Achieving privacy in the world of cryptocurrencies is a difficult and often elusive task. Public blockchains and currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not designed to allow private transactions. Thankfully, services are out there striving to provide safe havens from prying eyes.
Samourai, a Bitcoin wallet provider, has taken notice of this demand for privacy and, as such, has seen a dramatic rise in its Whirlpool service—a tool specifically designed to achieve transaction privacy. To know more about this service keep reading the article!
What is Samourai Whirlpool?
Samourai Wallet’s Whirlpool is a Coinjoin implementation that aims to provide privacy for Bitcoin transactions through Zerolink technology. It has been natively integrated into Samourai Wallet, making it one of its key features.
CoinJoin removes traces left behind by Bitcoin transactions, ensuring that users’ identities remain hidden while they make payments or transfers with their Bitcoin balances. This is especially important as Bitcoin’s public ledger records all transactions made on the platform and links them back to user addresses.
By employing CoinJoin, Samourai Wallet allows users to obscure their activity from prying eyes and third parties who may be trying to trace transactions back to the original sender or receiver. In addition to providing privacy for users, CoinJoin also helps reduce transaction fees as it groups multiple small payments into a single larger payment that can then be sent over the blockchain network.
In a sense, it is akin to Bitcoin mixing due to the end result – both provide users with a means of breaking the taint that can be left behind on blockchains. While the end result of both these techniques is largely the same – breaking the link between a user’s coins and their ownership – there are some key differences between them. Unlike online or darknet-based mixing services, CoinJoin does not require users to rely on external services. Instead, users can break the link on their own without involving any third parties.
The concept of CoinJoin is simple – multiple inputs are combined into one transaction with multiple outputs, making it difficult for blockchain analysis firms and other entities attempting to trace funds. However, there remains a chance that advanced analytics techniques could break this technology, and the taint could be reinstated when using CoinJoin alone.
Mixing Coin in Samourai Wallet
To use the coin mixing feature in the Samourai Wallet, you will need to follow a few steps:
- Choose the specific UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs) that you want to mix.
- Select the mixing pool that you want to join.
- Wait for your coins to be included in a Coinjoin transaction.
With Whirlpool, you can select from three mixing pools with varying input and output sizes for your UTXOs. These pools have different fees associated with them, as listed below:
- 0.5 BTC UTXO size with a 0.025 BTC entry fee
- 0.05 BTC UTXO size with a 0.0025 BTC entry fee
- 0.01 BTC UTXO size with a 0.0005 BTC entry fee
It’s important to note that the fee for using Whirlpool is not charged per mix but rather per entry into a mixing pool. This means that once you have entered a pool, you can mix your coins as many times as you wish, with each mix corresponding to a new transaction. While a single mix is sufficient to break the link between your coins and their transaction history, multiple mixes can further increase anonymity and improve privacy.
Additionally, the more mixes performed in a given pool, the more liquidity is added, leading to a faster mixing experience for other users. The mixing feature in Whirlpool can benefit the individual user and the overall system.
When you use the coin mixing feature in Whirlpool, your UTXOs will progress through three stages: pre-mix, mixing, and post-mix. The UTXOs in each stage are distinguished by having separate views in the wallet and being stored in different accounts to prevent them from being merged.
To learn how to mix your coins using Whirlpool, you can refer to this step-by-step guide in the Samourai Wallet documentation.
If you want to have your coins mixed continuously without needing to keep the wallet app running on your phone at all times, you can pair your wallet with the Whirlpool Desktop GUI/CLI. This allows you to use the coin mixing service from your desktop. You can find more information on this in the Samourai documentation.
Features Samourai Whirlpool Offers
High Level of Liquidity
Whirlpool offers three mixing pools to choose from, providing flexibility in terms of the amount of coins you want to mix and the number of outputs you want to receive. When selecting a pool, consider the total amount of coins you are mixing, and the desired number of output UTXOs created as a result.
As per 2021 records, the liquidity in the mixing pools is at an all-time high, with over 3,000 BTC (worth more than $104 million) being available for mixing. This high demand for privacy among Bitcoin users demonstrates the popularity of the coin-mixing service offered by Whirlpool. This level of liquidity will likely be reached again in the future as the need for privacy in cryptocurrency transactions continues to grow.
Extremely Fast
Whirlpool was developed with a mobile-first approach in mind, and as a result, it can provide strong privacy protection for your coins in a short amount of time. Instead of relying on a single, slow CoinJoin cycle, Whirlpool uses many small, fast cycles to mix your coins.
Cheap Fees
Unlike some other coin-mixing services that charge a fee based on the volume of mixed coins, Whirlpool charges a flat fee for its mixing service. This means that regardless of the amount of coins you are mixing, you will pay the same fee. For example, the fee will be the same whether you are mixing 1 BTC or 1000 BTC.
Math Enforced
Mathematics plays a central role in the design and operation of Whirlpool. The coin mixing service is based on a system of mathematical calculations and algorithms that ensure the privacy and security of each mixing cycle. In fact, each mixing cycle can be interpreted in 1,496 different ways, and with each additional cycle, the number of possible interpretations increases exponentially.
Available Everywhere
Whirlpool is a feature of the Samourai Wallet app, but it is also available as a s/tandalone desktop application that can be used on various platforms.