And although this method does help maintain a certain degree of anonymity, it still provides a level of ‘taint’ for somebody experienced in Blockchain Analysis. As a standalone tool, BitBlender provides a very good level of anonymity for erasing your transaction trail. With BitBlender you can send your un-mixed coins to 5 different addresses at once – they will all show up as a single balance in your account for ease of withdrawal. By setting your PGP key in your profile you will activate Two Factor Authentication, which means that you have to decrypt a message containing a randomized One Time Password on each login. This ensures that only the individual with access to your private key and password can access your account and your funds. It is also possible to delete your account if you want your username to be completely gone from the system. However, as with anything, you can always take extra precautions to ensure your anonymity remains top-notch and offers the greatest protection possible. When you deposit coins into your BitBlender account, we will take a low, randomized fee of between 1-3%. We make our fees low to keep coin mixing affordable, and we randomize the fee to make analysis of our service less predictable.
There are several ways of ‘mixing’ your coins, however many of these do not provide the same protection against Blockchain Analysis as BitBlender (and other similar hidden services). If someone is watching the blockchain, and they notice a transaction for 100 BTC at 4:30, followed by another transaction of 98 BTC at 5:00, they might suspect this is a part of the same trail – even if there is no hardcore evidence. Taint’ can be seen as the trail your transaction leaves behind, and although techniques used by services like Shared Coin certainly blur that trail, they do not remove it completely – for best results, you should find a service that sends you coins from a completely different ‘pot’. We are a hidden service that mixes your Bitcoins to remove the link between you and your transactions. Perhaps the most common method aside from using a hidden service mixer like BitBlender, is the Coin Join method found on services such as Shared Coin.
The way this method works is by attaching your transaction to a number of other transactions, thereby making it difficult to tell which has gone where. This is because Bitcoin works on a public ledger, meaning anyone anywhere can see and follow every transaction you ever make. The transaction is not finalised in the mempool it is just speculation of a transaction, so it makes sense to emit when the transaction is confirmed. If a deposit address is removed by a user then information is kept for 10 days to be able to process coins that could accidentally be sent to old address. Once combined deposits from a user and his/her referred users reaches 10BTC in 7 days, the referring user will be credited 0.5% of all deposits. If you deposit more than 10 BTC within 7 days, your new deposits will give a bonus of 0.5% of the deposit, effectively making the fee 0.5% lower for you. We have structured this as a bonus rather than a fee rebate in order to maintain the integrity of the 1-3% randomized fee. Our randomized fee takes this tool away from those who would seek to tie your transactions to you. Classic examples of people who might follow your online activity and reveal your identity, are Law Enforcement Agencies, somebody with a grudge, or hackers who have noticed you are moving large amounts of money around.
All server logs and database entries are kept for 10 days only, this is to be able to solve support tickets. Support messages is also kept for only 10 days. Hence why I need to receive the unconfirmed messages. A token of appreciation for helping improve BitBlender by bringing more transactions to the pool. But by ‘mixing’ your Bitcoins, you are essentially breaking the link between your identity and your transactions – BitBlender lets you prevent Blockchain Analysis by swapping your coins for somebody else’s. If you do not wish your transactions to be followed, mix all coins you buy before you spend them, then mix anything you withdraw again on their way back out. If you prefer, you can set wallet addresses for auto-withdrawal so you do not have to log back in to withdraw your coins. By waiting several hours, days or even weeks, you are further distancing yourself from association with the coins you wish to mix.
