This is Theymos's opinion, at least as of last year:
That said, there are two halfway-decent mixing methods currently:
#1 - Wasabi walletThe
Wasabi wallet uses CoinJoin in order to anonymize BTC.
- Pros: Easy to use; fairly cheap ~0.15% fee; pretty good privacy; automatically uses Tor
- Cons: ~0.1BTC minimum; with a great deal of effort and investigation, transaction analysis may still be possible, especially if you leave other traces; the coordinator could possibly do an active sybil attack against specific coins
#2 - MoneroMonero is not a magic black box which provides perfect anonymity! If you use eg. flyp.me to buy XMR and then quickly sell this XMR on flyp.me again, it is
blatantly obvious to flyp.me what you've done (if they keep logs), both due to the amounts and the specific Monero inputs used. In order to get decent privacy, you have to do something like this:
1. Convert BTC to XMR (using your own Monero wallet, not a hosted wallet).
2. In two or more transactions of random amounts, move XMR from that wallet to a
different wallet/account.
3. Optionally, you can repeat the above step with additional wallets/accounts for greater anonymity.
4. Preferably in two or more transactions of random amounts, convert the XMR in your last wallet in the chain to BTC.
Ideally, all of the above should be performed over as long a period of time as you can tolerate.
- Pros: Possibly the best anonymity, especially if you're able to stay within the XMR ecosystem to some extent
- Cons: You
should use Tor with Monero, but you have to set this up manually; it's all more difficult; you're exposed to exchange rate risk; transaction fees may be significant
P.S.If services like ChipMixer operated based on blinded bearer certificates, then they'd be in many ways superior to both of the above mixing methods. Someone should work on this.
Note the postscript at the bottom. ChipMixer may be in the process of implementing a blinded scheme:
If Chipmixer were interested in running such a service, I would be interested in implementing the code to turn Chipmixer into a Chaumian bank. Trustless for privacy, though you must trust them to not steal your money (just as now). I would use a protocol designed by cryptographers, not my own concoction; blinded signature schemes are hard to get right (plus there is some existing open-source code I may adapt).
We have contacted nullius about developing Chaumian bank.
