Whirlpool Brings Bitcoin Mixing for the Masses
Privacy-conscious bitcoiners gained new powers this week with the release of Whirlpool for mobile. Using the service, which is built into Samourai’s Android wallet, you can mix coins on the go, increasing your onchain privacy without relinquishing custody of your BTC. The software, previously only available on desktop, provides a means of cycling UTXOs, thereby breaking the deterministic links between them. The technology uses a version of Coinjoin, based on the same tech that powers BCH mixing service Cashshuffle.
Already, there are signs that bitcoiners are mixing their UTXOs en masse, with coin joins (CJ) accounting for over 1% of transactions in recent BTC blocks. Chain analysis companies can observe that CJs are taking place, but cannot reliably correlate the inputs with the outputs of the transactions.
As one user urged in Whirlpool’s Telegram chatroom, “Pollute the UTXO set with CJ’s … we need that critical mass of people using these privacy tools regularly because it will totally mess with [the] chain analysis side.” The more people who coin join, in other words, the better for everyone. Altruism aside, however, there are more tangible reasons to use Whirlpool, such as breaking the link between coins you’ve withdrawn from known (KYC’d) wallets and the wallets you’d like to transfer them to next. The following guide explains how to use the mobile implementation of Whirlpool.
No comments:
Post a Comment