Let's say that they (ChipMixer) have the following funded addresses before they announce their service:
And assume that someone wants to mix 0.1 BTC by receiving a hundred of 0.001 BTC chips.
It's not good for privacy to exhaust the mixer's stash all by yourself. Luckily, for most real scenarios that won't happen.
How will they refill those 0.001 chips without looking suspicious? Will they split some of the 0.002 and some of the 0.004? Would it be better if they split from the deposited ones?
As far as I know, deposits are all split into chips again.
I conclude that there's no reason to mix more than 1 BTC using 0.512 or 0.256 chips, but rather hundreds of 0.001 & 0.002 chips unless you put the transaction fees above your privacy. It's much easier for a chain analysis company to search among 100-500 addresses than from hundreds of thousands.
Even "just" 100 addresses is still a lot if they have no idea which one they're looking for. But even better is that you don't need to mix your full input into chips instantly. You can 2 chips and keep the rest as a voucher, or even add an older voucher to get a chip larger than your last deposit.
Does that mean that you already have 0.5 & 1 BTC chips or that you'll split your weird looking 1.024 & 0.512 to 1 and 0.5? If it's the latter, isn't is meaningless?
It's the former: "round" chip amounts are also available already.
If you knew that I wanted to mix within a certain chronological period, you could exclude lots of transactions to detect who's the mixer.
How would "they" know you want to mix funds within a certain time?
Here's an example of how to obtain maximum privacy:
due to my intent to expose the blockchain data from this transaction, I decided to use an address from ChipMixer. The address was obtained using ChipMixer voucher codes that I set aside for this potential purpose in November. I always keep a moderate amount of money in Chip vouchers, just in case I need to do something bad for my privacy. The money for these vouchers may have been deposited by me anytime in about the past three or four years; thus, any blockchain observer who identifies Chip inputs will not find it feasible to guess which were mine.
I just don't understand how you know when it's the perfect time to create new chips.
I would expect random times. Even better: anyone can create "chips" by sending funds to new addresses with value 0.001 (or 2
N times more) each.