To be frank I wouldn't even call Whirlwind a mixer, a Privacy Pool is a better term.
That's a powerful quote, a really good 'branding point.' I could see "privacy pool" becoming a new term, and if Whirlwind is the one to popularize it, it'd draw many users as being the one to really establish the term. There are plenty of neat business strategy aspects that I think most mixers just skip over, and it hurts their growth. More growth for whirlwind just means more privacy for all of us, so if a mixer wants to really improve the privacy of their users through a huge set of incoming and outgoing transactions, I think they should focus on innovating in a business strategy sort of way. You just don't really see that in any other mixer today.
It's a much more appropriate term for sure, we were just concerned that if we'd call it that way noone would even bother to check what it is. Literally the only weak point of Whirlwind is that we need a lot of usage at the start until the Anonymity Set grows to a decent level, so we couldn't afford to confuse potential users even more with new names.
The implementation of the Pay to Note feature paired with the 0% fee should give us the much needed boost in transactions, if it still doesen't happen then we already have a 'Anonymity Mining' campaign planned. In layman terms we will pay users who deposit using the Note mode and keep the funds inside the pool for a specific amount of time. Basically we would pay for increasing the Anonymity Set.*
After enough users hear about and use Whirlwind we will change the wording and branding of features to better reflect the reality and distance ourselves from similar services.
*We still have the 40,000 DAI in escrow for the review campaign with minerjones even though it ended. Not that it means much since only in the multi-sig there are 6x more funds right now, but it's worth mentioning anyway. We will leave them there until we decide if the Anonymity Mining campaign is needed or not.
If your latest DDoS protection is holding up and providing adequate protection from any possible attack without using any 3rd party software then that is good. When I last visited the clearnet website earlier today to see if the page loads, it took a long time before the 5 second DDoS countdown loaded and after that it took well over a minute for the page to load before I gave up.
Eventually this message showed. Is it because the website is really under maintenance or because that is the new default message when the website is under DDoS:
It looks like it's not holding up, so please use the Tor version for now. Please keep in mind that no matter if the clearnet version is offline, the Tor version will always work flawlessly.
We tried solving the issue only through software updates, and for a while we did, but the intensity of the attack is growing by the day and the current clearnet VPS is way too weak and cannot handle it. We will upgrade to a much bigger dedicated server and we expect the issues to be solved at least to a certain degree after that.