The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger. A chronological record of all transactions made on the network is available for all to see. This clarity allows users to personally verify the supply & movement of all coins back to their inception.
Whilst this makes the network incredibly trustworthy, reliable & fully verifiable; unfortunately, it is also susceptible to bad actors whose ultimate goal is to identify the owners of all addresses and track the ownership of every single Sat.
For anyone who values anonymity, this is problematic. Luckily there is a solution.
Whirlpool is a potent Coinjoin tool from the guys at Samourai Wallet & is easily the most effective Coinjoin implementation available. It is also easy enough for beginners to master.
Whirlpool uses the “Zerolink Protocol”, which combines five collaborative inputs & produces five identical, equal amount outputs.
This transaction effectively hides your UTXOs amongst others with 1496 possible interpretations, breaking deterministic links & making it impossible for bad actors to know which output belongs to which input.
These equal outputs are now part of a non-custodial post-mix pool, waiting to be randomly selected for FREE remixes as new UTXOs arrive. Each Whirlpool round will consist of a minimum of 2 pre-mixers, those adding new UTXOs to the pool & paying the fees.
The remaining participants are randomly selected from the pool of post-mix UTXOs. There is never any address re-use, your UTXOs are never cycled with themselves & you will never cycle with any previously encountered sats.
With this methodology, your UTXOs become part of a larger crowd, increasing in size exponentially over time.
Every time your UTXO, or any of those you previously participated with, is selected for a remix, this anonymity group grows larger, radically increasing your anonset as time passes. There are multiple pools to choose from, varying in size.
Which you enter will depend on your starting balance & how you plan to use your post-mix sats. It is, however, typically an excellent approach to have a combination of different UTXO sizes for other use cases.
You can make a start with Whirlpool either using the Samourai Wallet Android application or Sparrow Wallet desktop software. Give it a try & increase your bitcoin privacy.
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