In this tutorial I will Explore Decred's Privacy features and show you how to anonymize your Decred using the Mixnet built right into Decred's Wallet, Decredition, with just a few mouse clicks.
So here we have a wallet with 5 unmixed Decred. Everything we need to perform mixing is in the Privacy Tab located on the left hand side.
We'll need to authorize the wallet to create two new accounts, one called 'Umixed' and the Other Called 'Mixed'.
To do this click "Create Default Account" and enter your password.
First we need to send our Decred from our 'Default' account to our 'Unmixed' account which we can do right here. There's a button you can press which will select all of the account funds, then press "Send to Self".
Now that our funds are in the 'Unmixed' account, we can start up the Mixer.
Your Decred will sift through the mixer in increments, arriving in the Mixed account freshly anonymized, with all past history scrambled.
The mixing occurs in epochs of 20 minutes, so it may take a bit of time for your mix to occur.
The way this works is the Mixer will create a Decred CoinJoin, and will pass your funds from your Unmixed account through the Decred Mixnet, with the newly mixed coins arriving in your Mixed Account. A CoinJoin is a trustless method for combining multiple Decred payments from multiple spenders into a single transaction to make it more difficult for outside parties to determine which spender paid which recipient.
This is a completely non-custodial process meaning you never lose ownership of your DCR, and there are no risks with mixing your Decred.
The smallest amount of Decred that can be mixed is 0.00262144 DCR
Notice by going to On-Chain Transactions you can only send from your mixed account, and receive into your unmixed account or default account. This is the wallets way of helping you not to mess up your privacy by keeping your mixed and unmixed Decred separate.
You can disable this feature if you'd prefer in the Privacy tab.
You can also see all of the transactions that took place with the mixes, and the fees associated with them.
These mixes are very cheap to perform. As you can see, this mix only cost me less than one cent.
We can further explore the mix by taking a lookat it on the block explorer. We can see here the total mix fee for the all of the participants, and the number of outputs created.
Now that you've successfully mixed your Decred, you can safely transact knowing there is no history tied to your coins.
You can also now privately stake, provided you have enough Decred to Purchase a ticket. I will cover the process of Staking in another tutorial.
Decred's mixnet is integrated with its Proof of Stake system, which currently holds over 7 Million DCR, so there is always plenty of other Decred to mix with.
As of this video over 30% of all Decred in circulation has been mixed, with mixing participation growing every day. The goal is for Decred to be a fungible cryptocurrency, where every unit of Decred is equal to every other unit. The more Decred Mixed, the more fungible it becomes.
At current numbers, an average of 250,000 Decred is mixed every day. This is significantly larger than the amount of Bitcoin mixed, which only amounts to roughly 50,000 BTC per month.
Decred's broad Mixing participation allows for much more efficient mixes and fungilbity. Furthermore, Decred's Mixing is much easier to perform and cheaper compared to Bitcoin's.
Decred's CoinShuffle++ Mixing protocol (also referred to as 'StakeShuffle') was chosen because it's simplicity makes it auditable, and it allows for blockchain pruning, meaning historical transaction can be dropped from full nodes, making the blockchain less cluttered, and more sustainable. It can also be modified to support Post-Quantum Cryptography, keeping mixing secure from attackers.
Because Decred is a cryptocurrency that has the ability to adapt and evolve with it's unique governance model, it is very likely there will be more improvements and features regarding user privacy in the future.
Thanks for watching this tutorial, to learn more about Decred's Doucmentation, visit docs.decred.org, or check out Decred's website at Decred.org. You can also see all of the privacy charts for yourself by visiting Decred's Block Explorer at dcrdata.org