I see you've been bragging about those 10 btc in escrow, but let's see if it DOES actually make sense: assuming you are a new market player and so have a relatively small amount of customers, your cap of simultaneously mixed coins is 100 btc (for simplicity) and that's where exit scam happens (for whatever reason, we are just assuming here). And let's say there were 100 people where everyone was mixing a single coin, which means that if the escrow will be WILLING to collaborate and allocate funds proportionally then everyone gets 0.1 btc.
Does only for me this thing look ridiculous and proves absolutely nothing? Keep in mind that we have an optimistic 1 to 10 ratio here (escrow/mixer), so if the real turnover is higher than you'll probably get like a few satoshis or so from the escrow.
Good luck with establishing trust but imo this is not the right way of doing it.
1:10 ratio for
BTC10 and
BTC100, yes, it is not balanced.
But the thing is; everyone is free to mix small amount several times if they are doubting a mixing service, not only this one (does not intend to defend this site). But, a mixer service actually doesn't need to escrow funds, in this case just for insurance but you said
this is not the right way of doing it? Maybe you should mentioned about the right way to do it. There is another mixing service which doesn't escrow their funds at all, only based on their trust in this forum. On the other hand, every mixing service could manage to collect fees from all of transactions which is profitable without have to scam people, trust is more valuable than
BTC1 at a time or
BTC10 in different time frame
You are right, the truth is that the only way a mixer can prove it is legit and not scamming is remaining in business over a long period of time. There is absolutely no other way they can prove their intentions apart from revealing the identities of the people behind the mixer. Trust is gained over time. Even when a website or business is trusted, and has been in business for several years, they can still exit scam. A good example is MTGOX. The reason they made away with so much coins is that people completely trusted them and left huge amount of coins on the exchange.
I think bitmixcoin is chugging along nicely, I am yet to mix any coins with them, but I will be doing so asap, so that I can take part in the video contest. The only way to make a good promotion video is trying out the mixer. At the very least if they scam me of the .01btc I plan on depositing, the escrow will pay that back. The escrowed amount is a good thing, and it should not be sneered at. More start ups should be encouraged to do the same and increase consumer confidence. I would rather take my business to someone that offers me escrow insurance than give it to a company based solely on their signature campaign.
