Mixers are so 2012 though. Its 2017 and you just discovered mixers, immediately noticed the obvious potential flaw in mixers but not even the good flaws, and didn't consider every other improvement over the last HALF DECADE. Yeah Internet Explorer 7 is pretty bad too, congratulation you just got hired nowhere with that tidbit.

Okay, now according to the rules here I have to say something helpful, see below:

The primary goal is to - unlink - your transaction.

First, the mixers are primarily hidden services on TOR, but even if they aren't, you would use a mixer over TOR. Ultimately, you get different bitcoins back over time. Mixers have reputation and you hope they don't undermine that reputation this particular time. Its a slow process and pretty bad experience. The mixer's "tainted" coins are liquid and fungible enough.

Second, well mixing on the same blockchain kind of sucks. But wait how would you even know if the person trying to obfuscate and unlink is even using the same blockchain? Again, its not 2012 anymore and there are thousands of blockchains they could have been paid out in, and you wouldn't know because you are an armchair sleuth clicking across bitcoin addresses in 2017 playing detective. Such high tech chain analysis.

Third, but okay, some service is probably still keeping records of these blockchain transfers, this just delays the detective work as people wise up to cross chain movement ... maybe in 2022? Rhetorical question. Turns out, some blockchains aren't like the others, and some cryptocurrencies don't use blockchains at all.

Enter Monero. Monero does use a blockchain. Monero's blockchain does not contain:

- sender's address (or any plain text addresses for that matter)

- recipient's address (or any plain text addresses for that matter)

- transaction amounts

so now you just need a "mixer" that lets you swap your unfungible coin to a fungible coin like Monero. Hm, well since its already 2017, as you've realized, what services do that?

www.shapeshift.io - Many to many asset exchange. No accounts needed. Doesn't store funds, just a pretty GUI on a mixer. Low transaction limits.

www.xmr.to - Monero to bitcoin, bitcoin to Monero transmitter. No accounts needed. Doesn't store funds, just a pretty GUI on a mixer. Decent transaction limits.

www.changelly.com - Many to many asset exchange. No accounts actually needed. Extremely high transaction limits, but the spread just gets worse.

no accounts needed on any of those, and if they pretend you do, just use TOR and a fake email address. You'll still get your opaque coins.

Unlike most cryptocurrencies that you've never heard of, Monero has USD markets on well known exchanges and is a very active market. The project hopes its fungibility improvements make it more valuable than bitcoin-style blockchains, while the technology advances to get the scalability improvements as well, eventually.

One of the rebuttals posted here was that all of the services will blacklist the bitcoin addresses that are tainted. This is not true, even the ones that are interested in doing so just don't update that fast.

There have been several times in the past where I paid bitcoin invoices, using a mixer/exchange like xmr.to. I just put the service provider's bitcoin address as the recipient, and I sent Monero to the mixer. Why would you want everyone knowing how much you ever had in any address? I didn't want that and I opted out. You wouldn't know if a hacker that accepted bitcoin was doing the same thing.