http://www.bitcoinlaundry.com/ is still up and working AFAIK.
I noticed that site before, also noticed it's REALLY expensive (if you ask me). Thanks for your reply though!
An important tip: Always put your bitcoin client behind a proxy like Tor. This is really important, as it is not so difficult to guess from which IP transactions come. Linking every transaction to an IP puts you just a step close from linking them with an entity/individual, particularly for a business which has publicly known IPs.
Besides that, to really "erase" every trace you'll have to do some work. Two things you should worry:
To "erase" the trace you should search for mixers. There's a site, bitcoin laundry or something, that does it and theoretically does not keep logs. I don't know how competent they are, I just know I found it expensive last time I saw it. A mixer would only work well if it has many clients, and I don't know if these services have enough demand yet. Instead, you may want to make your coins hop from an e-wallet to another before reaching the final end. That'll probably do the mixing. Yes, it would leave logs on the e-wallets. To mitigate the risks of being identified by such logs, always use proxies like Tor and maybe create multiple anonymous accounts on these e-wallets. In this case, even if an attacker discovers one of your accounts by following blockchain traces, they wouldn't necessarily know about the others.
Also, if you don't want to mix coins coming from different costumers, you can't have transactions that spend them at once, since it would prove they were controlled by the same entity. Each amount you receive should be spent entirely in a transaction of its own. I remember somebody once did a patch to the standard client that allowed you to manually build your transaction, picking the inputs. If it was possible to make with GUI, then it's probably possible to make it through RPC as well. If in a certain situation you need to make a payment that's higher than the full individual amount of all of your addresses, then you should make multiple transfers to your e-wallet/mixer and let it do the join of coins in your place. Hopefully it will pick different addresses.
Summary: it's not easy, and we unfortunately miss automated and cheap ways of doing it.
Besides that, to really "erase" every trace you'll have to do some work. Two things you should worry:
- The trace coins leave, obviously.
- Linking different coins in a same transaction.
To "erase" the trace you should search for mixers. There's a site, bitcoin laundry or something, that does it and theoretically does not keep logs. I don't know how competent they are, I just know I found it expensive last time I saw it. A mixer would only work well if it has many clients, and I don't know if these services have enough demand yet. Instead, you may want to make your coins hop from an e-wallet to another before reaching the final end. That'll probably do the mixing. Yes, it would leave logs on the e-wallets. To mitigate the risks of being identified by such logs, always use proxies like Tor and maybe create multiple anonymous accounts on these e-wallets. In this case, even if an attacker discovers one of your accounts by following blockchain traces, they wouldn't necessarily know about the others.
Also, if you don't want to mix coins coming from different costumers, you can't have transactions that spend them at once, since it would prove they were controlled by the same entity. Each amount you receive should be spent entirely in a transaction of its own. I remember somebody once did a patch to the standard client that allowed you to manually build your transaction, picking the inputs. If it was possible to make with GUI, then it's probably possible to make it through RPC as well. If in a certain situation you need to make a payment that's higher than the full individual amount of all of your addresses, then you should make multiple transfers to your e-wallet/mixer and let it do the join of coins in your place. Hopefully it will pick different addresses.
Summary: it's not easy, and we unfortunately miss automated and cheap ways of doing it.
Thank you for a elaborate response.
Didn't like the summary though
but maybe something revolutionary is coming in the near future. Seen some speculations about how to make the perfect mixer/tumbler/laundry and other services which would make BitCoin anonymous.I'm gonna do some research on ewallets and see if that's a usable solution for now.
Ps. It's funny that so many people talking about BitCoin just say "You can make it anonymous if you use it right/smart" but no one seems to know the right/smart solution. Or is the smart people sticking together and not sharing?
