Changes to Whirlpool mixing fees effective March 2021

TL;DR — On March 17th we deployed a temporary pricing reduction of 30% for the 0.5btc and 0.05btc mixing pools. These reduced prices were supposed to expire today March 26th. We have instead decided to make these changes permanent for the foreseeable future.

Understanding the flat fee model

Whirlpool has a unique fee model among competing implementations. Instead of charging based on the amount being mixed and/or charging extra for a larger ‘anonymity set’ we charge a single flat fee and promote an ever growing anonymity set by offering free remixing while your coins remain in the mixing pool.

Old Fee Schedule

• 0.001btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00005000 BTC (5,000 sats)
• 0.01btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00050000 BTC (50,000 sats)
• 0.05btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00250000 BTC (250,000 sats)
• 0.5btc Pool
  Fee: 0.02500000 BTC (2,500,000 sats)

New Fee Schedule — Effective 26 Mar 2021

• 0.001btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00005000 BTC (5,000 sats)
• 0.01btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00050000 BTC (50,000 sats)
• 0.05btc Pool
  Fee: 0.00175000 BTC (175,000 sats)
• 0.5btc Pool
  Fee: 0.01750000 BTC (1,750,000 sats)

How to choose the right pool

Now you understand the flat fee concept you initially may be tempted to throw your entire stack into the 0.001btc pool…Not so fast! While it is true that you would pay a flat mixing fee of 5,000 sats you would also be on the hook for the miner fees as well.

For example, if you are putting 1 BTC into the 0.001btc pool you would create 1,000 UTXOs each with their own miner fee! Using a larger pool would be more cost effective with the miner fee savings offsetting the increased mixing fee.

Pool Limits

In an effort to help protect users from this type of costly mistake we have instituted limits on the max amount you can enter into a mixing pool in any single transaction.

• 0.001btc Pool
  Min: 0.00100000 BTC
  Max: 0.02500000 BTC
• 0.01btc Pool
  Min: 0.01000000 BTC
  Max: 0.75000000 BTC
• 0.05btc Pool
  Min: 0.05000000 BTC
  Max: 3.75000000 BTC
• 0.5btc Pool
  Min: 0.50000000 BTC
  Max: 37.50000000 BTC

Make use of the built in fee break down displayed in the Samourai Wallet app to compare the costs of each pool to find the most cost effective solution for your particular situation.

Motivation

We hope to increase access to essential privacy technology for users to obtain basic financial privacy fundamentals on the public and immutable bitcoin blockchain. We recently introduced the 0.001 pool to open CoinJoin up for the first time to a group of people previously priced out of privacy, we’re following that up with this measure of reducing the base fee for the two larger pools

Thank You

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