Quote from: LeGaulois on Today at 05:53:27 PM

Time?
Especially since it has been ~1 month only and you surely haven't explored all the possible channels to market Whirlwind. And as you pointed before, people don't understand correctly how Whirlwind can be superior compared to other services.

We haven't explored any marketing channel other than Bitcointalk and the reason for that is we do not want to associate our service with illegal activity. We could easily go down that route and it would certainly be much easier to attract deposits and grow the Anonymity Set, but it'd render all our efforts to stay compliant useless. As we said since the beginning we intend to do everything in our power to operate Whirlwind in a way that doesen't give anyone specific reasons to attack us, all without compromising our users privacy even in the slightest bit. All the security precautions we took would be rendered useless too if our service ever gets sanctioned for any reason, and the service would become unusable. Sure, funds won't be lost thanks to our architecture but all our work would still be gone and together with it the only true privacy solution available on Bitcoin.

It might sound like we're continuously ranting about the way our competitors are doing things for no real reason, but you'll know why after we publish our comparison. It's important to mention that as soon as they fix the issues outlined by us and many others we will give them credit for doing so, but if they had any intention of doing so Whirlwind wouldn't exist in the first place. We noticed a clear gap in the market (before CM downfall) and that's why we decided to present our own solution. It remains to be seen if the public appreciates it or not and may the best service win in the end. We'd obviously wish to be that service but even if it doesen't happen it's fine as long as competitors step up their game and offer real privacy.

Quote from: LeGaulois on Today at 05:53:27 PM

How many deposits will you consider the Anonymity set good enough so it doesn't need an Anonymity mining campaign or doesn't need to continue it?

I would also say for an Anonymity mining campaign, the words to promote it have to be choosen wisely...
I prefer to see people know Whirlwind as a mixer, rather than people telling me "yeah, I know Whirlwind. You can invest BTC and make a few bucks for profits"

Anything over 2-3000 deposits should be decent enough for most amounts, but IMO 10,000 deposits is what we should aim for.

People will definitely recognize Whirlwind as a privacy tool and not a staking platform, even if this campaign goes ahead it would only happen for a very limited amount of time before the service becomes popular.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:27:19 PM

Quote from: LeGaulois on Today at 05:53:27 PM

Quote from: whirlwindmoney on Today at 05:02:10 PM

Open question: Let's assume we don't go ahead with the Anonymity mining campaign, what other alternative exists to grow the Anonymity set?

Time?

Agreed.

I'm glad you brought up "Time" and essentially asked us why don't we just wait for the Anonymity Set to grow naturally. There is a good reason for that, allow me to explain:

Imagine the following situation: The Anonymity Set is 291 and there are 10BTC currently in the multi-sig. If you want to deposit any amount over 5BTC from Address A and withdraw it immediately to Address B it would be pretty easy to assume where your output originated from, so essentially you cannot use the service in this case. Our personal BTC reserve size makes no difference in this case since we cannot add it all at once, it needs to be added slowly blended between other users deposits so it counts towards the Anonymity Set.

So just 'waiting' for time to pass until users decide to try our service doesen't make much sense and it can do more harm than good for our reputation because if the above example happened in real life and that person gets deanonymized, it could be perceived by the public as an issue with the way Whirlwind works rather than the obvious reason for why that happened, which is the Anonymity Set being too low and the overall volume being too low for that amount to be withdrawn immediately.

Again, our goal with this campaign is to grow the number of deposits, not necessarily the amount of BTC in the multi-sig since we will be able to add our own reserve as long as deposits happen. For more peace of mind we could change the way the campaign works so instead of allocating a fixed amount to distribute to users every day, you receive a fixed amount at the moment of deposit and you are free to withdraw whenever afterwards.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:27:19 PM

Quote

3.They openly encouraged the use of their service for illegal purposes.

I've been around for a while, and I've never seen this from ChipMixer. Can you provide a link to back up this claim?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1574581/download - Section E as an example

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:27:19 PM

By that definition, selling a funded Collectible could be considered money laundering too.

We are not lawyers but we don't think we are selling 'funded Collectibles'. In this case a no-kyc exchange is also a money laundering service? We'd prefer to stop talking about these matters as we don't have the expertise to do so, but from everything we've read we don't think that what we do can be considered illegal. Kucoin's hot wallet has a 4x worse AML score than our multi-sig

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:27:19 PM

They preyed on greedy people's stupidity, I assume you don't want to compare yourself to them.

Of course not, the point was that if people entrusted their funds with that kind of people/companies with all possible red flags slapped on them, it shouldn't be too much to ask to take a small risk in order to help advance Bitcoin's privacy as a whole. And this risk basically means using the service, with or without this campaign users would still have to trust us if they want to use Whirlwind, same as with any centralized solution.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:27:19 PM

No. I agree that you have a good reason, but that doesn't change the risk involved. I'm not saying you are, but if you'd be planning an exit scam, this would be a great way to increase the amount. That is what you risk getting associated with.

Agreed, but then the question remains. How to bootstrap this in a safer way than what we already proposed as simply waiting is not really a solution?

Quote from: yidrukesti on Today at 06:31:11 PM

It would be nice to have the option to deposit less than 0.001 btc. For example, if I have 2 addresses that have 0.0005 btc each, it would be nice to have the option to combine these amounts without showing directly on the blockchain that they both belong to the same person. (Preferably, this option should allow one to send these two amounts of 0.0005 BTC to two different whirlwind's BTC addresses.)

So, the option to deposit less than 0.001 BTC in a single transaction would be useful even if withdrawals are only possible with fixed values, and the lowest of these values is 0.001 BTC. It becomes even more useful if "fast" withdrawals of non-fixed amounts are possible again, and yet more useful when exchange to monero is available. If such deposits are disabled now because the blockchain fees constitute too much percentage of the deposit amount, I don't see any problems with charging a corresponding fee to such mixes, even if you want to keep the mixes with a single top-up of >= 0.001 BTC fee-free.

Thank you for the suggestion, we will give it a thought.