It’s difficult to find a person who has never heard of such words as «Bitcoin», «crypto-money», «blockchain analysis». If you use the Internet daily, you’ve definitely seen advertising banners or different articles on the subject. The attitude towards cryptocurrencies is totally diverse, if not to say – controversial. Some people are passionately discussing different ways of obtaining crypto-money, comparing types of cryptocurrencies and trying to find the best way of establishing a highly profitable mining farm that could help its user to become rich with no efforts and with minimal financial investments. Others prefer to stay on the safe side, demonstrating purely academical interest in the subject under discussion. There are also people who don’t care about crypto-money or who are totally against it, they believe that it’s some sort of fraud for silly guys. So many people, so many opinions, still it’s undoubtful that cryptocurrencies made a long way from quite a specific type of valuable assets up to their modern condition. And the most well-known cryptocurrency is, of course, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to have been introduced on a large scale in 2008-2009. The initial idea of its creator, a man or a group of people united under the nickname Satoshi Nakamoto, was to launch a financial system free of any governmental restrictions and secured from all sorts of swindlers and cyber-criminals. The new system intrigued its users, and after a few months, bitcoins had their first subscribers. In the beginning, the value of Bitcoin was relatively low – from 800 to 1500 bitcoins for one dollar. The fuss around bitcoin took place in May 2010, when the user Laszlo on one of the resources offered to buy two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. This was the first time that bitcoin received material ground. This raised its value and encouraged programmers to create special exchanges for exchange transactions. In its peak form, Bitcoin cost about 20 thousand dollars.
And here we go to a fly in the ointment. Bitcoin was claimed to be absolutely safe, but this happened to be wrong. All transactions within Bitcoin network are recorded in a special data array known as blockchain. If you use Bitcoins to pay for something in real life, your virtual wallet and your transactions become visible for you have to reveal some personal information during the purchase. And thus, it becomes possible for cyber-criminals to trace back your transactions and retrieve your personal data or even get access to your wallet. To cope with that problem other kinds of cryptocurrencies appeared later after Bitcoin. Their creators tried to take into consideration the drawbacks of the key mechanisms and working principles of Bitcoin. The most well known are Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Ripple, Altcoins and many others. But the most valuable is still Bitcoin, that is why many of its users continue to mine or trade these coins despite the risks mentioned above.
As it’s known, where there’s a problem, there’s a solution to it. To protect transactions with Bitcoins, special utilities were invented – coin mixers. They work this way – to conceal the origin of Bitcoins you have in possession, you are suggested to send them to other users of the network, in return they send their coins to you. Thus, the connection between the old address and the new one is broken, and your coins become untraceable. There are two important things to be mentioned here – first, you must realize that such procedure is not a free one. Mixing sites will take their commission. Of course, it’s not the most pleasant thing in the world but miser pays twice. The second thing is that there are plenty of such sites and sometimes it might be really puzzling to choose the best one for your future usage. We have personally dealt with Bestmixer.io and they kindly agreed to demonstrate how the whole process of making your transactions anonymous works.
The first step is to go to the official site of the bitcoin mixer and choose the amount of coins you would like to send to other users. Many sites of that kind have a minimal rate of transfer for each type of coins and Bestmixer is of no exception – it’s 0.005 for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. Then you specify the number of receiving addresses (here you can indicate up to 10 receivers, the more – the better, thus, there are less chances that your coins will be accidentally associated with your address) and indicate the number of mixing sequences (more than one is possible). Then set the preset of the transfer delay with accuracy in minutes for each specified address. This is it – start the mixing. The commission is taken automatically, by the way. The crucial thing about this mixer is its transparent policy in relation to your anonymity (no pun intended). The whole process is under your control and you decide how many coins to send, where to and how. Many other Bitcoin users have already estimated the convenience of the service and you can see the detailed feedbacks on bitcointalk.org community.
To sum it up, let’s consider again the advantages and disadvantages of Bitcoin
The first cryptocurrency that appeared on the market, thus one of the most popular ones
Independent from financial systems or governmental restrictions
Has the highest rate against the dollar so far
Instant transactions
Low security and anonymity level
Vulnerable to speculations, drastic rises and falls of the course
Great amounts of energy and resources are wasted in the process of mining
Uncertain future of cryptocurrencies in general
As you see, Bitcoin is like many things in our life – it’s controversial. It’s up to you to deiced whether you want to deal with it or just hype a little bit and then forget about it.
