Quote from: Dabs on September 14, 2013, 12:02:56 PM

I haven't kept up with the coinjoin thread, but ... assuming people could trust either one individual or one entity or even 2-of-3 multisignature addresses, can a bunch of people just send coins to that one person, and he sends it to himself (consolidating all the unspent inputs into 1 output), then send them all back out to the same bunch of people (at different addresses), and this is effectively mixed?

Let me rephrase that in steps:
1. many people send coins to, for example you, 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB, wait 6 confirmations.
2. you then use some form of raw transaction or coin-control to get all the unspent inputs, then spend them all back to 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB, wait another 6 confirmations.
3. then you send the coins back to their original owners.

Of course, this method is flawed in that they (the people) have to trust you. But a service could do this and charge 1% or something, like blockchain or bitcoin fog used to (they really did mixing by not connecting users to each other.)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, or am missing something:
Why the extra step to "send all inputs to one adress" and then split them up again?
As far as I remember, coinjoin does exactly the same thing you suggest, except it creates one huge transaction, where everybody throws inputs at it, defines new, "anonymous" outputs, and signs the whole tx when they are happy with the result. It's either all or nothing, the coins can't be taken in between. Also there is no central point whatsoever. Except, for convenience, a central point to organize all the people and inputs, outputs and the like.
I see a market for such a central point. TOR and anonymity would be fine too, an .onion address would in fact be helpful. I'd throw a small fee at it too.

Ente