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What is Bitcoin Mixing?

What is Bitcoin Mixing?

Bitcoin tumbling, also referred to as Bitcoin mixing or Bitcoin laundering, is the process of using a third party service to break the connection between a Bitcoin sending address and the receiving address(es).

Bitcoin mixing helps you to disassociate any BTC you purchased from your identity. You send your coins to a Bitcoin mixing service; they take a small mixing fee, and after a random delay they send you an equivalent amount of other people’s bitcoins to your new address.

In other words, coin mixing services take your cash and give you new cash to your secret identity so that it remains secret.

How does a Bitcoin Mixer work?

Bitcoin tumbling (mixing) involves the usage of a third party service to break the connection between a wallet address sending coins and the addresses receiving coins. So if a person does not wish the whole world to know from where they got their coins, and/or to which addresses the Bitcoins are sent, then tumbling is the way to go. A provider of Bitcoin tumbling service is referred to as Bitcoin tumbler.

Coin mixing will provide you with a certain amount of privacy, by mixing your coins with other coins previously sent or in their reserve and sending different coins to the address you specify. When looking at the blockchain, one will be able to see you sent your coins to a wallet. And that someone sent coins to the wallet you want them sent, there will be no connection between your wallet address and the one where you want your crypto delivered.

Peer-to-peer tumblers appeared in an attempt to fix the disadvantages of the centralized model of tumbling. These services act as a place of meeting for Bitcoin users, instead of taking coins for mixing. Users arrange mixing by themselves. This model solves the problem of stealing, as there is no middleman. Such protocols as Coin Join, Shared Coin and Coin Swap allow few users to gather in order to form one Bitcoin exchange transaction in several steps. When it is completely formed, the exchange of BTC between the participants begins. Apart from the mixing server, none of the participants can know the connection between the incoming and outgoing addresses of coins. This operation can be carried out several times with different recipients to complicate the transaction analysis.

While newer coin implementations such as Cloakcoin, Dash, PIVX and Zcoin have built-in mixing services as a part of their blockchain network.

Conclusions

It’s important that they be trusted. There’s no authority or government you can complain to if they run off with your coins. So if you like privacy and also want to protect your cryptocurrency from government tracking or tracing, Bitcoin mixer services are a good option.

As with anything, you should do your research before using Bitcoin tumbling services and use the ones with the best reviews and highest levels of trust. We do not officially endorse any Bitcoin Mixer. The tumblers we list as trusted have been around for some time and have had no verifiable complaints against them. We do not link to mixers that are scams, or that do not function as advertised.