Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Can Bitcoin Mixer services be trusted?
by
n0nce
on 27/03/2022, 14:21:59 UTC
you don't have the associated private keys to your deposit and you risk losing your money but no one is discussing that which I'm having interest on.
Yes, this is a risk. When you deposit coins to any exchange, casino, mixer, etc., then you are giving up custody of them. This is a risk I am willing to accept with ChipMixer due to a number of reasons: Firstly, I am mixing small amounts of coins at a time and not leaving amounts I can't afford to lose in the custody of a mixer, and secondly, they have mixed hundreds of thousands of bitcoin over the years without a single incident of loss or theft.

why not go through Coinjoin where you have access to your keys than a mixer that you have to trust about your privacy and custody of funds.
Coinjoin is another useful tool, but it is neither perfect nor infallible:

Still, it seems that Wasabi has never been as safe as we all think:
Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges.
I believe there's a market for a LN-based mixing service. Not sure if it might require an extension of LN and / or Bitcoin, but it should be possible without. Basically a way to submarine-swap on-chain funds into different LN channels, maybe even splitting it and having it arrive in multiple different LN wallets / nodes using https://bolt12.org/ invoices for instance. Then, similarly to ChipMixer chips, you can submarine-swap them all at once or over time as you need them, back into an on-chain wallet.
This is possible today already, but it's a manual effort - creating various invoices, initiating multiple swaps, and reversing the process.