One of the most attractive qualities of cryptocurrency is its anonymity, as well as your ability to hold complete control over your funds at all times. However, these benefits can disappear if you’re not careful with how you manage your private keys and how you spend your funds. Fortunately, there’s a new kind of service on the market called crypto mixers that will combine your coins with others to make it impossible to trace them back to you without the proper access to the service itself. Let’s look at why a crypto mixer is the best way to keep your coins private and secure.

What Is Tumbling?

Tumbling (also called bitcoin mixing) is an industry term for crypto mixing. It involves merging your coins with others’, so that it becomes near impossible to trace them back to you. There are many reasons why you might want your coins to be tumbled: privacy, security, and anonymity. All of these make it much harder for someone with malicious intentions—like hackers—to get their hands on your precious coinage.

What Are Cryptocurrency Mixers?

A crypto mixer is a cryptocurrency transaction service that allows you to break a single large transaction into smaller transactions. When you deposit coins in your wallet, they get combined with other coins from other people—you send your coins in, and they send back different coins. By breaking down these large transactions into many smaller ones, it’s impossible for anyone to trace them back to their originator.

Do They Work?

Many people think coin mixers are scams. They worry that their coins will be stolen or they’ll never see them again. Thankfully, there are several legitimate and effective coin mixers available today. Most operate anonymously on Tor networks and don’t require you to send in any personal information. You simply input your wallet address, deposit coins, and within minutes receive a new batch of coins in an untraceable wallet address.

Is This Method Safe?

Before you send your money, it’s good practice to check out whether or not there are any complaints or concerns about a crypto mixer service. Check Reddit and other discussion boards, and take special note of threads that say Never use X, never sent my money back. If you find anything like that, move on—it’s better to be safe than sorry!

Should I Use One of These Services?

Not necessarily. Crypto mixers are great for privacy and security, but also for laundering coins and scamming exchanges. If you’re using your crypto to make purchases, however, there’s no reason not to use one—and plenty of reasons to do so. If you’re not sure whether or not you should get started with an online mixer, ask yourself these questions: Do I want complete anonymity when making purchases? Will I be moving my coins frequently? Have I ever purchased anything illegal online?

How Does a Crypto Tumbler Work?

The first thing you need to know about how a crypto tumbler works is that it isn’t instantaneous. Tumbling your coins can take hours, days, or even weeks depending on how much mixing you want done and which service you choose. The reason for these extended timelines is that mixing services use multiple addresses—some of which may be hot (with coins from other users)—and some of which are cold (empty) before coins start moving around in them. It’s impossible to tell when they will finally move into an empty address, so using a long time frame ensures that any coin trail will be buried under many others.

When choosing which mixer to go with, there are three key considerations:

How fast do they mix? If you need your coins mixed within minutes or hours rather than days or weeks, this is something to keep in mind. How easy is it? Are there fees associated with the service? What kinds of anonymity does it offer?

Which One Should I Choose?

We’ve covered three of them so far in our guide: Coinmixer, Clearcoin, and Bitcoin Blender. In all honesty, they are all good options for your coins. They each have their upsides and downsides but ultimately it comes down to preference. Here’s what you need to know about them before deciding which one is best for you:

- Coinmixer has been around longer than other crypto mixers and offers an added layer of security by sending your coins through 5 rounds before releasing them back into circulation.

- With Clearcoin, there's no need to send or give away any personal information and with Bitcoins, there's never any connection between the original bitcoin address that sent the funds and the final destination address.