If you are familiar with the world of cryptocurrencies, then the term, “crypto mixer” is something that you might have come across. A crypto mixer is essentially a means of making cryptocurrency transactions more anonymous and harder to track. People who wish to have higher levels of privacy and anonymity with their crypto and altcoin transactions frequently use crypto mixer to accomplish this.
What is a crypto mixer
A crypto mixer is a service that allows users to obfuscate the origin and destination of transactions. Users send cryptocurrency to the service, have that crypto mixed with other coins or tokens, and then send the equivalent amount of “mixed” coins to a recipient address, hiding the connection between the sender and recipient.
There are many legitimate uses for this kind of service. Just as you may not want your employer to know the intimate details of every bank or credit card transaction that you’ve ever made, you may also not want your employer — or anyone else, for that matter — to know every detail of every crypto transaction you’ve ever made either.
But as the adoption of crypto and blockchain tools grows, real-world identities are becoming increasingly linked to blockchain addresses — with every purchase, transfer, or interaction associated with those addresses laid bare on a public, transparent, distributed ledger. And that’s where crypto mixer come in.
How Do Crypto Mixers Function ?
Crypto mixer work by essentially taking your cryptocurrency, mixing it with a giant pile of other cryptocurrency, and then sending you smaller units of cryptocurrency to an address of your choosing, with total the amount that you put in minus 1–3%. The 1–3 % is generally taken as a profit by the coin mixing company. This is how they make money.
If you would like to use a coin mixer, then you have to send the company cryptocurrencies. Otherwise, they will have nothing to mix. However, because you are sending some of your money to the service to be mixed, you need to make sure that you send it to a reputable coin mixing company. Otherwise you could potentially be robbed of your money.
There are a number of companies who offer coin mixing services. These companies include Coinmixer.se, Helix, and Bitcoin Blender. If you are interested in having your cryptocurrencies mixed in order to increase your privacy, then you may want to consider one of these options. For the moment, coin mixing is perfectly legal in the United States. However, the legality of coin mixing varies around the world, as does the legality of cryptocurrencies themselves.
Crypto mixing is somewhat similar to the criminal practice of money laundering. However, just because a person participates in coin mixing does not mean that he or she is a criminal. It just means that he or she would like to achieve a higher level of anonymity with his or her cryptocurrency transactions.
Summary
Coin mixing is similar hiding your IP address by using the Tor Browser. The Tor Browser is a network of connected computers which are used to bounce communications signals all around the world. So, if you are using the Tor Browser in Philadelphia, your IP address signal may appear to be coming from Geneva, Switzerland.
Coin mixing is very similar because you may enter five Bitcoins from your wallet, but you may ultimately end up with 10 half Bitcoins from many different parts of the world. This makes your transactions extremely difficult to track. The more sources there are that go into your end product, the more difficult it is to track.
