Now, as we mentioned before, the Bitcoin ledger or the blockchain is completely public and anybody
can read it and analyze it.
Now we also mentioned that in the blockchain, in each entry, there isn't a lot of information about
the people transferring money, but you'll see the addresses of the senders and receivers.
So this is fine as long as these addresses are not linked to identities.
Now there is a number of scenarios where you wouldn't want your address to be linked to another address.
For example, let's say you purchased your coins using a coin exchange that requires ID verification.
In that case, the address that the money will come from will be linked to your real identity, and
you'll be sending it to your tails wallet.
That way, if anyone analyses the blockchain, they'll easily be able to link your exchange address
the one that you use to purchase the bitcoins and verify your ID with to the ID of the electron wallet
that you created on tails.
And that way this address is linked to your identity, and then any transactions you make or receive
will be linked to your real identity.
Other examples would be if you're sending money to another address that you're not sure if the user
is practicing proper OPSEC, or if you are not sure if the user is using his money legally.
We can't really know what people do in their personal lives, so breaking the link between the sender
and the receiver is not easy when it comes to bitcoins because the blockchain is completely public.
This is where tumblers and mixers come in play.
The idea of this is very simple.
First of all, you send your coins to a server or a service that's available to a number of people,
not only you, and then this service will send your money to a different wallet.
This way you're breaking the connection between the sender and the receiver, and you can actually link
a number of mixers if you want.
So you can send this to mixer number one, mixer number two, mixer number three, and then to your
wallet or to someone else's wallet.
And you can even do this to send money to your own wallet to hide the connection that you actually own
both wallets.
For example, let's say you purchased money from an exchange that required you to verify your identity.
You transfer that money to a wallet in here, and then so this wallet will not be linked to your identity.
You send the money to a mixer, and then the mixer will send the money or the coins to another wallet
that you control.
And this way it is very difficult to link the transaction that happened here with the transaction that
happened here.
Now the way mixture is mixed, the coins differ depending on the mixer that you use.
So some of them will literally just randomly select an equal amount of money that you sent from their
own wallet and send it to you.
Others will be mixed in the money that they have with different exchanges and send it to you.
There is others that will literally sell the money or the coins that you give them in coin exchanges.
They'd use crypto stock exchange to buy coins and then send you the new coins that they bought.
So again, making it very, very difficult to track, some of them will split the payments and send
it to you in a number of transactions instead of sending it in one transaction.
Some of them will add a time delay to make it even more difficult to trace.
So there is a lot of techniques that can be used, but the whole idea is the same.
You send the money to the mixer and you wait for the money to arrive in the second wallet.
Now, because there are a lot of mixers, I can't really cover all of them.
You can simply look in DuckDuckGo or Google or any of the other search engines that I showed earlier
in the course for Bitcoin mixers and see all the options that you have and see how they work and compare
them and then use the one that's most suitable for you.
But in this lecture, I want to show you three examples that are slightly different from each other.
Therefore, they can be useful in different scenarios.
Now all of these mixers have a darknet and a clear net address, and if you scroll down on all of them,
you'll see both the clear net and the darknet addresses at the bottom.
For some reason, this one that I'm using right now, the Bitcoin laundering dotcom, the darknet address
is not working.
That's why I'm accessing it over the clear net address.
Now, the cool thing about this one is it's actually very cheap.
It doesn't charge you any fees.
You only pay for transaction fees, but it doesn't really do a lot of complex operations.
When mixing the coins, you literally send the coins and then it sends you coins back into the other
wallet, breaking the connection between the sender and the receiver.
The next one is BitMEX.
The way this will work is you send the coins and they store all of the coins in one wallet.
They mix the coins in that wallet and then they give you different coins into the second wallet.
Now, these guys do charge a little bit more, but again, they're fast enough.
I should have also mentioned that bit.
Laundering is pretty quick, it's pretty instant, so it's much faster than a lot of other services.
Now, you should keep in mind the more complex the mixing process is, the longer it takes to get your
money, because obviously there would be more operations involved.
This leads us to mixed up dot IO.
This is the most expensive service between the three, but it is the most anonymous because when you
send the coins to them, they don't simply just mix it and send it back to you.
They will use this to buy crypto from stock exchange and then send you brand new coins that they bought
from stock exchange and from investors.
Now with this, the amount that you receive can also be split into a number of transactions.
A time delay can also be added to make it more difficult to trace these coins and link them between
the sender and the receiver accounts.
Last but not least, I should also mention that there are a number of mixers that are related to Darknet
markets such as Helix.
Now, this is supposed to be a really, really good mixer.
The only problem I see with it is the fact that it is related to a darknet market.
So the fact that you're going to be using this mixer, sending or just receiving money from an address
that's related to this mixer, could raise a lot of question marks on why you're using a mixer like
that.
Therefore, depending on your situation, it might make more sense to use one of the ones that I'm showing
you right here.
And like I said, there are lots of mixers out there.
You should do your own research and see which ones fits your scenario best.
Using them is pretty much the same.
And in the next lecture, I'm going to show you how to use mix them just as an example.
So you get an idea on how they work in general.