Bitcoin Mixers List – Best Reliable, Private Sites

Bitcoin mixers play a crucial role in enhancing transaction privacy. They allow users to mix their coins with others, making it difficult to trace the origins of the funds. Below you can find a bitcoin mixer list that has links to the current safe and private mixer websites. You should be prioritizing your financial privacy over mindless airdrops and giveaways, so this page will be useful to you. You should thoroughly research and use only trusted websites to ensure a safe mixing process, so that’s why you should continue reading to see the list of reputable bitcoin mixers.

This site is under constant attack by someone who hates mixers. Therefore, below you can find a list of mirrors of this page. There is nothing illegal or abusive about writing a page about mixers. What is illegal is using Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks to take BitMixList off the net, which is what the mixer hater is trying to do. So webhosts: think about that before banning this from your site.

This page was last updated on March 2024.

Mirrors

If any of these sites don't work, just click on another one. Mirrors are not sorted in any particular order.

• bitmixlist.com
• bitmixlist.org
• bitmixlist.ihostfull.com
• bitmixlist.0fees.us
• knightmirror.bitmixlist.org
• bitmixlist.ihostfull.com
• bitmixlist-lao7a.kinsta.page
• kmzvdt7443fqisu27xw3saxv7rn2pmgx33zd2cy54ev2mbba2xjoziqd.onion
• bitmixlistorg.bitbucket.io
• bitmixlist.github.io
• bitmixlist.gitlab.io
• bitmixlist.vercel.app
• bitmixlist.netlify.app
• bitmixlist.liveblog365.com
• bitmixlist.webcindario.com
• bitmixlist.byethost22.com
• bitmixlist.onrender.com
• bitmixlist.surge.sh

The List Of Bitcoin Mixers

The List Of Private Exchanges

The List Of Anonymous Wallets

You’re probably thinking, “this is a bitcoin mixer list, but this page is so long!” Well, this may be a list, but it’s also a history of bitcoin mixers. And yeah, technically, all this is important info. But some of the best stories start with important info. And that’s exactly what this is, a story. And to tell it right, I gotta take you back to long before bitcoin mixers set foot on the internet.

A Short Introduction

It might be worth asking: How did we get to this point?

Bitcoin mixers have experienced one of the most remarkable rises in the industry, and that is not exaggerating. From their humble origins in the first half of the 2010’s to a libertarian powerhouse, they have literally seen all the highs and lows along with Bitcoin itself. As a result, people have tried to copy them for other cryptocurrencies, but it only really works well when the blockchain includes it by design.

It is also important to note that Bitcoin by itself is not anonymous, only private. If you need full anonymity, use Monero, or Grin, or ZCash, or any of the other networks that do have anonymity built-in. A bitcoin mixer can only provide anonymity if it is not compromised – and if you are not compromised.

Also, have you noticed that nearly all of these mixers are closed source? Maybe that is not desirable for you. In that case,there are some open-source ones too.

Bitcoin Mixer List Disclaimer

It should be said right now that mixers are an attractive service for criminals who want to launder dirty money. However, I will prefix this by saying some mixers because chain analysis firms like Elliptic have already identified most of the entry and exit points of a lot of mixers. The vast majority of bitcoin mixers do not allow cybercrime and never supported it in the first place. Unfortunately, a small number do, but you won’t find any of them on this bitcoin mixer list. I will never list any illegal mixers here, and the ones that do exist to help Lazarus and Co. can go where they belong: prison.

Even though I myself have advertised mixers, I have never advertised a sanctioned mixer, and they will never be promoted here. Hence, I kindly ask you, the reader, that if you find any illegal service on this bitcoin mixer list, for you to report it to me by the email or Telegram channel linked below. Your vigilance is much appreciated.

In particular, I will not be responsible for what you use the content on this site for. The action of using a bitcoin mixer is supposed to be to help protect your funds, not to help you commit crimes. And yes, I spoke with my hosting provider, who said that publishing cryptocurrency topics (including mixers) is OK. The original web host, Hostinger, renenged on their assurances to me and kicked BitMixLst off their site, likely after succumbing to pressure from anonymous scammers. Therefore, I can no longer recommend anyone to host a website about crypto on Hostinger. Because BitMixList only provides links to real mixers, scammers obviously hate it and want to see these web resources destroyed. Therefore, I encourage everyone to make mirrors of this website and host them for all the internet to see.

Comprehensive History Of Mixers At The Bitcoin Mixer List

Early History Of Bitcoin Mixers

The concept of mixing bitcoins dates back to at least 2010 when Bitcointalk and various online communities started discussing the need for improved privacy features. The first Bitcoin mixer, known as Bitcoin Laundry (also called BitLaundry), is believed to have been launched around this time. Bitcoin Laundry allowed users to hide their funds by sending bitcoins to the service and receiving other bitcoins forwarded from the service.

The first bitcoin mixer to make use of blind signatures was called Blindbitcoin, announced on June 2011. Blind Signatures are a cryptographic process created by David Chaum which hide the contents of a message before it is signed with a digital signature such as DSA, or ECDSA in the case of Bitcoin. The idea for mixers to use variable fees was proposed on June 2012, around the same time the first mixer hack occurred (and the second).

Ironically, that mixer started a claims page, which directed users to perform identity verification to receive their funds back. Don’t ask me how it got to that. Such a thing would be unspeakable in the present day. Even Blockchain dot com was running a mixer at the time (surprise!).

Also it should be noted that the bitcoin mixer list does not have any of these mixers listed because they appear to have been taken offline a long time ago, but by their owners at least, not any government.

The Use Of CoinJoin By Bitcoin Mixers

Over time, as the demand for privacy solutions increased, more Bitcoin mixers entered the scene. They offered different algorithms and methodologies to break the link between the sender and the receiver of bitcoins. Some mixers focused on implementing CoinJoin (a technique created by former Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell), which combines multiple transactions into a single transaction, while others adopted different techniques to achieve the same goal.

To give you an idea of the theory that makes CoinJoin work, here is a description from Greg Maxwell himself.

The independence of the transaction inputs from each other is what allows CoinJoin to work in the first place. Users already send bitcoin as an transaction input to a recipient. So by including the bitcoins of several users as transaction inputs, and the recipients’ addresses as transaction outputs, we have just created a CoinJoin transaction. They can even create this in a private matter by creating and sign the transaction with your inputs, then send the Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction to the next user for signing, then to the next user, and so on.

The Wild West Of A Bitcoin Mixer List

If I told you that even back in 2012, there were bitcoin mixers that were running as scams, you wouldn’t be surprised, I hope. Especially on Bitcointalk, moderators would proactively label a service as a possible scam at that time. (Nowadays the forum is so rampant with scammers and bounty spammers that I think they gave up.) Even Tor hidden sites were in on the act.

If you opened some of the links above, you might have noticed that service operators stored the bitcoin mixer’s coins on an exchange like Mt Gox. Granted, this predated CoinJoin, and nowadays you can’t run a mixer from an exchange since there are heightened AML regulations. It’s worth noting that the bitcoin mixer list has actually become safer than it was during bitcoin’s early days.

LocalBitcoins And The Beginning Of Private Exchanges

When LocalBitcoins opened in June 2012, it was the first peer-to-peer marketplace of its kind. In a way, it was a precursor of the private exchanges as we know them today. Why is this important, you ask? Because in a private exchange, the buyer and seller directly trade cryptocurrencies with each other. Also fiat currencies could be traded, but that is beyond the scope of this website.

Way back then, people trusted each other enough to do direct trades with each other on various parts of the internet. This was before scammers overran cryptocurrency circles. When PayPal eventually banned bitcoin transactions on its platform (for nearly 10 years), people flocked there instead. LocalBitcoins is no more now, but it has left a legacy of a model exchange.

Bitcoin Mixers: Privacy Or Money Laundering?

Did you know that back in 2013, The Bitcoin Foundation (yeah, the one that spectacularly imploded) had a proposal to set up a gigantic mixer service to mint anonymous bitcoins for the public? They never made one, because they didn’t want governments to accuse them of money laundering. A full quote from a now-deleted post should show the full situation:

Implications

It goes on to show that even back in 2013, there was already a debate of bitcoin mixers being used for privacy versus money laundering. Although I must say, the degree of regulation they wanted back then was pretty extreme, even for today’s standards. For instance, the Bitcoin SV blockchain has a feature similar to this that seizes coins when shown a warrant. The Bitcoin community views this kind of thing as a heretical practice, as well as address blacklisting.

Ransomware And How it Relates to Bitcoin Mixers

A related topic to seizing people’s bitcoins is ransom. In 2013, someone predicted the apocalyptic future where kidnappers would force their victims to pay ransom in Bitcoin. Unsurprisingly (and tragically), this is now a stark reality in the cryptocurrency world.

While this kind of ransom is of the physical kind, virtual heists are just as common. One of the first instances of hackers laundering their illegal profits was the CryptoLocker malware. No doubt that they used some bitcoin mixer list on Bitcointalk to find one. The hackers largely evaded blacklisting mechanisms by using a bitcoin mixer. Authorities have actually cracked down on this practice hard, as I will explain later.

Proposals To Make A Bitcoin Mixer List Obsolete

There were also many proposals that were brought up by community members to add a mixing feature directly inside the Bitcoin Core reference client. One of them, by the legendary Casascius, describes a simple relay where wallet-enabled Bitcoin nodes ask peers to send their list of transaction outputs. This is so they can make a CoinJoin transaction that both parties sign and broadcast.

If Bitcoin developers had implemented this idea, nobody would need a bitcoin mixer list because all of the mixing could be done directly on the bitcoin network. This never gained steam though, despite the many people bringing up the topic several times over the years. Now that we have SPV wallets, hardware wallets, and custodial exchanges, this might never come into fruition. Although, that is not really a bad thing, because some altcoins jumped at the chance to integrate it.

The Rise Of Monero As A Bitcoin Mixer Alternative

Monero was launched on April 18, 2014, and among its other features such as its CPU-friendly mining algorithm, it has built-in support for ring signatures. You can find details of it in the CryptoNote whitepaper. A ring signature is when a group of people sign something, but it is impossible for someone on the outside to know who in particular signed it.

Ring signatures provide far more anonymity than any bitcoin mixer could provide. In fact, although the IRS awarded a $625,000 contract to blockchain analysis companies to break Monero, but they failed at breaking it. In fact, these properties lave lead to Monero becoming the underground currency of the darknet. So next time someone tells you that “Bitcoin is only for criminals”, take them to this section.

It is worth noting that there have been several high-profile unmasking of bitcoin darknet users, and I’m sure many of them thought mixers would make them safe. That is not the case if you do not secure your digital life, whether you use Bitcoin or Monero or another cryptocurrency.

JoinMarket and Practical CoinJoin Software

JoinMarket was announced on January 2015 as a wallet software with client and server parts. It uses a bitcoin network software called libbitcoin to connect to a Bitcoin Core node, while the JoinMarket server waits for wallets to connect so that coinjoins can be performed. There is a command-line and graphical user interface and is one of the most practical ways to use CoinJoin today. It can also do a PayJoin which is basically a special case of a CoinJoin with two inputs and two outputs. In other words, two people paying each other.

The JoinMarket client looks like any other wallet except that it automatically CoinJoins your funds with the other users connected to this server. It is actively-developed open-source software and is very popular with the community because it preserves bitcoin’s fungability. This is important, because fungability would soon become a talking point during the bitcoin mixer regulations. So if you can, contribute to it. It represents the future of mainstream bitcoin privacy.

Companies Start Refusing To Accept Certain Bitcoins

Bitcoin is a fungible currency. That means that you can give someone one bitcoin, it it will be equivalent to another person giving that person one bitcoin. So if people do not want to accept someone’s bitcoin, that damages its fungability.

In 2015, it was discovered that crypto payment processing provider Bitpay was one of many companies rejecting certain bitcoins from being sent to their service. People went as far as claiming that fungability would become a major talking point (in hindsight, they were right). The coins being declined likely came from services posted on bitcoin mixer lists across the internet, and BitPay and other companies flagged them as “possible suspicious activity on the blockchain”.

It’s very clear that the narrative, even in 2015, had gone from bitcoin mixers being used as tools to protect your safety to services used for “suspicious activity”. So it came as a surprise to nobody when media claimed that bitcoin was used to finance a terrorist attack in Paris. This claim was never verified.

Calls For Bitcoin Regulation Ramp Up

Regulation really stepped up in 2016 when the European Union started one of many motions to get bitcoin transactions to be regulated. In other words, to require your identification to do any bitcoin transaction. And of course bitcoin mixers, and bitcoin mixer lists, would get outlawed in the process. Congress was in on it, too.

See, I don’t really have a problem for regulation for buying and selling bitcoins. You gotta prevent money laundering you know.

The problem comes when said regulation requires you to provide identification for performing any kind of bitcoin transaction, whether with a bitcoin mixer or not. This benefits nobody, because inevitably, the regulation is implemented by 3rd party KYC providers who require not just your ID and bank statement, but any or all of the following:

• Employment records as a proof of funds
• A mugshot of you holding your ID
• A picture of you holding your username and current date on a piece of paper
• A live picture of your ID taken from a phone running iOS newestVersion or later
• A live picture of your ID taken from a phone running Android almostNewestVersion or later
• Ditto but a selfie of you choreographically moving your head
• A video call

And even then your application can be denied for no public reason, leaving you stranded with no money, which is exactly what Bitcoin was created to solve. You see, nowadays you need one of the latest smartphones to perform any kind of verification, which is very silly – even banks don’t require that sort of thing!

As someone said over here when the news broke out: “How are they going to end the pseudo-anonymity of something that they don’t even understand?”

Atomic Swaps Are Invented

When you hear the phrase Atomic Swap, your first thought might be “smart contracts” or maybe “Uniswap”. Actually, you are close, but there can be atomic swaps across blockchains besides Ethereum.

Basically, an atomic swap is when two cryptocurrencies are exchanged with each other, without involving a fiat reserve currency. This is a very important pillar of private exchanges because it is very hard to secure millions of dollars in liquidity to operate a successful private exchange. Also, having dollar funds implies that the exchange has access to the banking institutions. But this was in 2017, during the ICO boom and crash, so banks weren’t exactly keen on working with random, unknown exchanges.

According to this site, 2017 saw the first ever atomic swap executed, between Decred and Litecoin. Although the idea existed since around 2012.

Now let me mention that you need the two cryptos to be on the same blockchain in order to make a successful swap. The reason why is because the smart contract feature of the blockchain has to understand what is being traded. So you can’t swap Bitcoin and Monero, for example.

However, what you can do, is write additional software to automatically send Monero, in the correct amount, when someone sends you Bitcoin. Just like how the dollar has an exchange rate with other currencies, you can actually make an exchange rate based on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on. The combination of smart contacts and external software would be the force behind the first rise of exchanges.

Bitcoin Mixer List Advertisements

It was around this time that lists of bitcoin mixers were advertised on Bitcointalk, especially BitMixer. It happens to be one of the last major mixers that shut down on its own will. Nowadays it seems that bitcoin mixers would rather operate until they get seized than take their profits and run. For historical reasons

This is only relevant to this page because Bitcointalk has advertisements for all sorts of things, in the past you would usually see banner ads below the first post on the page, usually for some casino since they have tons of money. But if you’re wondering why you don’t see them anymore, you should read this post.

In particular, bitcoin mixers never bought banner ads (at least as far as I was a member), but they did rent signature areas on some “legendary” user accounts. And they bought a lot of them. These signatures could be rented out for a hundred or so dollars per week, and it was common to see a lot of bitcoin mixer ads when you browsed Bitcointalk. In fact they started off with a rate in BTC, but after the 2021 bull run, the rate became so extraordinary in some campaigns that they had to switch to dollar rates.

It is also around this time that more bitcoin mixers popped up and started to gain traction. Besides BitMixer, there were in this time period CoinMixer, ChipMixer, and the now-infamous Bitcoin Fog and Helix. The latter two were seized around this time.

Bitcoin Mixers and Crime

In addition to cybercrime, which hackers were already savvy enough to pull off, in 2017 we saw a surge in physical robberies and extortion. While everyone was distracted by the block size debate, thugs heard about bitcoin’s meteoric rise in price. They started finding ways to intimidate wealthy OGs to fess up their fortunes. The ones who didn’t get caught either lived in a jurisdiction with an incompetent police force, or used a bitcoin mixer to cover up their tracks. This basically dominated the news all year.

Also as a result of this, more countries started to ban Bitcoin, in addition to Russia and China. Some of these countries have revised their bans in the wake of central bank digital currencies, probably because they want to catch the train before it leaves the station.

More bitcoin mixers keep popping up throughout 2017 and 2018, and this is when the rise of blockchain analysis truly takes center stage. For instance, Binance started a partnership with Chainalysis to detect coins coming from a mixer. To the casual onlooker of Bitcointalk’s archives, it looks as if the crime rate is getting out of control. And yet, the world governments were not too bothered to do anything about mixers, yet.

Jambler – Mixer Meets Minter

Jambler was launched in 2018, as a platform to bring mixers and coin suppliers such as miners and exchanges together. Its not a mixer itself, but it makes it easy for anyone to start their own mixer.

Recall that the purpose of a mixer is to obfuscate bitcoins. So how do you do that? Well, first you have to get your own coins, and you have to make sure that they are not flagged by any blockchain analysis. In other words, making sure they are “clean” and not “dirty”. Now that you know that, where do you get those coins from? The answer: Exchange withdrawals and miners.

When a bitcoin miner mines a block, it contains a coinbase transaction with some BTC inside it. This is what they call “clean” bitcoins, with no transaction history. Jambler sources coins from bitcoin miners and resells them to mixers. This allows the mixers to give their customers coins that are not flagged, and the next customer’s bitcoins are taken from the pool of previous customers’ coins, and so on.

Exchange withdrawals are perhaps sought even more than mined blocks, because they are easier to find than blocks. After all, miners mine a block every 10 minutes on average. The exchanges process hundreds of withdrawals during that time period. These coins go through a scoring system to make sure that they aren’t dirty. And if they are good, Jambler sends them to the mixers.

Remarkably, Jambler is still standing today, when almost all mixers from that time period have failed. A lot of mixers would piggyback on Jambler in the coming years.

The First Wave Of Private Exchanges

There are a lot of exchanges on many blockchains that are bloated and have useless features such as staking, and so on. I’m not talking about that stuff. Those platforms are very fragile and keep getting hacked (usually by the guys in the last section). Instead, I am referring to the simple ones that use atomic swaps and custom software to swap common coins like Bitcoin and Monero.

Private exchanges which let you privately buy and sell privacy coins without KYC emerged, such as Bisq, LocalMonero, and TradeOgre. These exchanges do not collect KYC and let you exchange different cryptocurrencies. As a corollary, none of these sites let you trade in fiat.

Exchanges are useful because privacy coins like Monero have an obfuscated blockchain which makes blockchain analysis impossible. So if you sell your bitcoins for Monero, send them to another exchange, and then buy someone else’s bitcoins with your Monero, you completely detach your transaction history.

However, it is important to note that in this regard, a exchange is like a bitcoin mixer. If someone looks at the Bitcoin transaction flow, it could de-anonymize you. In that sense, using more than one exchange is recommended as I described above, because the intermediate withdrawal and deposit of Monero cannot be traced. The same cannot be said about mixers. If all of the mixers used in a sequence are compromised, you might be de-anonymized.

Enhanced CoinJoin Wallets

It is around this time that the Wasabi and Samourai wallets were created. These two wallets are not like ordinary wallets – they have a service which automatically performs CoinJoins of bitcoins that you receive from your wallet. This provides a major advantage for users in that they don’t need to look at a bitcoin mixer list to pick a mixer. These services are generally called coordinators, and can be either private or centralized.

These wallets are different from JoinMarket by having many user-friendly features that a normal wallet would have, and they are very similar to mixers in that they obfuscate the source and destination of funds. But a key difference they have from bitcoin mixers is that it is impossible for the coordinators to identify you or steal your coins.

Samourai Wallet

Let’s start with the older of the two. Although Samourai Wallet itself was created in 2015, its Whirlpool Coinjoin implementation was not made until 2018. Whirlpool integrates post-mix tools within the Samourai Wallet, providing users with features like PayNym (payment codes that use unique addresses). It supports multiple rounds of mixing, allowing users to achieve higher levels of privacy by participating in subsequent mixing cycles.

Besides Paynym, it also uses additional techniques to help bounce blockchain analysis away such as Stonewall and Ricochet. Users have the flexibility to choose between different fee structures for mixing, including “Fast,” “Standard,” and “Slow” options, depending on their preferences and urgency.

Already, this array of tools is much more than what traditional mixers provide. So by participating in Whirlpool mixing, Samourai Wallet users can significantly enhance the privacy and fungibility of their Bitcoin holdings. Whirlpool coinjoins are run by a central coordinator.

Wasabi Wallet

Wasabi Wallet (not to be confused with the cloud storage service) is a newer wallet software that was created and announced on 2018. As explained in the post, Wasabi was a re-branding of another wallet called HiddenWallet, which used the ZeroLink coinjoin protocol, and they made their own CoinJoin protocol called WabiSabi. It is a BIP-157 light client.

WabiSabi is designed to be a non-interactive Chaumian CoinJoin protocol, meaning that users do not need to actively coordinate with each other during the mixing process. Just like Whirlpool. It uses Schnorr signatures introduced in Taproot, and unlike some previous CoinJoin implementations that used fixed denominations, WabiSabi allows for variable denominations, providing more flexibility in transaction amounts.

The WabiSabi coordinator is ran by a company called zkSNACKs, who also employ the Wasabi Wallet developers. Sometime around March 2022, a few months after the release of a brand new version 2.0, they announced that they would start developing an address blacklist to prevent mixing of laundered money. Remember what I wrote about address blacklisting? Yeah, the community didn’t take that well.

Ever since then, there has been endless arguing about the yet-to-be-developed blacklist on the old Wasabi Wallet ANN thread. If you ask me, I’m not a fan of blacklisting, but as long as it never pulls a Binance and prevents people from using their coins, I’m good.

Disadvantages Of Enhanced CoinJoin Wallets

Well, there are no important disadvantages. A few trivial disadvantages for using an enhanced coinjoin wallet:

• Bitcoin mixers make less money off of you
• There are less bitcoins for the feds to seize if they ever shut down a mixer
• Endless drama between competing wallet developers
• You won’t need to look at a bitcoin mixer list like this one

Hopefully none of these disadvantages put you off of these powerful wallets. Except maybe the last one, but you can always come back to my bitcoin mixer list at any time to see new updates about CoinJoin technology.

Meanwhile, bitcoin mixers became ever more popular thanks to them spending even more money on advertisement, especially on Bitcointalk. This would be the subject of a lot of infighting and disagreement.

Regulators Close In On Bitcoin Mixers

As I wrote earlier, criminals have already learned about bitcoin mixers, but would be only a matter of time before law enforcement caught up. And once they set up departments and offices for investigating mixers, they were ready to strike. One of the first mixers to get seized was a site called BestMixer. It only lasted for over a year and was apparently used in a lot of money laundering cases.

Throughout the rest of the decade and the start of the new one, authorities worked diligently to identify which ones were the “bad mixers”. Then they’d get their mixer IP addresses and server locations, so that they could launch a raid of the servers. Some people claimed that bitcoin mixers in general were no longer safe, although evidence only points to previous heists and government actions. Frequent kidnapping activity involving bitcoin (and possibly mixers) caused Nigeria to ban it entirely, for example.

North Korea got in the act too. Its 414 Liaison Office started abusing bitcoin mixers by laundering stolen gains from cryptocurrency services. And that’s when the US really got ticked. The United States and other countries started to arrest many people who operated bitcoin mixers. And even people who wrote mixer software, whose purpose was to launder money. And they were ruthless. Seizures and sanctions had already been high through 2020. But two years later, they would accelerate.

I can’t really say this increased scrutiny was just on bitcoin mixers, because regulators started giving other services such as exchanges last warnings. A lot of exchanges closed shop in different parts of the world during that time. Also hardware wallet inspections started happening.

Exchanges Start Delisting Privacy Coins

The exchanges that chose to comply were forced to stop supporting privacy coins. Misinformed lawmakers believed that by stopping the purchase and sale of Monero, the crimes would stop. However, it is rarely as simple as that. Remember the bitcoin mixers I listed? None of them use Monero.

Binance, Coinbase, and FTX were among the large exchanges to drop privacy coins. Naturally this angered the communities of those cryptocurrencies, but they were holding on to exchanges. They continued to provide free access to buying and selling Monero. In that regard, we can say that the blockade failed.

On an unrelated note, it feels ironic that these “gatekeepers of crypto” would try to block privacy coins in the name of safety. And yet they actively promote harmful shitcoins that frequently result in a total loss of funds. That screams money more than anything else. Then again, by delisting Monero, they also lost money. So let this reinforce your beliefs that exchanges only care about profit over anything else blockchain.

The Second Wave Of Private Exchanges

It is shortly after these events that a new generation of exchanges were being created. The old ones were still going strong, and remarkably were hardly subject to any criminal or government activity. In fact, they’re all still operating to this day.

Exchanges such as Robosats, Wizardswap, Agoradesk and UnstoppableSwap were created during this period. A few scams were also created, but they must have realized that exchanges are not so profitable, because they all disappeared quickly.

It is also around this time when exchanges became widely adopted, mainly by people whose exchanges were giving them a hard time with their funds. Today they represent a glowing future of private coin exchanges, which can trade not only Bitcoin and Monero, but other coins such as Ethereum and stablecoins too.

The Use Of Sanctions To Curtail Mixer Money Laundering

Meanwhile, OFAC had already started sanctioning bitcoin addresses as early as 2018. Now let me explain briefly why they would want to sanction an address. Sometimes, after they seize a bitcoin mixer, the owners manage to spirit some funds away. Like what Nazis tried to do during World War Two. Authorities must ensure criminals cannot cash out this money, so they add the addresses to OFAC’s blacklist. Exchanges are supposed to enforce this.

Now, it’s one thing when crypto companies want to maintain their own blacklists. It’s a whole different thing when governments make a blacklist, because those addresses were used for serious financial crimes. And it was not just bitcoin addresses either. Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies were flagged as well. And in particular, most stablecoin issuers can freeze any address they want to with a click of a button. Which is all the more reason why you should use DAI instead of USDT or USDC. But that’s another story.

In cases when sanctions were not required, it was because law enforcement was easily able to recover funds from people who thought merely stashing them in cryptocurrency would provide anonymity. Boy were they wrong – as I have demonstrated at the beginning of this page.

Tornado Cash

The most high-profile mixer sanction award has to go to Tornado Cash. But you would not find it on any bitcoin mixer list, because it is not a bitcoin mixer. In fact, it is an open-source Ethereum mixer. Now I don’t claim to be an expert in Ethereum, but Tornado Cash was a smart contract. Then there would be dApps on top of it, which lets you use the mixer from a Web3 wallet.

When the sanction hit in 2022, all these dApps started censoring access to the mixer. It even came to the point where the developers who made the mixer were de-platformed and arrested. It has raised some concerns in the DeFi community on how to deal with legal problems.

Blender.io and Sinbad

Blender enjoyed an extremely brief time on Bitcointalk advertisements, before they themselves were sanctioned by OFAC on May 2022. I can probably explain the reason why their stint wasn’t longer is because they’ve only bought a few weeks worth of advertising. They also regularly had communication outages with the community, and it seems that they had finally disappeared by the time the sanction rolled out against them. Or did they?

About 5 months after they went dark, a new bitcoin mixer called Sinbad.io went live. Everyone thought they were some new mixer, until Elliptic alleged that the people who ran Blender sent it millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to start a new mixer. But nobody thought they were connected. Admittedly, I also did not think it was true at the time.

That all changed in November of 2023, when FIOD proudly announced in many place that they had seized the Sinbad bitcoin mixer. All of a sudden, all Sinbad addresses were placed on the OFAC sanctions list, including addresses used for advertisement and promotion. I strongly believe that FIOD gave these addresses to the US Treasury. Bitcointalk advertisers narrowly escaped sanctions (but never needed to worry about them in the first place as they are independent entities).

Interestingly, it appears that the Sinbad owner Mehdi is not on the run. He promised to post an update days after they seized the mixer, but the Bitcointalk administration banned his account before he could post it. Which makes sense if you think about it, because darknet sites are forbidden there.

Bitcointalk Bans Bitcoin Mixers

The Sinbad case was the first time law enforcement seized a mixer and announced it on Bitcointalk. It appears that the administration was apprehensive that law enforcement could question or take an action against the forum, so it issued a total ban on mixer advertising. This came at a shock to pretty much everyone because the forum’s mission is “to be free as possible”. The community begrudgingly accepted it after much disquiet.

Such a ban meant that, among other things, making bitcoin mixer lists was no longer possible, hence why I created this site. It also brought the lush advertisement landscape for mixers to an end.

Why Bitcoin Mixers are Necessary

At this point, you probably read this history, and might have concluded that a bitcoin mixer list might be a bad thing. Or, you may also think it is a good thing. But here is why you should be optimistic about mixers in the long term.

It’s Much Easier To Create A Website Than A Wallet

Firstly, when I say wallet, I mean wallet software. Wasabi and Samourai in their current form, used up a lot of R&D before their developers made them. Developers have put years of research into these wallets so they can have the best and latest privacy features. From 2015 up to now, there have only been three bitcoin wallets with CoinJoin. Compare that with about ten times as many bitcoin mixers during that timeline. Additional mixers and CoinJoin wallets ensure decentralization of privacy.

Exchanges Might Block Coordinator Deposits

Remember how I said there are only three coinjoin wallets? That makes it easy for exchanges such as Binance to block their destination addresses. This is despite the fact that they are not bitcoin mixers and are just privacy technologies. The rate of the number of mixers appearing will overwhelm some exchanges, who won’t have time to identify their addresses as a result. I know some people who sent mixed coins to an exchange without any issue. But obviously not all mixers are treated equally, so do your research.

Countries Could Censor Coordinators

If you live in a censorship-heavy country, chances are that all of the CoinJoin wallets are blocked by domain and IP addresses. Normally in this case, you would download Tor Browser. But if their website is not accessible too, then you’ll need to look for a bitcoin mixer that is available.

Ease Of Use

This is not a strong reason since CoinJoins are just as easy to use in Wasabi and Samourai wallets. However, there’s no software you have to install in order to use a mixer. This means you can send the mixed coins to any wallet, while saving on transaction fees needed to sweep your coins otherwise.

Other Reasons Why You Might Use A Bitcoin Mixer

But sometimes, you need to mix some bitcoin quickly, maybe you don’t trust the person who gave you the coins. Maybe you are taking a stand against “blockchain taint”. Or maybe you are an activist or some other kind of person who police unfairly go after. Or perhaps you are just an ordinary person who is not savvy in bitcoin. All in all, if you find the wallet interfaces too clunky,

Here is a very good thread from 2014 which explains why people should use mixers, and look one up on a bitcoin mixer list to protect themselves. This is especially true for people who keep their coins on an exchange. By the way, recent events must have shown you that’s not a safe place to keep them in the first place.

Why Does Law Enforcement Hate Bitcoin Mixers?

Governments have a thing against bitcoin mixers because bad guys use them from crime. There’s no conspiracy theory about governments trying to dismantle Bitcoin or anything like that, but there are salty bank chairmen who’d like to. For the most part, politicians around the world actually see the benefits of cryptocurrency. A few more would agree with this bitcoin mixer list.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of politicians from the old, pre-technology age who do not understand crypto. They are also quick to make judgments about it. Examples should be quite obvious since you can read them in the news on a near-daily basis. So this is where the majority of negative crypto action comes from.

Bitcoin mixers, and for that matter, CoinJoin wallets and exchanges, are all abused by criminals, and that is not going to change anytime soon, if ever. But the last thing we need is complete, Orwellian surveillance over our digital transactions. That is why people make bitcoin mixers. Even the wallets that implement blacklisting do so begrudgingly, because the natural evolution of that is to decide who gets to use your service and who can’t. (Like PayPal.)

Which Is Most Private: Mixers, exchanges, or CoinJoins?

By far and away, the most private method for anonymizing your Bitcoins is by using CoinJoins, followed by exchanges, followed by mixers. The reason behind this is simple: CoinJoins are a built-in part of the protocol and thus leave little trace. Exchanges use ordinary transactions, but if sent between exchanges via Monero, offer equivalent anonymity, but it’s slightly harder to do. Mixers are centralized, and you need to trust them to not keep logs and to set up their sites properly. And there is the risk that they might be a honeypot.

Although as I wrote earlier, all of these methods must exist for Bitcoin to be healthy. Because without bitcoin mixers, law enforcement would be going after exchanges or CoinJoin wallets instead. Is that a future we want?

How A Bitcoin Mixer Works

Most modern bitcoin mixers create a session for each user. Each one calls it a different name, but they all look something like the one showed in this picture. (It is defunct, by the way.) The session key is so that you can close the browser, open it later, and then type the key in order to withdraw your bitcoins manually. As such, it is sort of like a password which must be kept secret. Some mixers like the one pictured use a public and private key instead of just one key. Think of it like using SSH keypairs instead of passwords.

To start, bitcoin mixers have a large number of transaction outputs before they start the service. It is common for them to have thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of outputs. Ideally they would receive each transaction output in a different address, in a fixed size. Having coins in fixed sizes like 1 BTC, 0.1 BTC, 0.01 BTC, makes each balance look the same and makes blockchain analysis harder (but not impossible).

The above is very important – if a bitcoin mixer does not start off with a large enough output set, then someone can easily analyze the whole transaction history at once, and the anonymity is reduced to that of a single (giant) CoinJoin.

After you create your session, the mixer automatically generates a personal address. Then it waits for you to deposit any amount of bitcoin, and it breaks it into equally-sized pieces as I explained above. Additionally, there may also be an option to donate some of the deposit to the mixer so that you receive less bitcoins. This makes the deposit and withdrawal look like they are from different people.

Withdrawing Coins From A Mixer

A bitcoin mixer usually takes a long time to mix the coins. That is because it tries to space out each transaction of the mix into variably-separated blocks so that the timestamps don’t look too close to each other. Also, sending the mixed bitcoins to the destination right after the mix will give it away too. So mixers usually take one of three approaches:

• They automatically send you the withdrawal bit by bit, waiting for some time in between
• The mixer waits for you to manually initiate a complete withdrawal
• They give you a set of private keys which you should import in a wallet

Additionally, most mixers allow you to split the withdrawal into many addresses for extra privacy.

The most important piece of the setup is the Letter of Guarantee. This is a file with a PGP signature, and contains proof that you started a mix. You download this letter when you begin each session, and it allows you to get your coins out if the mixing process messes up. In order to make the process work, bitcoin mixers put a public key on their website. They also made a private key for PGP and keep it. Most mixers keep the private key on the server so that they can automatically generate letters. But this approach allows law enforcement to compromise the whole mixer, if they seize the server.

Bitcoin Mixer List FAQ

Finally, you can find the answer to any topic that I didn’t write about above in here.