There exist a plethora of Bitcoin mixers in the industry, all claiming themselves to be the absolute best. That’s the reason we’re scribbling this BitCloak review here today and why we started this Bitcoin mixer review series in general.
In this series, we review as many Bitcoin mixers as we can find to their ultimate core, trying to bring out their features, problems, and all the other aspects associated with any mixer out for you folks.
Why do you need a Bitcoin Mixer?
If you’re on this piece you definitely know what Bitcoin mixing does, it makes your Bitcoins anonymous, that’s right! But, why is it important? Isn’t Bitcoin anonymous by itself? And how exactly is the anonymity achieved? That’s what we’ll share briefly throughout this section.
Contrary to popular opinion, Bitcoin isn’t anonymous. It’s decentralized, yes. Anonymous? Not exactly. In fact, Bitcoin is extremely transparent, just about anyone can track the origin and destination of coins on the Blockchain no matter how many addresses it’s funnelled through.
Hence it can’t be used carelessly for all types of transactions, an example is buying a porn account, or buying something off the Dark web, because if and when the receiving end of the funds is verified to be “unacceptable” it may not act in favor of the senders.
The total amount of Bitcoin too in any given account can be verified just as easily, which makes it easier for hackers and other parties with similar intents to find and target rich addresses.
So what a Bitcoin mixer basically does is, it de-links the origin and destination of the coins. In other words, it lets users send their Bitcoins to the mixer’s address, and in return sends out equivalent amount of coins from its own reserve to a new output address pre-specified by the user.
Hence, the unclean coins sent by the user can only be tracked upto the point of being sent to the mixer, after which they sit in the mixer’s reserve for indefinite amount of time, and are then broken into several parts and sent to many different users making them impossible to be tracked.
BitCloak Bitcoin Mixer Overview:
Before getting into a more detailed BitCloak review, here’s an overview of the same which should get you an overview of the platform and help you understand this review better:
- Onion URL: https://bitcloak43blmhmn.com/
- Minimum Deposit: 0.01BTC
- Fee: 2% + 0.0004BTC/Address
- No logs policy: No
- Time Delays: Yes, Not user-controlled.
- Additional Addresses: 10
- Deposit Percentage control for different address: No.
Is Registration required to use BitCloak?
BitCloak as a mixer does pay some attention to user-privacy and hence lets users use the Mixer without requiring any registration. It’s not optional, rather no registration feature is available to begin with.
While scribbling down any Bitcoin mixer review we pay attention to a number of factors and “anonymity” is at the very top of that list, this “no registration required” feature adds to that factor without doubt.
How Easy or Hard is it using BitCloak?
A Bitcoin Mixer is most often quite simple, you send in unclean coins, they send you clean coins back. But how easy or hard it is using the webpage, understanding the options provided and ease of changing the values does affect the overall performance of a mixer, don’t you agree?
The BitCloak Bitcoin mixer user-interface isn’t the easiest or simplest mixer interfaces I’ve ever seen to be honest, but it’s not exactly rocket-science either.
For starters, users need to click on “Mix my Bitcoins” to begin the mixing process, the other button which says “Pay anonymously” leads to their anonymous Escrow service.
The mixing dashboard is pretty simple, it has one single “output address box” where users can specify their Bitcoin address(s), I said earlier it’s not the simplest interfaces because all addresses need to be specified in the same box, separated with a dash (-) which is less simpler as compared to other mixers which provide separate address boxes.
Then there’s the max amount box where users enter the amount they’re willing to mix, this in my personal opinion is unnecessary as most other mixers do not ask for the amount to be specified, considering how the mixer will get to know the amount you send anyway when it’s deposited.
And finally, there’s the delay-hour feature which lets users set the time-delay for the Bitcoins. In a nutshell, it’s simple and easy although could be easier.
Deposit Page and Guarantee
This is what the deposit-page at BitCloak looks like:
As is evident, it simply shows the deposit address where users ought to send the unclean set of coins to be cleaned. It does display the time after which the clean coins would be sent out to the receiving address.
However, it doesn’t show the number of confirmations required for the transaction, or the exact fee which even though isn’t a deal-breaker is a lack of transparency.
Although the page does provide a “PGP Proof”, which is a like the Letter of Guarantee provided by other platforms which helps users prove that you did send the funds to the right address, which indeed was provided by the platform making sure they can’t scam users without risking their reputation.
Additional Addresses
One of the primary features any Bitcoin mixer offers is the number of additional addresses it supports for each mix, which for Bitcloak is 10. Meaning you can break each of your unclean set of coins and send them to 10 different addresses.
This provides additional anonymity to users pertaining to the fact that there’s no way someone can link the unclean set of coins to the output address you provided to begin with, and when it’s broken down into more than one parts there’s absolutely no link between any of those other addresses either.
This also changes your output value by a great extent, as the coins are broken down each address receives only a fraction of what you sent in, hence further adding anonymity to the clean coins.
Although as mentioned earlier, each address needs to be entered in the same box which does make things not so elegant. And there are no additional customizations for the addresses available.
Does BitCloak Provide Time-Delays?
Time-delays too are another way of adding anonymity to your mixing process. Time-delays indicate the amount of time-lapse between you depositing the coins and they being sent out to you.
BitCloak does provide time-delays, although they’re neither user-controlled, nor individually customizable.
Meaning you can decide one single delay for the complete process regardless of the number of addresses and it doesn’t let you decide the delay for each address separately.
Hence, no output is sent before the first user-set time-lapse is met, although once it’s met all outputs may either be sent at once, or at random times on which the user has no control.
Does BitCloak Provide Distribution Control?
Distribution control is a phrase I coined to denote the percentage of funds from a user’s total funds sent to each individual additional address. Any mixer which lets users control this distribution of funds manually is a better mixer in my opinion than those which don’t.
BitCloak doesn’t provide distribution control, at all. Users only get to specify the additional addresses the exact amount of funds for each address are completely random and not user-controlled.
What Fee is Charged for using BitCloak?
This I suppose is one of the most important aspects of this BitCloak review; the fee. BitCloak has a standard fee of around 2% of the transaction which I must say is nearly 4x higher than most other Bitcoin tumblers in the industry.
The additional fee /extra address too is around 4x higher and is set at 0.0004 BTC/address while most other mixers charge 0.0001 BTC for extra addresses.
So in my personal opinion, the fee is clearly set higher than what other similar platforms and most often with more features are charging.
Does BitCloak Provide a No Logs Policy?
The No logs policy is the most important feature for any Bitcoin mixer from an anonymity-perspective, any mixer which stores logs isn’t actually anonymous as it can always review the logs for transaction records.
As for BitCloak it doesn’t seem to mention anywhere on its site about its logs policy, which almost all other mixers do. That’s what led me to conclude that the platform probably doesn’t have a any logs policy and does store logs.
To be fair, there’s no written evidence either that the platform stores logs, but the lack of a “No logs policy statement” is what led me to the conclusion.
What are the Minimum/Maximum Deposit limits and confirmations required?
BitCloak requires only 1 confirmations before it considers a deposit valid, which I must say is one of the positive points which can be counted for the platform in this BitCloak review.
The minimum deposit limit is set at 0.01 BTC which is at par with what nearly every other mixer out there. Although unlike most other mixers, it does have a pre-specified maximum limit set at 100 BTC.
Final Words on BitCloak Review
So that’s me signing off as far as this BitCloak review goes folks. In my opinion, it’s not the first Bitcoin tumbler I’d go with, or even the second maybe.
That’s because of its lack of transparency, a better user-interface, logs policy and much higher fee than other mixers. So for me it’ll just be a substitute option for situations when everything else fails.
But that’s just what I think, this BitCloak review is scribbled down for you folks, so do let me know what you think of the platform and also of this BitCloak review in the comments.
