. All transaction data is stored and displayed in the blockchain ledger, which makes it possible to track the path of each coin to its final storage location. In addition, there are many services and programs that can track operations within the system. Bitcoin mixers help to maintain anonymity.
For the first time, coin mixing services appeared in 2011 – two years after the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain. Then BTC was worth $ 1, and soon its price dropped to $ 0.1. In such conditions, services began to appear on the market that could ensure the anonymity of transactions — mixers. They made it possible to fully hide the identity of the owner of the coins and “clear” them from the log of previous transactions.
Due to the high demand for absolute privacy, mixers have come to be associated with fraud and money laundering. But the percentage of using services for their intended purpose is much higher. The cryptocurrency community has its own ideals and values, according to which anonymity is the right of everyone, and not a privilege for the elite.
First, because privacy is the hallmark of cryptocurrency. Ideally, digital money should be of equal value to itself. In reality, different BTCs may be inferior to each other in the right to sell on large exchanges with high liquidity and acceptable commissions. In this case, coins obtained from darknet services, addresses of scam projects, dubious exchangers, as well as stolen bitcoins, fall into the risk zone. Using mixers is a way to exchange your potentially dirty BTC for coins with a clean history.
Secondly, by neglecting anonymity, you can get into the field of view of attackers. This is especially dangerous for large coin holders. Cryptocurrency transactions use alias addresses that can be correlated with real names and surnames. Therefore, even if the user does not advertise the amount of his savings, it can still be calculated from the transaction history of the public address. Mixers will help to hide the data on the number of BTC movements and maintain anonymity.
One of the popular Bitcoin mixing services is Blender.io. It works on the same principle as the rest of the mixers, but has distinctive features. The service is based on a special technology for conducting anonymous transactions, CoinJoin. In addition, the platform uses Madeamaze technology – a unique set of algorithms and metrics for complete privacy. The service does not need JavaScript to operate, so it is more resistant to external attacks.
Blender.io has two URLs. One is regular, and the other is with the pseudo top-level domain onion, which is intended for use on the Tor and Darknet networks. Supports work with SegWit and betch32 addresses. Unlike some other mixers, Blender.io does not store any logs or any transaction data. All information about moving and shuffling coins is deleted immediately. The site does not require registration, users do not leave any traces of their actions in the form of accounts. For mixing, you only need the address of the recipient of the bitcoins.
Thanks to a large reserve fund of previously cleared coins, operations on the service are performed instantly – there is no need to wait until the required number of transactions is accumulated to form a pool. Mixing times, transaction time delays and service fees are all user-adjustable.
The mixing process is automatic, no need to keep the browser window open with the address to send coins. The address itself remains active for a day, after which all connections with it are cut off, deleted, and transactions to it are ignored. A special mix code ensures that previously sent coins are not mixed with the user’s new coins.
Bitcoin mixers appeared almost immediately after the launch of the first cryptocurrency network, as the community needed additional ways to ensure privacy even at the dawn of the development of cryptocurrency technologies. Mixers are used by different categories of cryptocurrency owners. Every member of the community has the right to anonymity, and confidentiality is a mandatory property of cryptocurrencies. Blender.io is one of the most technologically advanced mixers on the market, ensuring the safety and privacy of users.
