best of luck with your venture

Perhaps you should rename it? Launder I don't think is the best fit. Perhaps Anonymizing Service? It's what you do is allow people to be anonymous. Launder kind of implies funneling ill gained money into businesses to hide it. I know it would be a pain but I bet your service would get better reception!

"Layering" is a phase of "money laundering." I think this qualifies.

Mike, can you give us an example of where the "single hop" would be more advantageous than the other?

It varies quite a bit. I'm not going to put out exact status, but I can say that on some days I'll see nothing come in while on others I might see 500BTC.


Bitlaundry.com (the single-hope service) will basically wait for 10 confirmations on the input send, and then transmit the remainder immediately after taking the fee. That's probably as close to "instant" as I'll make it. The equivalent deposit to app.bitlaundry.com would involve a delay of 10 confirmations plus up to a day.

Single-hop services could conceivably be chained together to move coins around rapidly.


No, not at present, and that's something I couldn't do without hacking the wallet management code itself, or by taking an "outside-the-system" approach like the Bitcoin mixer running on TOR. If the mods proposed at http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin-client-to-make-it-more-anonymous/ get included into Bitcoin, though, it should become possible, though still subject to the limitation that someone sending in more coins than the service's pool holds will inevitably get some of their own in return.

Why not create two wallets? Wallet A and Wallet B. When they visit the site it automatically picks the wallet with the smallest balance. They could also select a different one if they are repeat customers so they always deposit into the same wallet every time. They then pick a withdrawal address. As soon as the other wallet gets enough coins it's paid out. They are guaranteed to never get their own coins back. If they are impatient they can cancel it and risk getting paid from the wallet they paid into. As long as you aren't keeping logs it would be impossible to follow as long as you used random pay out times and amounts!

Sweet this is a great idea and totally not going to get the fbi and major organised crime units interested in bitcoin at all welp cya

Actually I think it would be unwise to put that condition on a mixer.

It reminds me of the method eventually used to break the enigma machines.  The breakers worked out that the enigma machine would never encode a letter to itself.  That gave them enough of a statistical hole that they could begin breaking.

In the same way, one could simply look at which output coins a person received that contained none of a particular input and voila, the connection is made from input to output.

The correct solution is that coins are completely randomly mixed.

Are you sure that's a good idea? Under some circumstances surely it'd be possible to match large incoming transactions with outgoing ones by the fact they have no coins in common. (Edit: In fact, this attack would probably work quite well against flows of smaller transactions too.)

Mike,

I tried testing your service and came up with error messages when it tried to generate an address for me to send a payment to. Any idea why? The amount attempted was 1 BTC.