One thing that concerns me... the value of washing coins is based on the time between the deposit and the withdraw. If you deposit and withdraw the same amounts with no delay you diminish the value of mixing. On top of that... the ChipMixer paradigm is based on creating a session that terminates after 7 days. Meaning... if I create a session and deposit some bitcoin I need to preserve the chips or withdraw the BTC within 7 days.
So what if the BTC is sitting in my session and the 7 day session expires while the site is down? In this case I never really had the chance to withdraw the funds.
First of all, the best anonymity is achieved by keeping some time between deposit and withdrawal, that's correct.
But you don't have to withdraw within 7 days; you're supposed to 'withdraw' vouchers right away, and redeem and 'actually withdraw' the coins days or potentially months or years later. Not supposed to just close the browser and restore it using session token. The session token is more intended to, well, restore a session after there was a technical issue such as now.
In the rare chance that you did create a session, deposited and had no time to withdraw keys or chips / vouchers before it suddenly went down, don't worry. ChipMixer extends session times by the amount of days that it was offline. That's at least how they did it so far.
Thanks! That is a good tip. I was planning to do three withdraws over four days. The first withdraw happened 24 hours after the deposit and was successful. The next day the site went down. I have been trying to get back into complete the withdraws. I did see the voucher but did not plan to wait more than 7 days... so I did not pull vouchers. I now understand that it is better to just pull vouchers immediately and use them over time.
I appreciate the note that ChipMixer will extend the session times. That does give me some comfort.
I would also just love ChipMixer to update the clearnet site and say something like "We are experiencing problems at the moment. Do not worry... we expect to be back online soon and your funds are safe." Or something similar.