Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: MtGox database leak: why you should always mix your coins.
by
domob
on 10/03/2014, 12:55:34 UTC
Got any good suggestions for trustless and low-fee mixers?  I think all the P2P mixer projects are not yet fully ready, as far as I know.

While it is not the best solution in terms of obfuscation, coinjoin is a pretty good system that IMO everybody should use. It's not perfect, but IMO it gives enough protection against the casual "let's see how much money this guy has" situation. A prepared and determined opponent will probably end up finding up your total balance, but it will take him more resources and time, which normally is something the casual criminal wants to avoid when looking for targets.

Summing up: By using coinjoin you avoid being the low hanging fruit, which is usually enough protection against a potential dangerous situation similar to what happened with the leak of the Gox database. The criminals won't be able to easily check your current BTC balance, so you will probably be discarded as a target.

Tumblers like bitcoinfog provide better obfuscation, but the (huge) trade-off is that you should trust an unknown third party. I'd never risk more than 1% of my holdings to such services, but I think the service they provide is necessary and should be used, albeit with care and with just a very minor portion of ones funds at a time.

Yes, I think CoinJoin should be a very good start.  But do any really decentralised and fully working implementations of CoinJoin exist already?  I don't think so and would be interested to know if they are.