Bitcoin tumbling

Bitcoin tumblers and privacy issues they face.

While Bitcoin tumbling is essentially the same thing as Bitcoin mixing, thus Bitcoin mixers can also be called Bitcoin tumblers, today’s article will be concerned with different topics and ideas connected to this practice.

But before we do that, let's briefly repeat what a Bitcoin tumbler is, how it works and especially answer the question as to why anyone would use it.

What do you need to know about Bitcoin tumblers?

Bitcoin tumblers, also known as Bitcoin mixers, are devices, platforms, services or processes that have one goal and that is to make the users more anonymous. They do that thanks to different tumbling techniques, where they group together coins sent by the users and then split them randomly so that the users receive the same amount (minus the mixing fee), as they had before.

Even if this might seem unimportant or maybe weird for newcomers to this world, there is a good reason as to why anyone would use the Bitcoin tumbler. And that is to increase their privacy. It has now been clear more than ever before that Bitcoin is not anonymous, but pseudonymous. In practice this means that once any user connects their identity with their bitcoins, it is easily traceable.

However, for anyone, who wants to have their financial privacy under control, the services such as Bitcoin tumblers offer a great way of acquiring privacy back even if it was compromised before. And while many would believe that services such as these are mostly sought after by criminals, the contrary is true. Most of the users of the Bitcoin tumblers are just normal, simple people who do not want to share every bit of their financial situation with everybody. Bitcoin tumblers offer exactly this.

Problems with Bitcoin tumblers

There are however some problems with these services. We have looked especially at the legality and morality issue of a Bitcoin mixer. Yet, there are some other drawbacks connected to these services such as traceability.

While at the first glance it might look like the coins coming out of the tumbling process should be untraceable, the contrary is true. First of all, they can still be traced the same as they are still broadcasted to the blockchain, which is a public ledger. The only thing that changed was the connection to the user’s personal identity. 

However, if the users decided to use centralised tumbler, this might not even be true. In fact, many believe that centralised tumblers, which are not open-source, can become a single point of failure in the future when it comes to Bitcoin privacy, as many suspect that Bitcoin tumbling platforms keep the transaction data. This would mean that they can connect the identity back to your new address even after the tumbling process.

What is however a more pressing problem is the fact that after the tumbling, when the tumbler receives its fee, all the other transactions will be more or less the same (value-wise). On-chain analytics companies can try to track and trace the wallets that were used in the tumbling process and can try to pair them together, essentially making the bitcoin tumbling obsolete. The size of the tumbler does matter then, since the bigger the size the more difficult it is for anyone to try to connect the identity back to the user.

Additionally, there are only very few Bitcoin tumblers or mixers that have been around for a longer time period. Most of the tumbling services and platforms face problems either from the side of regulators and politicians or through exploitation and hacks. Some of them were even pure scams that tried to rip off their users. Trust is especially necessary with the centralised tumblers, while decentralised usually face problems such as higher transaction fees, slower transaction processing or more complicated interface.

Whir to the rescue

Have you experienced any of the problems with the Bitcoin tumblers? Or have you had some other negative experiences that might have put you off these services and only made you use KYC exchanges to buy Bitcoin, store, or sell it? Well, if any of that is true, do not worry, there is an easy solution.

And that solution goes under the name of Whir. Whir offers super easy Bitcoin tumbling service that allows the users to make sure that their transactions are not only safe, but also anonymous. The only thing that the users need to do is to insert an address where they want to send their mixed bitcoins or satoshis. Whir will then generate a new address, which is the one that the user should actually use for the transaction.

Once the users send their capital, the funds will be transacted directly to the address that was selected by the user, but with one twist. Privacy. All of this goes through Whir, which uses CoinJoin to deliver the best anonymity in the Bitcoin space, since it offers all of these services through private browsers such as Tor.

This option is now offered to transactions up to 1 BTC, with the minimum being 0.001 BTC. This brings a nice balance of being able to make reasonable amounts of money private, without the ability to launder huge amounts of stolen money.

Lastly, Whir offers pretty low fees. With only 1% of the transaction fee, Whir is definitely one of the cheapest options out there for anyone, who wants to make their satoshi stash anonymous and does not want to pay hefty fees of Bitcoin tumblers.

Conclusion

Bitcoin tumbling has been popular ever since its inception. The concept of making Bitcoin anonymous is very appealing mainly to the privacy extremists, libertarians or some other groups of people who want to have their money not only safe, but also private. Yet, it is far from finished as there are drawbacks that can always lead to traceability of bitcoins even if they went through Bitcoin tumbling service.

Thus, if you still want to make sure that your bitcoins are private and anonymous and do not want to go through any Bitcoin tumbler or mixer, Whir offers a rather simple solution that anyone can use without any need of downloading a new wallet or using some special software. Using Whir is as simple as sending any other Bitcoin transaction. 

Disclaimer: This article does not serve as a piece of financial advice or encouragement and inducement for the usage of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Its primary role is informative, explanatory, and educational. The readers have to decide themselves whether to use or not to use these types of services.