Topic: [ANN] Whirlwind.money | ⚡No Fee⚡ | Ultimate Privacy | Anonymity Mining 12% APR🔥 - page 33. (Read 12789 times)

I am really looking forward to you fixing the clearnet site as I haven't been able to visit for the past 1-2 week due to the website being down whenever I tried.

I really appreciate you removing the fees alltogether which makes your service even more attractive when compared to competitors and hope that there will be enough donation-based income. When I wrote a review in the review campaign I added a comment about the fee system and I am impressed how fast so many changes have been implemented that were suggested by us.

With the current anonymity system in place I personally wouldn't need an address funded before my deposit.
The time you would have to spend on implementing this could probably be used for better things.

We fully agree with you on the centralization risks, but considering our architecture we might go as far as say that unless we choose to exit-scam ourselves it's pretty much impossible to exploit Whirlwind or take it down. You can find more detailed technical explanations in this thread if you are interested to learn more about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5444933.60

Sure, you can argue that it's impossible to prove that we are not planning to do an exit-scam and you are completely right, but consider that if this was the plan all along we had a million other ways to do it in a way that would be much more profitable and required a lot less effort and dev time. We built a product that is light-years ahead of the competition from a technical point of view, name another service that you believe is better and we'd be happy to give our take on that. The only thing that could be argued here is that our anonymity set is not big enough yet, but this can't really be considered a disadvantage because we just started and once we exceed a certain number of deposits there is no going back.

If you are concerned about us stealing your funds then you can just withdraw as soon as you got paid, you don't need to keep the BTC inside Whirlwind. The risk still exists for that short period of time, but it's the same with any other service and in that case you wouldn't get to benefit from the same privacy level and unique features that we offer. Monero is still the better option, at least for now, but not everyone has the ability or knowledge to exchange BTC to Monero and back or they simply do not want to wait or pay extra in fees to go through that process, and in that case Whirlwind is the only option you have on the Bitcoin blockchain that offers instant, feeless and anonymous transactions.

Clearnet is still down because it wasn't a priority until now, we wanted to finish up all changes on the actual product before dealing with this. It's on the list for tomorrow, and once we solve it we don't expect any more downtime. It's also worth noting that the Tor service wasn't offline at all as it's completely unrelated to the Clearnet server.

As discussed since before starting Whirlwind our end-goal is to decentralize the service, and we went to great lenghts to build the system in such a way that it is possible to do it anytime assuming there are willing users to run signers. Whirlwind could already be considered a blockchain, the only issue is that we are the only ones who are running the 3 signers (validators). Real decentralization can be achieved in one of two ways:
1. Find some trusted community members and simply add them to the multi-sig.

The problem with this approach is that even though it would solve the centralization issue, there is no way we can properly verify these 'trusted community members', so in reality we might actually introduce more risks instead of solving the actual problem so this is not acceptable.

2. Open-source everything and implement something similar to a Proof of Stake mechanism making the process to run a signer(validator) trustless

We are exploring this approach as we speak and we might soon come to a conclusion on the best way to do it. As soon as we do we will start implementing it. Even though this requires a lot more effort than the first option it's the only way to do it safely given Bitcoin's technical limitations. We won't give too many details for now but this is a very high-level overview of how it would work, keep in mind it's just an example so ignore the numbers:

In order to run a signer and be added to the multi-sig you would need to stake a minimum of 10BTC. Only 1 new signer gets added to the multi-sig each day, so after you made your deposit you will be added to the queue which will be sorted in a descending order by amount. If your staked amount is higher than that of everyone else in the queue in any specific day you will be accepted and added to the multi-sig.

There would be a slashing mechanism to penalize bad actors and expel them from the system. Ideally the total staked amount between validators should be higher than the amount held in the multi-sig

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Below is the changelog with the latest updates, and tomorrow we will solve the Clearnet issues and completely eliminate the withdrawal fee of 2500 sats/address. This means that if you choose to donate 0, you will pay nothing using Whirlwind. You deposit 100000 sats, you get back 100000 sats.

Our most important short-term goal is to grow the Anonymity Set and we hope that this change will help us achieve it by attracting more users. The multi-sig balance is also steadily increasing and we appreciate the trust that current users are placing in us.

Open question for everyone: We could fund some wallets ourselves and offer users an extra option to receive the private key of an address that was funded before they made their deposit instead of withdrawing from the multi-sig after the deposit was confirmed. In your opinion is this something worth pursuing?

Just about every mixer is centralized, but there are instances where people just need a mixer, and Monero might not be an available option to them. For most people who aren't the best of the best in tech-savvyness, the only way to truly acquire Monero (especially large amounts) is through an extremely centralized, KYC-obsessed exchange. This is a space where mixers offer a solution. Centralized a bit, sure, but by far the "lesser" of two evils to someone in that situation. As far as I can tell, the Pay-to-Note feature is the most privacy-centric way to have Bitcoin mixed, sent, stored, etc. that currently exists. If there's another mixer out there right now that's doing something similar, I haven't seen it.

This all sounds nice on paper but I wouldn't compare this new Pay to Note feature with monero, since this is fully centralized system, I think that privacy is inferior, and we need to trust you.
If your website goes down both on clearnet (like it is now) and onion version than we have nothing left to withdraw.
On positive note, paying zero fees is a nice feature, but I will always have some reservation towards centralized mixers, especially after CM takedown aftermath.

We just completed the most important upgrade to date, the changelog is available at the end of this message. Some major changes have been made so we suggest everyone reads the FAQ again and perhaps even give the service a try with a small amount since it's essentially free now. We will also work on video tutorials now that the platform will be mostly unchanged going forward. ANN thread presentation will also be updated to reflect the latest changes.

We are most excited about the introduction of the Pay to Note feature and fungible outputs.

The Pay to Note feature enables instant, feeless and anonymous BTC transactions. Gone are the days where you want to send some Bitcoin to your friend but you worry about him checking out your past transactions so instead you are forced to use Monero. Now it's possible to do everything with Bitcoin with much more convenience and in much better conditions since all transfers are instant and free. Whirlwind is the first and only service to ever implement such a feature and we hope that our users see the value and opportunities that this brings.

Outputs are now fungible, meaning every single withdraw will look exactly the same for outside observers. This greatly increases privacy for all users since it's much harder to track what is happening behind the scenes only by looking at transactions.

We are ready to answer any questions and looking forward to read your feedback.

p.s. Clearnet is still under DDoS and offline, please use the Tor version for now. We will solve this issue too in the following days, apologies for any inconvenience caused but this was not a priority.

It's a very wise move for the following reasons:

1. Even if they claim they mix in greater numbers than us it doesen't matter because their Anonimity set does not increase with more usage for the reasons we explained before. (our entire Anonymity Set, which is 240 currently, only needs to be higher than the amount of deposits they get in a 168 hour period in order for Whirlwind to be a superior solution. after we pass a certain threshold which is probably a few days/weeks away it's going to be impossible for them to even come close to us) Their systems are fundamentally flawed so comparing those to Whirlwind would never do them justice. After our major update goes live we will make a comparison between WW and all other solutions so everyone can have an educated opinion on what the best service really is.

2. Considering they are outright lying about keeping logs (mixing code) and they also use Cloudflare without double-encryption noone should believe any of their claims without proof

3. If what we are claiming is false and their service is really that good and provides such great anonymity, it shouldn't be an issue for them to also be as transparent as we are. We afford to do this specifically because we have nothing to hide and all the claims we made until now are true.

We can easily debunk any misinformation with verifiable arguments so lying would be a ridiculously bad idea from their side and a nice gift to us since it's gonna be even easier to convince users that we are the better solution.

Correct

If users are paying fees/donations on a voluntary basis that probably means they are happy with the service they received. If that continues then your customers will continue to have a fee-free service.

The anonymity set shows 240 user deposits. If this number is effectively the grand total of mixes to date, it serves a purpose when it is related to transparency however it can be used by your competitors to entice customers to use their service under the (true or false) guise of them mixing in the greater numbers than Whirlwind. Overall, is it a wise move to do that?

It will be interesting to see the format you are operating after 3 months.

You are right, this is a business and our goal is obviously to make money from it, but we never intended to make that money from the network fees. Now that we made our system much more efficient and we pay very little in transaction fees ourselves, we believe there is no point to charge the users the same as before. That would only result in less usage and we do not want that.

Pretty much everyone that used the service after we made the fees optional decided to donate something, so as long as this continues we should generate more than enough to be highly profitable, especially with the increased usage that we expect after the above features are implemented.

Of course it could also happen that usage increases, but everyone will donate 0 and in that case we will have to implement a minimum fee again, but we doubt that will be the case. And as we said before we will run the platform with 0 fees for at least 3 months before deciding if it is in fact viable or not.

We have a big enough reserve that allows us to absorb losses without being under pressure while we improve the product to a point where it doesen't make sense to use another service instead of Whirlwind, that was the plan from the beginning.

We are aware of the clearnet issues, it's still under DDoS. It will be fixed once the major update goes live in a few days, we gave more details in the previous 2 messages. Until then the onion site should work perfectly as it's completely separate from clearnet.

it seems that your clean site (https://whirlwind.money/) is offline, at least I can't access it. Tried from several different browsers., or there are certain restrictions from where it can be accessed.
onion works, but maybe a little slower than expected.



Also, ping can't find you

If you are reducing service fees to between 0%-4% and at some stage in future eliminate withdrawal fees, how would it be a viable model business for you? The presumption would be for you to make some sort of profit if you run it as a business and if your proposal is implemented in future that will not happen unless customers voluntarily decide to pay a service fee.

Number of visits were definitely affected by the DDoS, but we will solve it once and for all after we're finished with the update. That's the main priority for now.

Besides the 3 options to deal with DDoS I listed above we thought of a 4th one that requires a lot more effort from our side but it's probably the best way to approach this.  We could use Cloudflare or any other 3rd party, but to do that safely we need to double-encrypt everything. So even though Cloudflare would most likely store logs for all actions made through Clearnet, it would be useless since they couldn't decrypt the packages so they still won't know anything about our users including what actions they made while visiting the website. Each user will be able to independently verify this second layer of encryption actually exists so you do not need to trust our word. I'll write a detailed description about how this system would work and if the feedback is good enough we will implement it.

As opposed to CM or any other service we are not even trying to hide that coins came from us, in fact that would actually make Whirlwind less secure from a privacy standpoint. The multi-sig address is public so everyone can check all inputs/outputs themselves. Thanks to how the system works this information doesen't mean much because any output could have originated from any of the deposits made until that point so it's impossible to link them together. In this regard Whirlwind is more resistant to deanonymization techniques than even CM after our Anonymity Set is strong enough.* Other than the fungible outputs there aren't many similarities between the 2 services.

After the update later this week you will be able to deposit less than 0.001BTC in one Note, but to withdraw you will need to combine enough of them so you get to the 0.001BTC minimum withdraw amount.

We will consider offering Monero deposits/withdrawals but it's probably not going to happen in the very near future if at all as we don't want to overcomplicate things.

*Comparison example between CM and Whirlwind Anonymity Sets:
For simplicity let's imagine both services started at the exact same time 3 months ago and during these 3 months 1000 deposits were made to each service (1000 to CM and 1000 to WW) each worth 1BTC and 800 of them were already withdrawn. So each service had a total volume of 1000BTC but only 200BTC remaining in the reserve.

A new user now deposits 1BTC to CM and 1BTC to Whirlwind and withdraws 1 hour later. The anonymity sets would look like this for each of the 2 services:

Whirlwind - Since you do not know which one of the 1001 deposits was withdrawn at any point, it can only be assumed that each output originates from any of the 1001 deposits, so the Anonymity Set is 1001 regardless if 800 were already withdrawn.

CM - Since Chips are prepared in advance and during those 3 months most of the withdrawn chips (800) were already spent at a timestamp before you made your deposit, your Anonimity Set is only 1001-800 = 201

I see.money has not been working for several days, and you depend on Tor. Is there still visits and profits, or has it not been affected?

Your service has become very similar to CM, won't the fixed output fungible and fixed withdrawal fees make it easier to identify that coins came from u?
Are deposits less than 0.001BTC considered donations, or can I get notes of the same value, but they cannot be withdrawn?
Are there ideas to add Monero to the withdrawal from notes, or will you just be Bitcoin?

Important update

Major upgrades will be live towards the end of the week, at this point it's probably safe to say that Whirlwind is going to be the most complete solution after these changes. A complete changelog will be provided but here is a shortlist:

1.new UI and FAQ for better user experience

2.stability issues completely fixed, all delay times will be respected to the minute

3.withdraw fees will be reduced from 5000 sats/address to 2000 sats/address. we might eliminate them altogether after we gather more data

4.fast mode will be deprecated, everyone will have to use the Note system. you will still be able to withdraw instantly after your deposit is confirmed so it can be used in the same way as the fast mode

5.outputs will be fungible, namely 0.001BTC, 0.01BTC, 0.1BTC, 1BTC, 10BTC. the unspent balance will remain on the Note and you can withdraw it at any time

6.minimum deposit amount will be lowered so you can consolidate small amounts anonymously by combining multiple Notes

7.Pay to Note feature enabling feeless and anonymous Bitcoin transactions.

8.Complete compliance module - Whirlwind provides a signed Guarantee Letter for every action executed by the end user. It's the end user's responsibility to save all the guarantee letters and use them as needed. We stated publicly since before starting Whirlwind that we do not believe our service could be considered illegal by any standard and we intend to do everything in our power to stay compliant without compromising our user's privacy even in the slightest bit.

The compliance module is needed for the following type of situation: You send some funds to your online friend through Whirlwind and he deposits those funds in a centralized exchange resulting in his account getting frozen. Since you both saved the guarantee letters for the deposit, the transfer between your Notes and the withdraw, if he wants to he could prove to the exchange where the funds originated from and have his account unlocked.

We are not here to judge anyone's approach to AML or where our users deposit their outputs afterwards, but as a service we need to provide the tools to be compliant. It's still solely the user's responsibility to use these tools properly and equally any service where funds from Whirlwind get deposited have the right to ask questions and act according to their individual terms and conditions. That is none of our business

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You could coinjoin yourself before or after using Whirlwind, I don't think it makes much sense for us to build an alternative to coinjoins because one part of the system would have to remain centralized regardless. The only way in which the current system can be decentralized is if we add multiple trusted parties to the multi-sig.

We could build an extension so you don't have to use any website, but the service itself would still remain centralized

Do you think it would be possible if Whirlwind could somehow work with hardware wallets to reduce or remove risk with self custody, as alternative to coinjoins that are used by wasabi and trezor hardware wallet?
It would be great to have this working in more decentralized way, without the need for using websites, instead everything could be done with wallet interface.
I remember CM had extension that work with Electrum wallet, and I would like to see something like that.
 

We are well aware of the difficulties that our stance on DDoS brings, but IMO there aren't many alternatives. I'm going to list some of them with their main disadvantages and it'd be great if we could get some feedback:

1.Proprietary DDoS (current form): Expensive to maintain | Big headache to monitor and adjust all the time | Attacks can't be 100% mitigated, it's a constant cat and mouse game | Might have downtime anyway regardless of how much money we're spending on servers | Might lose a lot of users because Clearnet is not available

2.Cloudflare or another 3rd party: All transactions executed through Clearnet are automatically deanonymized | Anonymity Set would not be accurate anymore since deposits executed through Clearnet can't be counted as they are deanonymized so the entire platform would be more 'at risk'

3.Scrap Clearnet service altogether and only have an informative page when you enter whirlwind.money that directs you to the Tor version.

We do not want to lose the Clearnet business because it's very lucrative and it mostly contains the user types that interest us the most (someone that just wants some privacy), but achieving this through implementing Cloudflare would feel like selling our soul and lying to everyone for our gain. So as things currently stand and unless someone comes up with a better idea we will get "the big guns" out and continue with option 1, but if after a while our efforts prove to be futile like you say, then we believe the 3rd option is the only right thing to do.

p.s. the above only reinforces our beliefs that we need to distance ourselves from similar services as much as possible. not only is their anonymity set only as high as the number of deposits made during ~168 hours around your output transaction, but most of the deposits in that anonymity set cannot be counted anyways as they are logged by cloudflare. apologies if it sounds like we're attacking them for no reason, but this is the truth. We are not lying with anything, if we did then as said before any other operator is free to write in this thread and debunk our statements. It's your choice to use whatever service you think is best for you.

If it is a learning process, maybe with a few tweaks you may find ways to contain them otherwise as you said the bigger dedicated server might help when you migrate. If the intensity of the attacks is growing then you will have to remain vigilant. I have not used Whirlwind since my review but checked recently on TOR and the website loads without problems.

From what I've read about DDOS-attacks, home-made solutions are futile. Theymos gave up years ago. It's very expensive to mitigate, while the attack (using a botnet) is very cheap to run.

It's a much more appropriate term for sure, we were just concerned that if we'd call it that way noone would even bother to check what it is. Literally the only weak point of Whirlwind is that we need a lot of usage at the start until the Anonymity Set grows to a decent level, so we couldn't afford to confuse potential users even more with new names.

The implementation of the Pay to Note feature paired with the 0% fee should give us the much needed boost in transactions, if it still doesen't happen then we already have a 'Anonymity Mining' campaign planned. In layman terms we will pay users who deposit using the Note mode and keep the funds inside the pool for a specific amount of time. Basically we would pay for increasing the Anonymity Set.*

After enough users hear about and use Whirlwind we will change the wording and branding of features to better reflect the reality and distance ourselves from similar services.

*We still have the 40,000 DAI in escrow for the review campaign with minerjones even though it ended. Not that it means much since only in the multi-sig there are 6x more funds right now, but it's worth mentioning anyway. We will leave them there until we decide if the Anonymity Mining campaign is needed or not.

It looks like it's not holding up, so please use the Tor version for now. Please keep in mind that no matter if the clearnet version is offline, the Tor version will always work flawlessly.

We tried solving the issue only through software updates, and for a while we did, but the intensity of the attack is growing by the day and the current clearnet VPS is way too weak and cannot handle it. We will upgrade to a much bigger dedicated server and we expect the issues to be solved at least to a certain degree after that.

If your latest DDoS protection is holding up and providing adequate protection from any possible attack without using any 3rd party software then that is good. When I last visited the clearnet website earlier today to see if the page loads, it took a long time before the 5 second DDoS countdown loaded and after that it took well over a minute for the page to load before I gave up.

Eventually this message showed. Is it because the website is really under maintenance or because that is the new default message when the website is under DDoS:

That's a powerful quote, a really good 'branding point.' I could see "privacy pool" becoming a new term, and if Whirlwind is the one to popularize it, it'd draw many users as being the one to really establish the term. There are plenty of neat business strategy aspects that I think most mixers just skip over, and it hurts their growth. More growth for whirlwind just means more privacy for all of us, so if a mixer wants to really improve the privacy of their users through a huge set of incoming and outgoing transactions, I think they should focus on innovating in a business strategy sort of way. You just don't really see that in any other mixer today.

Branding is an extremely powerful tool that is often overlooked. We've got another more philosophical discussion about Whirlwind going on here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.62070355, and Whirlwind proposed this idea of Blind Certificates to really supercharge the note system. Blind Certificates, unfortunately, are a pretty confusing term to anyone who doesn't want to spend half an hour researching them (as most of us wouldn't). If they were called something like "Whirlbonds" instead, well, that's pretty exciting. It's all the same tech of blind certificates, but because it has a 'cool' branded name, it just sounds exciting and gets people interested.

The moment that opened my eyes to the power of branding was when my grandma was showing me a tennis racket she bought at a thrift store. She said "Look, it even has the Liquid X Core!" I remember thinking "Grandma! That means nothing!" Still, she was sucked in and excited about some really meaningless branding term. Not saying "Privacy Pool" or "Whirlbonds" is meaningless, but just that these "branded terms" are just one aspect that can really innovate a mixer and draw in more users, which helps all of us achieve more privacy.