Using a big service with your own coins does not help. They can still link the inputs to outputs. Since we are using a pool of many people's coins, simply linking the input to output only links us to ourselves, but introduces clean coins into the mix and makes it even more difficult to trace our client's coins. The worst case is that someone tracing can determine you used our service, but mixing with other services increases our pool size and makes this much more difficult.
I fail to understand how it's different, send coins to Instawallet, withdraw coins half an hour later, you won't get the same coins since it's a shared wallet.
Repeat this step with a second shared wallet, in another country preferably => coins cleaned.
And all this without handing your coins to a onion service that could instantly disappear with all the users funds.
..same problem with anonymous surfing: Sure, you can use one regular proxy. You are then anonymous to outsiders. But not to the proxy people, and not to the guys with the rubber hose talking to the proxy people. All right, use two, three, many proxys in a row? It only costs more time and effort to de-anonymize you, thats all. Maybe less than one workday, with scary confidential emails from three letter agencies.
The real solution, of course, is TOR.
And yes, you still have to trust TORwallet to not do something fishy with the logs. I, personally, already trust them more than other services to tumble coins. I will eventually try it out, with small amounts.
edit:
or, see it as a tradeoff:
- Regular services (yohndonym, instawallet): You can be pretty sure they work (and not steal your stuff), and you can be pretty sure they will eventually break (court order, raided servers, rubberhose)
- itself anonymous services (TOR, TORwallet): You will never be sure they will not run, once they have xy Bitcoin collected, or will be a honeypot to begin with (90% TOR nodes from three letter agencies?), but at least it it technically possible for them to not give out data in any event
Ente
