To tumble or not to tumble? Why in question?

Been noticing recently that people are saying tumbling is pointless. Then I see other people say you need to tumble. It seems that if someone wanted to find out where your BTC are going, they could just follow the original purchase down the blockchain. It probably wouldnt matter how many times your coins are xfered to a different wallet either. Is there any articles or info on this that will give evidence one way or the other? Right now it just seems like people have differing opinions, nothing concrete.


Comments


[4 Points] throwaway-DNM-098:

A tumbler does not irrevocably sever the link between the transaction that put coins into the tumbler and the coins that come out.

It is easy to identify addresses as being owned by a tumbler and therefore easy to see wallets paying into one and when one of them pay out.

These address typically are poorly active (they are either the DNM loading address, or a coinbase wallet address or whatever).

So while the coins are unrelated to your input coins. It wold be possible for LE to follow back through. Lets say they busted a DNM, they take it over, they find your your account and decide to bust you.

They provide you with address X then they could simply follow you back to your coinbase account and get your DOX... Shit.

lets say you tumble, now you've provided a massive inconvience to making that link between your account and your coinbase account. It's still there but under a pile of shit. You could be anyone of them, but if you are worth getting they could always check for priors for all those people and come up with enough to search you.

It is most likely that LE will be using automatic tools to do the search, so just passing it from address to address is likely pointless, tumbling has a better bet of providing some protection.

But, will LE ever bother? Who knows...


[1 Points] druggieslut:

cops come on here and tell people not to tumble so they can bust you easier. tumbler owners/selective scammers shill saying to tumble, no one else gives a damn and just follows one or the other. /s


[1 Points] Theeconomist1:

There is no right answer really. The bottom line, wallet transfers do little else than maybe provide plausible deniability that you were the one who actually sent coin to a market. You could have sold them to someone for instance. But like you noted, they can follow the path right back to you.

A good tumbler will break the link completely. You put coin in. And the coins you get have absolutely no taint from the coins you sent in. It's a black box and dead end and only the operator of the tumbler would know for sure. However it might be possible to make an educated guess about the coins based on the input and output of the tumbler. For instance if you were the only one who sent in 1.23455 BTC at that specific time, and out came the same amount (minus transaction fees) an educated guess could be made on who that belonged to. However that would take more info that backtracking from say a seized market down the BTC chain. They'd have to know some additional info about the tumbler to derive the inputs. Which leads to the next thing, with a tumbler you just have to be sure that they aren't going to scam you and that they are safe from LE. Obviously tumbling does no good if LE was involved in the tumbler.

There are other way to clean your coins without the use of a specific tumbler. You can do your own exchanges amongst different crypto currencies. You can use a gambling site Bc often when you withdraw its from the gambling sites main wallets and you'll get a completely different set of coins than you sent in.

Bottom line is that each strategy has its pros and cons. So there is no right answer as to which you employ. But you should employ some strategy to mitigate the risks should a market get seized. You don't want to paint a path right back to you.

And this is geared to the personal buyer. A vendor obviously has much more at stake.


[0 Points] None:

I personally stopped tumbling, and just did Circle->Electrum->Elsewhere.

I know this probably isn't the best, but hopefully LE are more focused on finding where that elsewhere btc ends up than reversing back up to me.