Should people tumble small amounts of BTCs?
[5 Points] galaxyandspace:
[1 Points] samwhiskey:
It's up in the air. My opinion is no, it's a waste of money.
[1 Points] bobafett89:
According to /u/galaxyandspace I'm definitely A, with a little B thrown in for extra paranoid security.
My opinion is ALWAYS TUMBLE, and securely delete your wallets, and therefore your transaction history, every few months.
Tumble for 0.2, tumble for 0.02, tumble for 0.002 and tumble INTO AND OUT OF a darknet market.
The only time to NOT tumble is when you don't have enough to tumble AND pay for your shit, in which case, don't buy the shit, because tumbling is all part of the cost of doing business.
Small purchases don't seem like an issue now, but I am looking to the future, when who knows what level of purchase LE will start looking into, or perhaps they figure out how to easily follow the blockchain, or perhaps they'll be interested in multiple small purchases from a small buyer. Regardless, why wouldn't you want to put as much distance between you and LE as possible?
Always. Tumble.
Leave no trace.
This my friend, is quite a loaded question.
Tumbling assumes your coins are attached to your identity somehow. Typicly for buyers, this is because you bought some coin on Circle/Coinbase or even localbitcoin, which are the easiest ways to buy coin currently.
In camp a, you have the paranoid people. They have read articles like This. They want complete separation from their own identity and their darknet identity. Tumbling allows this to occur. Some in this camp also argue that future employers may look at the blockchain, to see your public spending. I wouldn't want a future employer to see that I transferred money to a DNM.
Then you have camp b. Tumbling isn't needed, but at least transfer through a few different wallets. Give yourself some plausible deniability. Your start and end wallets are connected, but the intermediate wallets have undetermined ownership.
Finally you have camp c. Camp C are idiots. Strait from circle/coinbase to the market. No plausible deniability. Recorded on the blockchain for forever.
Chose a camp.