Topic: Any free ways to anonimize your bitcoins? (Read 3321 times)

BTGuard is not free actually, but  $6.95 for a month is not big money I think

blockchain shared send will probably not help you hide from a determined attacker, but it would help from someone with very limited resources. Even a determined attacker cannot track coins that go through shared send with 100% accuracy.

inputs.io and bitcoin fog both claim to delete their logs after x amount of time. As long as they do not become compromised after x amount of time then your privacy is secure. I believe "x" is around a week (they delete logs after a week) but I may be incorrect on this.

1. Buy stuff from SilkRoad
2. Sell Stuff locally
3. Buy Bitcoin with Cash from Local Sells
4. Mix + Profit
5. Repeat

lol

imo best is to use exchanges as the anonimizers + withdraw random amounts not same ones

Blockchain shared send has been proven to be inefficient, bitcoin fog and other centralized solutions are not only potentially compromised (in which case they would offer no real effect) but you would have to rely on them not getting compromised ever even if you used them once.

There are a number of low cost tumblers/mixers

inputs.io
blockchain shared send
bitcoin fog
SR 2

This is as close to free as you will get.

KYC is not required at some exchanges so long as certain account thresholds are not met. It's usually $1000 or so.

I can track mixed coins fairly easily with crude tools (like "f" - yes on my keyboard) using taint analysis on blockchain.info. One fellow recently won a bounty from blockchain.info for using a more sophisticated, but still fairly crude data analysis tool that he wrote himself to discover the id of a mixed Tx. If I cared about concealing coins, I would use the exchange method.

with KYC requirements, wouldn't sending the unmixed coin to the first exchange expose you even more?

CoinMixR.com

It's a question of how you got the coins in the first place, for one. If you bought them on an exchange and your adversary is someone who can find out which address you withdrew them to, you need to mix coins from other sources in to hide that. If your chain of transactions starts at address A and ends at Z, and A can be linked to you, it doesn't matter how many hops  you go through to get to Z if there are no other original inputs than A in the chain of transactions. A mixer would alleviate this concern, but they may keep logs. You'd need to use several different services for added security. The odds of all of them being corrupt are lower than the odds of one of them being corrupt.

I don't think that's the kind of scenario most people worry about, though. IMO the more pressing question is: Do you want everyone you pay to be able to tell how much BTC you hold? I think it's tremendously unsafe not to employ some method of concealing your full holdings. Mark my words, one day someone will get tortured and killed for BTC because they paid the wrong person and they saw their customer is worth millions in this instantly transferrable currency.

For that purpose, simply moving funds through an exchange should suffice. I'd recommend at least separating spending funds from other holdings and taking care to keep the two segregated.

so we are back at Zerocoin 

I cant remember the name - but there was a site where you were able to swap your BTC for other BTC. Coinmixer.com or something like that

Blockchain.info's "Shared Coin" easy to figure out, thus, not so shared...

Reddit: Confirmed Blockchaininfo Shared Coin is Broken

^^ This.

But how do you know they are not just recording the "mixing" they are doing?

like you said in OP, send to a few different exchanges (not in your name and loaded via Tor)
or use a paid mixing service.. either or really...
hmm or both

Im not sure whether or not its worthwhile to mix my coins.  I mean, I dont really have anything to hide except the fact that my coins belong to me, but ultimately I will own addresses with coins in them so my problem stays.

Hopefully someone builds a client that automatically mixes anyway.

I'm not an elitist - I just think I'm better than you are. 

not free, but low fees

coins ARE tracked.  coins and pieces of coins move from address to address.  all movement is recorded forever.  the blockchain keeps ONLY a record of creation of the coins and afterwards the movements from address to address.   there is no calculation of the total.  the client checks the blockchain movement records from the beginning of time and calculates the total for the addresses you have in your wallet. 

this is my interpretation. someone can elaborate with a technical explanation on this subject or totally fud my statement.