Braiins has this warning when you deposit bitcoin into your hashpower account:
Then when you deposit coins into your account, it will show “Manual Review” in red which their tech support says is an automated AML (anti-money laundering) check.
I’ve heard of Bitcoin not being fungible like cash due to the public nature of the blockchain but this is the first time I’ve seen someone actively checking to see if the bitcoin you used is from a “clear origin” or not tainted.
This is very concerning as there is no way for me to know if the Bitcoin I’ve received from an employer, peer, or exchange is tainted or not of “clear origin” and part of some chain analysis black list.
The most the Braiins tech support was able to tell me was that there are different systems I can use to “clean the coins” such as coin joins and other mixers.
I’m curious as to what you guys think about this and what the best way to “clean the coins” is.
Lightning network seems to help. Paul explained it in one of his post last week I think but here is how I roll:
Receive from OCEAN to CLN > CLN to LND > LND to Blotz to my Onchain wallet > To Onchain Braiins wallet.
So basically 3 lightning trips. I have only had 2 deposits returned (Mar 27, April April 7) out of 26 orders. Both payments that were rejected came from older coins in my onchain wallet. Both transaction created change from Braiins. Since then I send entire UTXO’s (no change). Seems to have helped but cant say for sure why?
Paul can probably shed more light than I…but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I think the number of hops over lightning are not important. Lightning transactions have an inherently much higher level of untraceability out of the box compared to on-chain transactions.
The process that I have been using that so far has worked:
Get the sats onto the Lightning network if they are not already (use Boltz.exchange BTC > Lightning for this if starting on with on-chain sats)
Send the sats to a fresh, unused Taproot address via Boltz.exchange Lightning > BTC)
Send from the Taproot address to Braiins
There are some challenges with this approach if you are using Ride the Lightning for the Taproot address step, which is that RTL does not allow you to specify which UTXOs to use for transaction inputs. If you go this route you can add a “Sweep All” step between steps 1 and 2 to consolidate all UTXOs into a fresh unused Taproot address. After step 3, in this scenario, you should have two UTXOs in RTL (on separate Taproot addresses), and Braiins seems to also be happy with this setup as well without requiring the manual review.
We do the same thing…I just have an extra step to LND (managed via Alby) from the blotz script at CLN receiving the OCEAN payout. I generate new taproot address’s every time with a Coldcard managed via Sparrow for sending, receiving and converting onchain. I suppose I could go directly to boltz via CLN and eliminate LND entirely…but it’s just been a habit I guess every since you turned me onto using Core and LND as a team endeavor due to CLN’s inherently clumsy UI.
Yes, that is what I figured. Mainly just pointing the number of hops out in case the nuance about CLN and LND wasn’t clear. That step is not important to Braiins, but is important for general Lightning node usage. My Agent Wallet service will hopefully remove this extra complexity in the future by “bolting” Bolt12 support onto LND without needing a separate CLN node and channel with LND.
