Many of us know about mixers but don't understand how they work. Mixers are designed to "cleanse" bitcoins. After all, there is always a chance that your bitcoins were once stolen. Therefore, passing through the mixer, your coins are mixed with the coins of other users. This article will look at three types of bitcoin cleaning.
Finding the owner of the wallet
The bitcoins in the wallet are holded as unspent transactions - UTXO. An analogy is fiat money. In this case, 1 bitcoin on the owner's wallet can consist of 10 inputs of 0.1 BTC or 4 inputs of 0.25 BTC. When sending bitcoins from a wallet, new UTXOs are created on the network. Example. A person has 1 bitcoin in their wallet. He wants to send 0.3 bitcoin to a friend. A transaction is created, where 0.7 btc is UTXO, 0.3 btc is UTXO 2. All transactions are visible in the blockchain, and if possible, you can track their movements from the wallet to the wallet. In some cases, it is even possible to identify the owner of the wallet. Fraudsters can take advantage of this and steal bitcoins with the help of social engineering.
1. Simple mixing
With this method, bitcoins are sent to the mixer for "cleaning" from different addresses. To do this, UTXOs are mixed, which breaks the sender-receiver chain. Therefore, scammers will not be able to trace the true sender of the transaction. Note that all modes of "cleaning" bitcoins differ in the price of the service, the duration of the process and the degree of protection against analysis.
2. Standard mixing
This mode provides basic anonymity and also protects against manual transaction analysis. The fees are low and the process takes several hours. This method differs from simple mixing by the presence of a premixer. Its action is that it splits incoming transactions from users into smaller shares. This can be compared to the exchange of a larger bill for a few smaller ones. Example. The person "cleans" the bitcoins and transfers them to a new address. In the premixer, the incoming transaction is split and mixed with the same split shares of other users and sent to the new wallet of the bitcoin owner. If we analyze this movement of bitcoin, then the owner will have coins from many different addresses on the wallet, which are not related to each other in any way. However, this method also has disadvantages. The first is the inability to protect similar volumes from analytics. There are services that will look for transactions with similar amounts and execution times. The second drawback is that there is a high probability that the user will receive "dirty" bitcoins on the wallet, from which he gets rid of.
3. Sophisticated mixing of bitcoins
With this method, the user receives on his wallet "clean" bitcoins from large stock exchanges. To improve anonymity, the user will receive coins into two addresses. An example. When "cleansing" 1BTC, the user on the wallets will receive 0.242 BTC and 0.745 BTC. At the same time, the amounts are always random, as well as the time of sending to each of the wallets. In this case, even the service of cluster analytics will not always be able to determine that the bitcoin is "cleared by" by one user. This service tracks UTXO different addresses, but in one cluster. Such transactions are tracked to large stock exchanges where the user account can be lit. An example of a complex "cleaning" Bitcoin. The owner of 1 BTC indicates two return addresses. These bitcoins come to a premixer, where they mix with other user coins. Further, they are transferred to one of the major stock exchanges, and already from the exchange, completely "clean", come to the wallet of the person who cleans them.
Exact payment
Everything here is exactly the same as in the method of complex mixing, only the amount of sending is chosen by the owner himself.
Dangers of using mixers
It is difficult to answer this question. It is believed that mixers do not store user data. Even the information about the applications is deleted automatically. There is also a function for generating a new bitcoin address for each transaction. Also, the service itself checks the "purity" of the laundered bitcoins. According to statistics, only 10% are considered "dirty". There is also a possibility that when the coins of all users are mixed in the premixer, they can get their own coins back. So there is no question of cleaning up.
Conclusion
Mixers help bitcoin owners maintain anonymity. When the mixer is running, the address of the owner of the bitcoin is not registered anywhere, that is, it remains anonymous. The only and significant drawback of mixers is the long cleaning of bitcoins.
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