Topic: Privacy Tips: Don't send round amount (Read 794 times)

Precisely this. Blockchain analysis is just one part of the global surveillance state, which thanks to various leaks and whistleblowers we now know is far more widespread and invasive than we ever previously considered. The governments of the world do not want you to have privacy; the governments of the world do not think you deserve privacy. Privacy is inherently wrong as far as they are concerned. Only criminals needs privacy, and privacy is only for criminals.

This goes far beyond coinjoins, though. This is why governments are trying to force legislation to mean that users must provide KYC and proof of ownership for all deposit and withdrawal addresses to and from centralized exchanges. This is why they are advising financial regulators to monitor any transaction and address which is not part of a centralized platform which enforces KYC on all their users. Any use of bitcoin outside of KYCed accounts is suspicious and high risk, as far as they are concerned.

Their reasoning is likely the following: if there are some "dirty" inputs coming into a CoinJoin transaction, then this transaction should be flagged as "illicit" since some entities are definitely trying to hide something. This particular transaction, therefore, is not a representation of rights to privacy and the ability of people to selectively reveal the aspects of their lives but rather an attempt to cover crime, at least part of the transaction is aimed at that. Since the case is clear; there is a telling indication that criminals used CoinJoin and this particular transaction to hide their dirty business, it is perfectly justified to somehow mark this transaction to try to catch the criminals in the future. So far, so good. But since chain surveillance firms have no idea which outputs belong to those criminals, they need to violate the privacy rights of all participants, not just criminals. This is how the process of elimination works: everyone is guilty until proven otherwise. Clearly, they think they do good - they are trying their best to prove that you are not a criminal by spying on your post-CoinJoin transactions.

Okay, but what about clean-inputs CoinJoin transactions? Why is it also getting flagged as "suspicious"? I think the reason for this is that they don't actually believe that people should have a right to selectively reveal themselves... If your inputs aren't connected to any illicit activities or sanctioned entities, why would you want to obfuscate your transaction history? The only "rational" explanation is that you are considering becoming a criminal! You clearly are "preparing" your outputs so that they can be used in dark markets in the future; you are thinking that from now on, it is a good idea to begin hiding your financial affairs. Because if you weren't considering joining the dark side, you would be readily sharing your transactions with good guys who are relentlessly trying to prove you aren't a bad guy.

Exactly. This isn't some sort of "one guy does a bad thing, the rest pay it", which would neither make sense unless all of them were involved. There's absolutely no evidence provided that there's that one guy (unless they're all, which is true according to the fantastic world of FATF). And even if that's the case, it neither makes sense to not do the same for those who deposit coins to an exchange, and who weren't using an "unhosted" (lol) wallet before.

It's clearly a disincentive for privacy protection.

Use Tor Browser, and go to Blockchair's Tor domain blkchairbknpn73cfjhevhla7rkp4ed5gg2knctvv7it4lioy22defid.onion The captcha isn't hard. Get a new Tor Circuit (CTRL-SHIFT-L) once in a while, and/or look up addresses and transactions that aren't yours to add some misinformation

The very act of doing this constitutes a huge risk to your privacy, since blockchair can now link all the addresses you have looked up together by means of your IP address and browser fingerprint.

I take your point regarding the ability to choose your co-inputs, but I think it is academic. We both know that blockchain analysis companies aren't analyzing coinjoin transactions, and deciding that the outputs from coinjoins with all clean inputs are untainted and the outputs from coinjoins which include tainted inputs are tainted. Rather, they see a coinjoin transaction and they taint all the outputs as being linked to a coinjoin. Given this, it is irrelevant whether a users carefully chooses which co-inputs they coinjoin with or if they don't. Their output(s) will still be flagged by these entities as having come from a coinjoin. See for example: https://nitter.it/bittlecat/status/1207621591820951552. Given all this, then my point above still stands, and block rewards should be classed as every bit as tainted as coinjoin outputs. We know they aren't, but this is due to arbitrary "rules" set by blockchain analysis companies which are not based on any reality or logic, which they have managed to convince the majority of the space are infallible.

I wouldn't call it a disagreement, you are telling me that the whole concept of taint is flawed, and shouldn't be promoted or allowed to exist, which I fully agree with. Let's assume, however, that not all people are willing to adhere to the same principles as we are and that they refuse to come to the same conclusions despite the logical nature of those conclusions. Let's take a CoinJoin transaction as an example. It is nothing else but a regular bitcoin transaction, albeit a collaborative one. The beauty of collaborative transaction is that participation in it is always voluntary, which means you have full control over whether to join it or not and also whether to collaborate with certain inputs or not. If you think, for example, that some of the inputs are connected to a money laundering activity, you may refuse to participate in such a transaction. Simply put, you don't want to ruin your reputation by doing business with persons you consider "wrong." How exactly you determine that a certain person is wrong is another story, but I think, in a decentralized system, you should have a right to choose, and you should be able to assess the risks. If you don't care about other people's possible connection to criminal activity, if you don't want to chain surveil them to kind of prove such a connection, you can freely mix your inputs with theirs, but you are risking "poison" your outputs, at least in the eyes of some chain surveillance companies. Now let's take transaction fees. What distincts transaction fees from collaborative transactions is that users have no ability to decide with which inputs to "mix" their transaction and, therefore, they can't surveil others' inputs beforehand, and they can't assess all the risks properly. Basically, the mere use of the Bitcoin network becomes dangerous since there is a very high chance that their "clean" coins will be poisoned by criminal ones. The risk of taint makes bitcoin unusable, but an unusable network makes taint useless. Taint nonsense imposed on individual users destroys the network, if that is its goal then it obviously shouldn't exist.

Who can control which transactions to include in a block? Miners. But the problem with miners is that they aren't very interested in censoring transactions and preventing criminals from accessing a block space because not only does it require them to do chain analysis, but it also makes them less competitive and less profitable when compared with miners that do only mining. The mining process is required for the bitcoin network to function properly, it makes it secure, but compliant miners will result in the weakening of the network. Taint nonsense imposed on miners makes the bitcoin network insecure, a subject to censorship and capture by the government. If that is its goal, then taint obviously shouldn't exist.

Regarding transaction fees: in the eyes of taint nonsense, it poisons every transaction after a block was mined because there is no way to distinguish the fees coming from good transactions and the fees coming from bad transactions. Moreover, it poisons freshly created bitcoins because, again, there is no way to tell which part of the coinbase transaction is fees and which part is "virgin" bitcoins. If the goal of taint analysis is to make even fresh bitcoin dirty, then it obviously shouldn't exist.

Wallet used for bitcoin transaction also plays a role on how blockchair classifies or determine the level of privacy of such transaction.
Blockchair is my favorite blockchain explorer and I use it frequently to monitor my bitcoin transactions so I noticed what I said about, there was a time I was using this wallet called chainge finance, I noticed that each time I transfer or send bitcoin from that wallet to another wallet, the transaction privacy on blockchair is aways low or shows critical level, recently I stopped using that wallet and switched to mycelium, and I noticed that transaction privacy changed from low to medium and high for transactions I make using mycelium wallet.

Loyce is right, but ChipMixer chips can be even better than that. Rather than deliberately sending a non-round amount to obfuscate which is output and which is change, you can select the exact right size and number of chips needed to end up not creating any change at all. You can't lose your privacy to consolidating change outputs if you never created any change in the first place. You can just leave the rest of your coins as a voucher for a later time or withdraw them in a completely separate and unlinked transaction.

This topic is about the amount you send, not the amount you have. If you start with a round amount, nothing changes: send a "weird" amount to make it harder to guess which one is your change.

What will you suggest about the chip? I guess Chip mixer given the idea of a chip where 0.001 BTC is the minimum. I don't use mixers, but do they allow sending less or more than the round figure?

Same. As soon as any merchant tells me my mixed/coinjoin/swapped/otherwise obfuscated bitcoin isn't good enough for them, I'll be immediately leaving that merchant for a less stupid competitor.

Yes, exactly.

Let's say you have one output of 0.00052376 BTC. You make a transaction which creates two outputs, one of 0.0001 BTC and one of 0.00042076 BTC, with 300 sats paid as a fee. Which of the following scenarios is more likely?

• Someone requested payment of 0.0001 BTC, and whatever is left over is the change.
• Someone requested payment of 0.00042076 BTC, which just so happens to be the amount to exactly match your output and leave you exactly 0.0001 BTC as change.

Obviously the first scenario is far more likely, making it trivial to identify which output is payment and which is change. If instead, your two outputs contained 0.00010814 BTC and 0.00041262 BTC for example, then it becomes far more difficult to figure out which is which.

What exactly do you mean round amounts?  You mean don't send 0.0005 btc and send like 0.000523?

True. Dumb subjection requires dumb solutions. So, better just avoid the merchants all together, whenever that's possible. I haven't once been told to have tainted coins, even though I mix regularly.

Also, one more reason they don't taint block rewards is because every bitcoin user is part of it, and as you said they associate every input with every output, hereby if one user is a suspect, every bitcoin user from that block becomes also a suspect, same as with mixing. And since everyone can't own tainted coins (although with AML they are all tainted until proven clean) as this would make tainting further pointless (because if all are tainted there's no taint), their analysis begins from the moment these brand new outputs are spent.

The funny part is they don't care (or care little) for blackmailing users with tainted coins. The real power comes from controlling bitcoin users who just want to complete verification, and who suddenly feel responsible for someone else's actions (if they take the time to read what's a tainted bitcoin).

I never said they were. I said they could be a miner making use of block fees to avoid taint analysis, with the implication I was making that said miner does not broadcast the transaction but simply adds it to every candidate block they are working on until they successfully mine it.

But such a transaction makes it completely obvious that is what the miner intended to do, whereas one which sends a small amount to another address and a huge amount in fees can be plausibly denied as "I fat fingered the fee" or "I was trying to code a transaction manually and forgot to specify a change address, and so everything was taken as a fee".

Such transactions should not be broadcasted, because there's no single mining pool that monopolizes the network. There's a high chance the miner just loses their money, as he pays another miner the >99%. And since it should stay locally, to the candidate block, there's no reason to not make a non-standard transaction. Such as one emptying the entire input in fees.

Or just use a mixer. Same job, less effort.

That. And, personally, I just think the user base will mature over time, which is a disadvantage for taint-proclaiming companies. Strong hands come with strong reactions.

There have already been several such transactions I am aware of, on both bitcoin and a handful of alts, where someone has made a transaction which sends <1% of the value to another address and pays >99% of the value as fees. There's a good chance that such transactions are by someone trying to create a transaction manually and not really knowing what they are doing or messing up some code they were writing, but there's also a chance that such transactions are a miner making use of the fact that block fees are treated as clean to avoid taint analysis. If such practice became widespread, then you can be sure that blockchain analysis entities will start treating block rewards as tainted too.

And any miner which decides to censor transactions simply puts themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to other miners which don't. This will only become more apparent over time as fees contribute more and more to the total block reward.

Tainting coins might be a pointless process of detecting actually illicit-related activity, but it's a very effective process of incentivizing bitcoin users to be as compliant and conformist as possible. Same as with anti-money laundering laws, and privacy sacrificing to protect from terrorism and tax evasion. In the end, it's an incentive of being meek, for the sake of the surveillance state.

I'm afraid that block rewards are not tainted, because the industry focuses on the majority. Once the miners start moving the money across addresses, here the taint comes. And it also doesn't make sense, even in the head of a conformist: Transactions are picked according to their fee rate, and since bitcoin is censorship resistant, miners can (and should) pick the transactions that pay them the most. On the other hand, treating already used coins as tainted makes the users question the previous owners, and let authorities put their nose into their stuff to prove they have no relation with them.

It's a brilliant, fraudulent conspiracy.

I'm not sure I agree. If you think about it logically, then miners claiming fees is not really that different to a coinjoin transaction, when considered solely from a taint point of view. If anything, miners claiming fees should be more tainted, not less. I'll explain my reasoning.

If you take an output from a coinjoin transaction, then you can approach that in one of three ways:

• We have no idea which input(s) created that output, so the default is to consider it clean
• We have no idea which input(s) created that output, so the default is to consider it automatically tainted
• That output is associated with every input, and so if any of the inputs are tainted, then that output is also tainted

If you take the fees in a block, then the only logical approach is that those fees are 100% provably associated with every input spent in that block, and therefore if any of the inputs are tainted, then the fees are also tainted.

I do agree that the industry treat block rewards (fees included) as completely clean, but doing so makes no sense, and by any logical metric then block fees are every bit as tainted as coinjoin transactions. It is a success on the part of blockchain analysis firms that they have managed to widely convince everyone in the space that this is true, when in reality is it completely arbitrary nonsense, just like the rest of taint analysis.

All these philosophical arguments that bitcoiners make regarding fungibility don't work as well as miners maintaining fungibility directly via creating transactions with no attached history. Therefore, I don't need to "believe" that bitcoin is fungible, I can provide evidence that it really is, that eventually, all bitcoins in existence may be re-issued and become indistinguishable in a practical sense as if they have never been used in transactions.

They are only hypothetical for people living in developed countries where the private property rights of citizens are guaranteed and respected; for others, that's the unfortunate reality.

That makes no sense. First, taint doesn't exist. But even if it would exist, it doesn't do me any good giving my money away to a miner so that the miner will get "clean" Bitcoins. Unless I would be a miner of course, but not many Bitcoin users are miners.
Even better: if taint doesn't exist, the concept of "cleaned" Bitcoins can't exist either

What if they demand to hand in all cars and other items you possess? Hypothetical scenarios like this aren't something I'm concerned about.