Topic: Accepting Bitcoin donation anonymously - page 2. (Read 646 times)

Yes, something like changelly, changenow, sideshift, simpleswap etc. people call this instant exchanges and even some hardware wallets are using their services.
They usually charge higher fees than normal centralized exchanges, but you don't have to withdrawal fees because you are getting converted coins directly in your wallet address.
Some of this exchanges can be risky and I even saw people complaining being scammed using some of them.
I guess one of the safest way for swapping coins would be using atomic swaps, one exists for BTC-XMR called unstoppableswap.net but only for smaller amount of coins, and bugs are still possible.

Yeah, platforms that perform crypto swaps or instant exchanges between two coins. Honestly, I don't know how instant those are. Some of them like ChangeNow claim to be non-custodial. Their exact wording is "Free of Custody." How can something be "free of custody" if you are depositing YOUR coins in one of THEIR addresses? I guess you can claim anything you want in crypto. Another thing I remember about services like the one I mentioned is that they claim to be anonymous. You don't need to do KYC. However, their partner exchanges and whatnot can still ask you to undergo KYC. If that happens, the non-custodial exchange will LOCK YOUR COINS until you go through KYC.

So non-custodial, much great... woof. 

Cold and hot wallets are made-up terms that have to do with the internet connectivity of the devices that contain private keys in their drive. OP will probably generate a master key pair and derive the donation addresses. I believe they know what's more secure and what's not. Either way, they haven't mentioned if the private keys will be stored online.

What's an instant exchange? You mean centralized swap services?

I guess he could do that and then convert received coins back to Bitcoin, but there is a risk in doing that on exchanges that are centralized or instant.
One of the better way would be to use decentralized exchange Bisq for that or some p2p trading website.
Alternative option for him is using Lightning Network donations with his own channel, that is much harder to track than Bitcoin and he will pay much less fees.

If the goal is to get the donations anonymously then you should consider another coin like Monero where transactions can't be traced.

I don't get clear why they want to store the bitcoin donation online, that's not the secure way to handle this. All the donations should go to a cold wallet and then send them to a hot wallet when you will spend those donations. That's would be the secure way.

I would never suggest anyone to use any telegram service or groups if they want to use something non-custodial and non-kyc.
Telegram account is directly connected with your phone number and IP address location, and they don't have any encryption in chats or in groups, so everything is public and stored on their servers.
Some say that secret chat has some encryption, but this is questionable, can't be verified and it's only available on mobile devices.

Other than Localcryptos and other similar p2p trading website, there is also decentralized exchange called Bisq, but I am not sure if there is liquidity for specific region.
You can always start your own trade and call people to join with adding more liquidity, and this is one of the best ways for trading.
Your keys, your coins and fiat currency method of your choice.

They asked for the best solution.

If OP customer really have serious privacy concern, they would use method to reduce the link/connection. For example, they could use P2P or multiple exchange for each/few addresses.


This is horrible for donator privacy. The moment they send Bitcoin to that address, blockchain analysis immediately know the group receive donation and know the donator donate to that group (if the donator doesn't have strong privacy practice).

There is not "a bit of privacy". the efforts using various addresses is neglible in his case. Thats all there is. Its not worth spending brain over it. Absolute not important as 99% of his problems are getting money into his account frm abroad that is from crypto sale. And for that, it doesn't matter.


I mean it doesn't hurt and yes, maybe it helps a bit but given the overall challenge he has, thats the last he should care.

This doesn't sound right.

If you have 200 UTXOs from 200 different addresses, you don't have to cluster them all in one transaction. That's why there's coin selection. OP may not want to cash them out all at the same time. Therefore, they can gain a little privacy. On the other hand, if they have 200 UTXOs in 1 address, it won't matter if they coin-select or not as they'll have revealed that all these outputs are owned by the same person from the beginning.

Plus, they may not want from their people to know how much money there are donated. If they use 1 address, they're doomed to reveal it.

A fourth option is to use a decentralized exchange such as Bisq.

You can't sum up all the countries in that region like this, the difference between them is HUGE. For examples in Iran you can have any religion or no religion at all and all major religions are publicly practiced and each have a seat in the Parliament, whereas you can't practice anything other than the Saudi regime's religion in Saudi Arabia.
Additionally bitcoin is legal in Iran and is being openly traded even though regulations are still incomplete.

I have read a lot of the posts so far and I don't see why so many write here so much without knowing the real problem behind your request. Also they might not understand that being atheist is a problem in the region and that is why being anonymous is important.

I have had 3 years experience with Saudi and other governments in the region (in regards to BTC) and therefore can tell you, that I know what I am talking about.

The first thing to mention is that you do not really increase your privacy with individual addresses. In my opinion, you can ingore this requirement right away.
If you collect donations on 200 addresses and want to cash them out, you eventually will send out a transaction clustering them. if you use coinjoin or other mixing services, you risk your coins being frozen by exchanges.
So lets ignore this right away and you can easily use 1 address only for all donations.
Here you can see an example of glasschain how they group addresses into wallets: https://glasschain.org/btc/address/bc1qx65xcxz6dfsge2g4eaerercslh83y66wrpm79r
The same would be done for your wallet.

Second is that your MAIN problem is to get the money in Saudi Riyals onto a saudi Bank account. As long as you just HODL Bitcoin you are good and nobody knows who is behind that 1 bitcoin address.
If you use middle eastern platforms like rain.bh you are screwed. They UPFRONT deliver data to regulators from where they are accessible to all gov. entities as they please. So this is a big nogo.
You must restrain yourself from using any service that needs KYC on any entity that is connected to you in the middle east but better even globally.

So you have 3 options

a) using a non kyc custodial service on telegram (I know there are a few reputable ones in operation since years. They really work and never heard of a scam there!).
There you might run into liquidity issues if you want to cash out more than 50k usd in 1 day.

b) using a non kyc p2p exchange such as Localcryptos or Vertex. If you sell Bitcoin, the buyer doesn't want to kyc you as he has no risk. However, you must make 100% sure you KYC and verify the person who will send you FIAT as they can very, very easily claim the money back in your region. Also, think of a reason to tell your bank why you got thismoney form YYZ as "selling bitcoin" is not an option.

c) using a foreign entity (anywhere far away from the MENA region) and cash out those coins there and then invoice this company out of saudi and get funds
However, you won't be finding it very easy to just get a bank account to cash out funds.

Therefore for me your best shot is option a).

gradually cash out and make sure to use various banks and various bank accounts to receive transactions from the escrow service. Keep funds you don't need cash as USDT and try to pay as much as you can with crypto.

Tried to PM you but as I am apparently a newby I can't ;-)

It's not that hard to use BTCPay server to generate new addresses for each donation, but problem could happen when you decide to consolidate all those transaction at some point.
Only way to keep some privacy would be to have good address management or to use some services like Chipmixer that would break connection with previous transactions.
Coinjoin could also be an option but it's less effective than mixers and they are easier to track with Chainalasys and similar tracking services.

In summary: Setup a BTCPay server and mix each UTXO individually when you'll have to spend from the donations. This way you'll have accomplished maximized anonymity with Bitcoin. If each user is not meant to donate much, consider using Lightning for better privacy and efficiency.

I assume the reason why your clients want to "accept bitcoin anonymously" is because their donors wish to donate in a way such that their identity is not linked to the donations.

If your clients receive donations from donors, there is the potential that your client will spent the coin in a way that will link all of the donations together, which is the equivalent of using a single donation address.

There are various ways of accepting bitcoin in a way such that a new address is generated for each potential transaction. Others in this thread have mentioned some implementations, and I will not suggest one above what has already been discussed.

However the above is not going to solve your underlying problem. The ideal solution to what I believe is your client's problem is that your client's donors need to be able to send bitcoin in a way such that the transaction cannot be traced back to their identities. A good first step to doing this is to not reuse addresses, not publish any addresses that belong to them, and to use coin control.

The problem isn't how to accept bitcoin donations anonymously. The problem is how to spend  bitcoin donations anonymously.

Once you have received your donation, you are 100% private (if you are using a fresh new address). But when you send those coins to an exchange, your privacy is gone.

My suggestion is to transfer all donated coins to a bitcoin mixer. Once those coins are mixed, you can send them an exchange and spend them. Nobody will be able to track that thsoe funds came from the original donation address.

What happens after the donations are collected?
Let's say 60 people donate to their cause and the coins can now be found in 60 different addresses. What do they plan to do after that? Distribute it equally among themselves or do they have more "advanced" ideas?   

Sounds like a good idea honestly.. Just make sure to find a good one. If you're searching for 'crypto experts', you're going to find a lot of self-proclaimed experts that discovered the whole topic a year ago and are going to recommend you investing all of your money into their new hot ICO or something like that.
Better look for 'Bitcoin experts' and make sure they really do know what they're doing.

Thank you guys for the input!
I think it is better to outsource and do this task with help of crypto experts. Their life is important.

Thank you again 

If it wasn't still so new and experimental, I'd recommend BOLT12 offers.
Everyone wanting to receive donations could create such an offer code that can be put on a website (static) and receive anonymous Lightning payments. These follow different paths every time by default, so there is no such thing as address reuse and blockchain analysis at all at play here. As far as the blockchain is concerned, funds never moved.

Not sure if that aligns with your product-market-fit, since it would require some technical know-how from the people receiving donations (setting up a node etc.)...

I would probably just set up a Bitcoin node for every user and either make (or find) a tip jar plugin that shows a webpage which generates a new address for each request, or one that generates Lightning invoices with the push of a button.
Something like this: https://github.com/lightningd/plugins/tree/master/donations