Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Anything to worry about if you use mixers and not doing anything illegal?
by
bitcoin talk
on 22/12/2023, 02:48:16 UTC

Does anyone else agree that mixers can be tracked?

Did you read anything on the link I put in my previous post?
Yes, thanks.

From your link the quotes below grabbed my attention:
In general, I would recommend using privacy driven cryptocurrencies if you want to have privacy in your transactions...

Since Bitcoin is purely transparent and you are able to to analyze each transaction in blockchain space you have enough data to identify and anonymize transactions regarding the mixing service.You just have to filter all blockchain data which is not interesting for you and analyze the rest.

monero and zcash are private crypto's because they were built with that purpose in mind. Bitcoin was not.

I did not look into the specific implementation of dash, monero, zcash. General speaking the difference between mentioned cryptos and bitcoin is, that bitcoin is not meant to provide privacy while the main focus of monero and zcash is privacy. They are built in a way to provide privacy, while in bitcoin some services try to implement algorithms to provide privacy on a cryptocurrency which is not meant to guarantee privacy.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0151.mediawiki
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0156.mediawiki
https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04439

The most effective way to maximize privacy when using Bitcoin is to abstain from address reuse, and to only conduct business with those who abstain from address reuse.
This would be very effective in making "mixers" obsolete, and unnecessary in most cases.

Remember that these are confined to the network layer of Bitcoin:

1. With BIP156, your IP address will no longer be tied to your personal transactions from the perspective of connected Bitcoin nodes.
2. With BIP151, all relayed transaction data will be encrypted from the perspective of someone analysing internet traffic (but connected Bitcoin nodes will still see the transactions unencrypted).
Neither of those BIPs will change the ability to analyse transactions on the blockchain