Andreas Antonopoulos - Mixing Services

The system CoinJoin introduced by the developer Gregory Maxwell, allows randomly mix the inputs and outputs of a transaction. With multiple signatures, mixing is done so that a user does not have to trust other participants. Several rounds of transactions will be necessary to reduce the possibilities of analysis of these payments by existing tools such as Chainalysis .

However, with thorough analysis and access to data exchange platforms, anonymity is no longer assured. In addition, CoinJoin transactions do not hide the amount of transactions.

The solution also comes from Gregory Maxwell with the Confidential Transactions (CT) protocol . It allows to hide the value of the payment amounts, while still allowing the entire network to validate them. This protocol is developing quickly, thanks to the contribution of Bulletproofs (a type of proof with zero disclosure of knowledge ).

The joint use of both systems (CoinJoin and CT) will give a lot of trouble to the analysis tools, even the most powerful ones.

Some exchange their bitcoins with other anonymous cryptocurrency, such as Monero , to turn them back into bitcoins via ShapeShift services . Even if this method is less expensive, Andreas Antonopoulos specifies that the risk posed by the disclosure of the data collected by the third party making the exchanges is very important. In this hypothesis, Shapeshift could aggregate the exchange data of its users, and issue them if a competent authority asked them.

In conclusion, he also cites TOR as a tool to protect his privacy.