Frequently Asked Questions


General Questions

How does deposit work?

ChipMixer creates Bitcoin addresses and funds them with specific sizes. These are chips with 0.001 BTC, 0.002 BTC, 0.004 BTC and so on till 8.192 BTC. When you deposit your Bitcoins, you receive same amount in chips. For example you deposit 0.112 BTC and you receive 0.064 + 0.032 + 0.016 chips. Each chip was funded before your deposit, so there is no link between them and your deposit on blockchain. They are already anonymous.

What can I do with chips?

You can split big chip into two small ones ie. 0.064 BTC chip into two 0.032 BTC chips.

You can merge two small same-sized chips into big one ie. two 0.032 BTC chips into 0.064 BTC chip.

You can bet a chip to either receive twice as big one or receive nothing. Chance to receive big chip is around 47% and is provably fair.

You can donate a chip to pay for our service. If you only have big chips, you can split them before donating.

Finally, you can withdraw a chip or all chips. This will reveal their private keys you can import into your Bitcoin wallet.

Why should I use split/merge function?

To add random element into mix. Let's say you've sent 0.52 BTC You have received one 0.512 BTC chip and one 0.008 BTC. Blockchain analysis can prove that one of 0.512 BTC chips originating from here is yours. Since you can use split/merge, nobody knows if you've withdrawn big or small chips. It is not required to use, but existence of this option increases your privacy.

Why should I use bet/donate function?

Betting and donate allows you to change possible output value. Even if blockchain analysis may assume you will receive permutation of chips, they cannot predict how much you've lost / won betting or how much you've donated. As with split / merge, you don't have to use it - existence of this option increases your privacy.

What fee do you take?

We use Pay what you want as pricing strategy. It mean you set how much value our service is to you.

You may split chips into size you wish to donate.

Chip questions

Why chip values are so weird? 1.024 BTC? Why not 1 BTC?

We wanted to have a lot of chip sizes and to easily split/merge them. if you start with 1 BTC and you split it, your minimal chip is 0.015625 BTC which seems even weirder.

But 1.024 BTC is so uncommon that everyone will know I've used this mixer!

After a while it will get more common, because you won't even need to use mixer to anonymize your coins. Just split them into tokens and they look exactly like chips.

I really, really want 1 BTC chip!

You are in luck! We have introduced commonize function which will swap your weird looking 1.024 BTC chip into 1 BTC chip and weird looking 0.512 BTC into 0.5 BTC.

Using this action will cost you the weird part of chip which is around 2% fee.

Do you know withdrawn private key?

Sadly, yes, we have created them and as long as two people knows private key, either of them can move funds. When you withdraw a chip, you receive a copy of private key encrypted on the mixer's server. You are free to sweep it yourself, ask us to send it to your address or keep it on chip for a while. Only the last option keeps your funds vunerable to our dishonesty, but it also extends your privacy. If you sweep funds from chip in first 12h after your input, you receive same privacy as you would get from standard mixer. If you trust us (as you already did when you sent coins into mixer) and spend chip when you need it, then you achive maximum privacy you can get.

Why I cannot withdraw small chips?

Current mining fees are almost as high as smallest chip size. Instead of withdrawing small chip - we issue a voucher for that amount. You can redeem old voucher to merge two small chips into one bigger and withdraw big one.

Privacy questions

Why withdrawal to private key?

After you've received private key, you can spend them right away without waiting for our transaction. But that's not all. Since your withdrawal is not visible on blockchain, it looks like your chip was moved a few days before your deposit. Time Travel! Third, less spectacular element this method gives you is that you decide when to move those coins next. Few days? Few seconds? Who knows, you are not encumbered with our solution. Fourth, when you are in a hurry, you can set higher fee to have your transaction included in first block. It's your money after all.

How long do you keep logs?

Your session lasts for 7 days. After that, your session and all its data will be removed. You can also destroy your session before time is up. We keep statistical data ie. how much was donated.

Fungibility? Why would I care?

Let's hear the expert:

First of all I was going to explain what we mean by fungibility before bitcoin and ecash. It's an old legal concept in fact, about paper currency. It's the idea that a one ten dollar note is the same as any other ten dollar note. If you receive a note that was involved in a theft, 10 transactions ago, and the police investigate the theft, they have no right to remove the ten dollar note from your pocket. It's not your fault that it was involved in a previous crime. And so bank notes actually have serial numbers, so it would be possible for a stolen note to be traced back to you.

This first arose, there was a 17th century court case where a wealthy merchant sent a couple of high-value bank notes to a colleague in the post and they never arrived. Before he sent them, he was quite paranoid that they would get stolen. He wrote down the serial numbers and made a mark on them. Sure enough they didn't arrive, so he put in a complaint with the bank, and evenutally the notes turned up at the bank. He tried to get the bank to return the notes to his ownership. The courts sided with the bank. Their reason was that if notes could be returned to their original owner after a theft, it would damage confidence in currency and it would be bad for business, the currency would become unusable because every time you received the paper note you would have to look in the newspaper whether it was reported stolen, or you would have the risk of it being taken, or you would have to rush to the bank to deposit it so that it was the bank's problem.(...)

Then we arrive at this problem of taint tracing. Because it's not very private, some people took an interest in tracing coins and I think the motivation was that there's a number of high-profile thefts of coins from exchanges and other businesses, and that's a problem for those businesses and they went out of businss because of it. Some people would like to put distance between themselves and coins that were used in illicit use. There is a law that says that currency is fungible, but because you can somewhat tell where a coin was used before, people started to care. Coin validation proposed to offer as a service to trace coins and try to give you a rating about how the history of the coin from your point of view and to offer that as a service to businesses. I think this could be quite dangerous because it goes back to that 17th century court case where now you could receive a coin that is perfectly valid at the time that you receive it, but a few weeks later a crime is uncovered and now your coin is tainted. So if this coin validation service is advicing many of the merchants where you would want to spend your coin at, it's tainted and now the merchant would refuse to accept your coin. That's a strange experience for you; you're holding a coin that you might have to sell at a discount to get rid of it. The aggregate effect of this might create a run on the bitcoin price. So it reopens this long-set legal principle that currency or currency units are all equal.

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoin-adam3us-fungibility-privacy/

Other Questions

What will happen if I send less than lowest chip?

Since we don't have chips lower than 0.001 BTC, your deposit will be treated as donation. Be aware that if you send 0.0015 BTC, you will receive one 0.001 BTC chip. Sending 0.0015 BTC twice will result in three 0.001 BTC chips.

How much time do I have to send input transaction?

You have 7 days to deposit, mix and withdraw private keys. You can extend it for another 7 days if your input transaction is stuck in mempool.

What are vouchers?

Every other mixer takes one big input and returns few smaller ones. This is good for privacy because inputs and outputs are harder to link, but it is bad for fees. While using ChipMixer, you can always deposit non-withdrawn chips and receive voucher code. When you redeem it, you will get the same amount back and you can use multiple voucher codes. This allows you to make many unconnected deposits and withdraw one big 4.096 BTC chip.

What is a signed receipt?

Our goal is to make Bitcoin value independent of its blockchain history. Some governments and corporations wants to invalidate its value by claiming they are connected to something immoral like gambling. Every time you withdraw from ChipMixer, we give you cryptographically signed receipt that proves you have received those funds from us. Since the disconnection of history is proven, there can be no loss of value.