[Subreddit Discussion] Let's talk about Tumbling. Is it necessary? Should tumblers be on the Superlist?

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding BTC Fog lately. We've had many reports that they selectively scam, and these reports are increasing in frequency. Many people are asking for BTC Fog to be removed from the superlist, and some are suggesting that the only reason they remain is because the mods are somehow profiting off it.

For the record, I am of the belief that tumbling is an unnecessary waste of time and money. I have been saying this for a long time. Just to be clear, I do not pretend to be an OPSEC guru and I cannot say for certain that you will be more or less safe by using a tumbler. It is not really a mod's job to decide that anyways - we simply provide you the information and resources you need to make your own choices.

With that being said, we do want to empower and help you guys to make the right choices. That means things like discouraging you from using onion.to links, or making sure to remove EXIF data from your picture uploads. That was why we added the warning in the Superlist about BTC fog being reported as a selective scammer, so people could decide for themselves if that was a risk they wanted to take. We always try to give good advice, and we might fuck up at times, but we're human too, and this is where we depend on you.

We're not sure if we're "giving good advice" by listing tumblers in the superlist. In essence, simply having them there lends them credibility and may give some people the impression that it is necessary or at least advisable that they use them. In reality, the mods are not advising anyone to use tumblers. I am actually advising people not to use tumblers as I feel you can acheive the same goal of plausible deniability without the use of one. Am I wrong?

Let's discuss. We'd like to hear the community's views on tumbling. Do you think tumbling is advisable? Why or why not? If not, can you propose an alternative method to create plausible deniability? Should any tumblers be listed on the Superlist?

I'd like to invite /u/bitblender and /u/gramsadmin to this discussion. Perhaps one of you can explain to us the advantages that tumbling provides that cannot otherwise be achieved.


Comments


[19 Points] Haxforasscracks:

Such a waste of time and another chance to get scammed out of your BTC.

Buy BTC from LBC----> new wallet ----> Market. Or add a few new wallets in between if you're paranoid.

Plausible deniability, just bought and sold some bitcoin to make a quick $20 online. idk where they were sent.

And on top of that I have yet to see any LE case of "follow the blockchain". Plus when buying from LBC its already anonymous to begin with. Unless you choose a service or seller that requires identification which most do not.

And no offense to Grams either, it's the best service for the Darknet ever created, and I use it quite frequently. Literally my homepage on tor. Just not the tumbler.

In conclusion, the blockchain is like the USPS mail, there are so so many transactions nobody is going to pick you out and follow you for no reason. Even if you get a CD and search warrant and sent to jail, chances are they still won't follow the blockchain. You have a better chance of getting a CD while taking a shit, and unable to wipe your ass, before you get followed on the blockchain. Just my 0.001BTC

If you do choose to use coinbase, or similar service that's connected to your IRL identity, I would certainly recommend a tumbler. Even though sending to a few different wallets with plausible deniability may work just as well. Anything connected to you is always worth the extra protection. You shouldn't be purchasing bitcoin intended for purchasing illegal drugs under your confirmed identity to begin with. LBC is anonymous as it is and is why I always advise using it.


[9 Points] MLP_is_my_OPSEC:

Tumblers are pointless and a waste of BTC for buyers. If you have at least one wallet on the dark net between the exchange and the market it provides more than enough plausible deniability.

For vendors or anyone cashing out, 100% necessary.

I'm beginning to think all of the BTC Fog posts are shills or people trying to cause drama. Almost every single one is from a new account, and recently we've been getting a lot of threads about them. I feel they should remain in the superlist. Us mods should not be to blame for people having issues, make up your own fucking minds and stop passing off the blame.

Selective scamming is impossible to prove. No hidden service should be removed just because User123 says it should be. We take suggestions seriously, there's even a warning about BTC Fog in it's entry for fuck sake. If people aren't going to do their own research before doing something... well... they're idiots.

If a single tumbler should be removed, then every tumbler should be removed.


[9 Points] impost_r:

Inb4 Helix.

Just think about this: if LE compromised a tumbler, would they take it down or monitor all the transactions? They have zero interest in taking down tumblers.

Also, think about all the markets that have been compromised at some point, do people really think tumblers aren't a target for LE?

Also, trustless etc.

Also altcoins and btc casinos.


[4 Points] gramsadmin:

This is my usual response. https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/3ciyyt/tumbling_is_it_worth_it/csvzsse

Here are my key points for why I always used tumblers even before I had my own.


[5 Points] bitblender:

Obviously im going to argue about why Bitcoin Blender should be on the Superlist.

Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, its only pseudoanonymous and once one of your addresses is known to be yours its easy to make up your whole wallet and its transactions with a site like walletexplorer.com. An address can be known to be yours by not purchasing coins anonymously, making a purchase at a store, sending coins to a friend/family etc.

Taking walletexplorer.com as an example its very easy to use and can be used by anyone. If you send coins straight from your wallet to Agora, Nucleus or other wallets that are tracked on walletexplorer.com its going to show up when looking at your wallet there. We have seen posts on /r/bitcoin about accounts being closed by Coinbase because of transactions to sites that violates their policies, so they are obviously trying to track to what sites their users are sending coins to.

Sending a bitcoin from purchase place to Wallet A to Wallet B and then to Market is just sending the coins in a straight line, even if its different wallets it easy to follow. If you use a mixer instead of Wallet B your original coins is going into the mixer and while at the same time you receive new coins to whatever destination wallet you wish. There is no link or taint between your new coins and your original coins.

Breaking the chain and receiving new coins without taint to the original coins is just the first step of mixing, to stop advanced blockchain analysis we are going to need some more techniques. First and most important is a randomized fee instead of a static fee, it prevents amount-based blockchain analysis. The second is a randomized delay on withdraw, it prevents time-based blockchain analysis. These features are the corner stones of good bitcoin mixing. If these techniques are used you can not even guess which transactions to follow, there is going to be thousands of transactions on the blockchain matching within the randomized fee range and the randomized time delay, this is not feasible. This mixing/tumbling/blending is providing much better anonymity and more than just plausible deniability than just sending coins between your own wallets and then sending it to a market.

We can not know what tools LE are working on, but it would not be hard to guess that it would have more advanced blockchain analysis methods than walletexplorer.com has right now and they are able to track Agora, Btcfog, Nucleus and so on right now. We know that all transactions are permanently stored on the blockchain forever. Once they have a tool as simple as walletexplorer.com it could check every transaction that have ever happened since the beginning of Bitcoin, they could check what wallets received coins from those easily tracked markets and follow the coins from there. Even if LE is not doing it now, its never too late for them to start if they decide to because the blockchain is there waiting.

Markets are high priority targets for LE in probably every country in the world, they are going to try to go after the users in every possible way they can to scare everyone away like they are trying to do with bittorrent file sharing for example. Encouraging users to not care about their bitcoin anonymity when LE is looking at every possible way to stop this from continuing is not a good idea. So i think the Superlist should contain an updated list of good trustworthy bitcoin mixing services so those users that chose to mix have a safe source for the correct links and latest information from the community.

//Bitblender


[3 Points] unitedstatesiscancer:

I really appreciate including tumblers in the superlist. I check here for reports of fraud before depositing into a tumbler.

While tumbling is not really necessary for buyers, it is necessary if you are looking to "cash out" bitcoins. I saw a flow chart of the intermediary addresses that one of the crooked DEA agents used on this sub or /r/bitcoin not long ago.


[4 Points] elliephantas:

I don't know if this is an appropriate place to ask this, but the use of other services like btc casinos seems like the best possible way as it essentially provides both tumbling and the ultimate plausible deniability in one. But how do I know which casino sites are legit and trustworthy? Is there a different subreddit for that? Do you guys have ones you always use?


[3 Points] Jay-__:

You know my stance:

Let us get rid of all tumblers and make it a market-list again. There is still DNStats.net for Tumblers etc.

Either that or we will probably have to live with accusations of being shills for service-xyz, simply because we list them. Also we'd have to add other tumblers, too, so that people can't say we only add tumblers that pay us.


[3 Points] good-afternoon:

Whether they are effective or safe is definitely up for debate. There's people on both sides.

Because there are many people who are convinced that tumbling is necessary, however, it is imperative that legitimate links to safe and reputable tumblers be kept on the superlist. That way those who are new to DNMs and paranoid about safety have the link to a tumbler that is legitimate, as opposed to a scam they may find on the Hidden Wiki.


[3 Points] Vendor_BBMC:

This should be a vendor discussion. Money-laundering tools are for legitemizing illegally-earned funds, ie every penny I earn.

Are they needed to launder one legally-purchased bitcoin, which is destined for a drug purchase?

Of course not.

Some of us are failing to understand the definition of money laundering, and why vendors might choose to protect the origin of their bitcoin from discovery using taint analysis.

Vendors Re the only dnm users with reason to use bitcoinfog. Some have been using it for years to launder huge amounts.

Not one of them has ever come on here after being "selected" for a scam.

Its always some chump with a throwaway on a Friday, who is sending to marketplace deposit address crom a web wallet.

You have to use real wallets that YOU have the keys to. Not coinbase to alphabay, blaming bitcoinfog instead of the scumballs its trying to hide from each other.


[3 Points] -lobali:

I've mentioned removing them several times for two primary reasons.

First, they're just something else we have to pay serious constant attention to the way we do markets and investigate and decide if the accusations of legitimacy are true and we don't do the same on any official level to any other tangential Dnm service like blockchain wallet programs or exchanges Plus, historically they turn scam incredibly spontaneously, as in three minutes ago it was working and now ir has my 87 Btc. They get a lot of false accusations that people believe and just as many real ones ignored from all the Crying Wolf. It's nearly impossible to tell beforehand if they're about to turn scam and about impossible to differentiate selective scamming from phishing, technical issues, or slow customer service. Which a brings me to my second point.

Users of this subreddit we expect to be sophisticated enough in the use of DNMS that the decision to use tumblers/which one to use - are things that one should know before being fully ready and using markets properly, which is the desired audience of this sub. There is a wholly underutilized subreddit to learn all anout rumbling as well as learning how to research any market, service, or vendor before choosing who or what to use. Using DNMs require a lot of homework. When someone asks a remedial question such as "how do I buy bitcoins" we send them to the noob sub. We don't write lists of exchanges, storage wallets and so on. I see tumblers as a tangental service and although there's no reason to ban discussion of them, butive always felt that listing just a few of many, many of them, ir could certainly be perceived as favoritism. I would like to keep them *off the sidebar.


[2 Points] thewhite2chainz:

I have been using the markets since SR1 and have never once used a tumbler. With that being said, however, I think that having them on the super list is useful for providing those who do want to tumble with a list of (somewhat) trustworthy services instead of scams off of something like the hidden wiki. Like you said, it's ultimately up to the individual to decide if they want to use them, but having them on the list helps to make sure less people get scammed


[2 Points] javasplitmmtppttt:

So youre saying vendors should just cash straight out, so if anyone was following their wallets they could see where they were cashing out to and then grab their info?

Or are you saying buyers who gave coinbutt a retinal scan and a piece of their liver so they could have the honor of buying bitcoins should just send to some 3rd party wallet and claim that the address was someone elses?

Tell me, if i have 4.2131412 bitcoins and send them to 100 addresses whose final desination still adds up to 4.2131412 and just so happens to move into a darkmarket that it cant be deduced that maybe it was some limpwristed attempt at laundering?

Look at the bc.i coinjoin fuckup, a bunhc of people throwing all their coins into a big ol pot and pulling them out, no way to trace that right? It failed because its not the direct connection between addresses that one is trying to trace but the amounts and the timing of the amounts, both of which required an entirely new altcoin (darkcoin) to solve.

edit: if you want to be responsible (lol) maybe you might want to mention that all the btcfog scam claims have always been from fresh accounts used only for that purpose. still waiting on one single aged and used account to say they got jacked.


[2 Points] Theeconomist1:

In an ideal world, having the links in some sort of list would be viewed not as endorsing but as at least providing the valid links to the service. But unfortunately some in the community do view it as an endorsement of the service and thus, there are some who then think that the mods are somehow paid off to keep these services in the list. It seems there must be a compromise where the list could be there for reference and be understood that none of the mods endorse any of the tumblers and might not even endorse tumbling at all.

I guess teh way I view it is without the links, would that increase the number of people who fall victim to getting phished and thus hurt the community? ON the other hand, we don't endorse them and don't want to give that impression. I guess I'd hope people would do their research and make the decision on what services to use based on research and vetting and not just go off links they find.

I lean towards including the links in some fashion b/c I feel it protects the community better than otherwise. I don't want to see people get phished. But I would also like to eliminate the insinuation that the mods somehow benefit in any fashion from having said links.


[2 Points] shitbrik:

I kinda felt like tumbling services were just a thrown together idea and shilled up our asses on Reddit and the forums to make the owners money. It's safer and cheaper to just switch hands the right ways manually. -This is all speculation by a schizophrenic conspiracy theorist btw


[2 Points] sapiophile:

Cats who think tumbling is really totally unnecessary should probably take a look at this: http://blog.cryptocrumb.com/2015/03/prosecution-futures-blockchain-evidence.html - it's pretty sobering and eye-opening. The feds are catching on, and they're using some pretty advanced blockchain-analysis stuff that's only going to get better, and they're actually using it to prosecute people. Jus' sayin'.

Aside from that, though, I really think that JoinMarket is gonna be the future on this front. Check out /r/JoinMarket. There's also a script that just got released to run JoinMarket on Tails...

It's way cheaper, totally trustless (that's HUGE for a tumbler, solves basically the #1 problem with them), and pretty airtight security, but of course volume/liquidity matters. So folks should totally try it out, and maybe even start using it regularly.

The transactions generally don't mix quite as many inputs and outputs as a "traditional" tumbler, so for maximum security, you might want to run it through a couple of times, but really, it's so much cheaper that there's no reason not to.

Seriously, check this shit out, it's a cool idea.


[1 Points] ShulginsCat:

The counterargument is that having any tumblers on the list will remind noobs that transferring coin directly to/from the market is a bad idea. Yes, you can achieve the same end result without using tumblers but not everyone knows how to.

If you remove the tumblers you should link to a few good guides explaining how to stay anonymous if you're buying from coinbase or circle, for example.


[1 Points] J0NJ0NES:

Am I wrong?

Respectfully, yes. Tumblers are not designed to give you plausible deniability. They are designed to give you anonymity. Used properly , a tumbler is the only way I know of to break the statistical link between bitcoin transactions. You may not value anonymity, but there are others (vendors) who need it.

There is also a case to be made for using tumblers even if you don't have a desire for anonymity, but to help provide anonymity for those who do (vendors). The tumblers do have their place, and should stay on the Super List.

Specifically on Bitcoin Fog, what's wrong with trying to reach out to the service to try to get a clue as to what's happening? I think it's reasonable to try to get an official response from a service that's being accused of wrong doing. Both sides of the story, know what I mean? But to me, the accusation of 'selective scamming' is tantamount to 'she's a witch'. Based not in fact, but fear, ignorance and delusion. They might be on vacation, arrested, have a bug in their code, or there might just be a whole lot of shills trying to shift tumbler market share in their direction. If you're not willing to reach out to the service, that's your prerogative, but it would be irresponsible IMO to be influenced by a lot of talking along with zero evidence. This is the reason the wiki was reworked.

I urge the mods to please stick to their commitment to provide transparent evidence before nuking a service (which is what effectively will happen if a service is taken off of the list). If you don't, you're simply opening yourselves up to be manipulated by whomever. The evidence requirement is what makes you specifically not shills. And if you think there's pressure on you now for not removing a service from the Super List, wait until you remove one and have nothing in the way of evidence other than a bunch of accusations. Ask for evidence, and if none is forthcoming and the issue is significant to the community, go and seek it out. That's just the way I would do it. Minimizes the chance of mistakes, and to a great degree covers my ass.


[1 Points] IGetDankShit:

Verification for Bitcoin Fog.

I contacted Bitcoin Fog support to see if they want to comment. A couple people have provided me with screenshots of their claims, and unless they have photoshopped their deposit page, the blockchain does indeed show their funds never appeared, and support apparently does not respond to them.


[1 Points] None:

Why i don't tumble;

  1. I assumed the tumblers were for vendors to move money off market. If it looks like a tax rate it probably is a tax!
  2. Tumblers charge me for mixing my clean coins. wtf? why would i need to do this? i've been taking cash out of a cash point for years and giving it to a dealer. It's a problem for them if they want to bank it... not for me when buying.
  3. I believe tumblers should be practically free for small amounts (i.e. buyers) since there's no real incentive to use them.
  4. I have considered the current tumbler model to be 'double dipping' on the cash they move.

I tumbled just one time and thought it was a waste of money. This is maybe considered annecdotal - but the one time i did tumble it was with bitcoin fog. But srsly after wasting (the accepted costs of tumbling) the equivalent amount ofmoney to buy a pizza... i figured why bother.


[1 Points] LoudRooster:

I think tumblers should remain on the superlist to give US the users a choice on what we believe is proper opsec. I think you will agree that some say no some say yes. Give us the choice to put our minds at ease. It should additionally include email service providers so we have all the tools we need right at our disposal. The list is a resource and just because someone may think it should not be there doesn't mean some others don't want it there and in order to comply with everyone, it should stay up. The thing is that your warning comment is not very visible, make it like Texas where everything is bigger and bolder.

There are some experts here who can go back and forth and follow and analyze the blockchain. You know this is true. I want you to remember that the blockchain is permanent. How much time until a tool is made that can do this. If there are permanent transactions listed and they want at some point in the future to go after you, then they can easily go back an fuck you right in the pussy.

Leave this as an option. Let the superlist be super.


[1 Points] rogueXleader:

For the needs of someone seeking personal amounts, I've found that the shared coin option on the Blockchain wallets to be a good, simple way to essentially tumble the coins yourself. That's not to say there isn't some way it could be traced back to you, as with enough time, money and resources most things can, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder. I would recommend that to other sub regulars, but I also am by far not an OPSEC expert


[0 Points] btcfogiscrap:

I transferred .5 or so to them a few days ago and lost it. When I tried to use their support page, no one responded. This was not my first transaction with them, but it will certainly be the last. Assholes.