I believe that CashFusion is an absolutely amazing tool. Privacy should be one of the most important features of global, decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash. After all, what good does it do when you're censorship resistant, but your transactions are publicly available for everyone to see? You could face repercussions in real life, especially in increasingly authocratic states on our planet.
That having said, I downloaded the CashFusion Alpha that was linked here a couple of times and ran it for about 24 hours now with a bit of BCH change in my wallet.
I had a bit less than 1 BCH in my wallet that got split up using CashShuffle. Worked perfectly fine, but what good is 1 BCH if it's split over 47 different addresses and I'd compromise my privacy if I spent more than 1 UTXO at once?
Anyways, I set up the same wallet in the CashFusion Alpha following sploit's guide over at read.cash: https://read.cash/@sploit/become-a-cashfusion-tester-c7acec1f
Setting up the TOR connection was very quick and worked perfectly fine. Soon after, I witnessed my first CashFusion transaction!
Now, there's 2 different settings menus the software offers, 1 being the "wallet" settings and the other being the "CashFusion" settings.
"CashFusion" settings is only ever used during the first run, when you set it up to run via a TOR connection. So it's of no real use and can be ignored when the software is running.
The second, more important settings menu is the "wallet settings". Here you can choose how CashFusion works under the hood (or more accurately, parameters is should use, but apparently mostly ignores!). Target output amount in satoshis, random fraction and especially the target number of coins in wallet are very important settings, but in my experience it doesn't really seem to change much.
I was delighted to witness transactions like these:
18 outputs consolidated into a single address, or 20 outputs consolidated into 2 addresses.
For a while I thought that CashFusion was working perfectly fine and doing exactly what I told it to do (consolidate my 47 addresses into just 2 or 3 while not compromising my privacy along the way). But then transactions like these showed up:
Splitting my former consolidated addresses into a huge number of useless outputs (10k satoshi range, or about 0.03 USD per address). No matter what settings I changed, it seems to randomly "fan out" or "fan in" (increase number of UTXOs or decrease it) instead of working towards a gradual consolidation of coins.
I'm still not sure if I can safely consolidate the coins myself into a couple of addresses now or not (don't think it's safe to be honest, as it might link different UTXOs to a single address).
So yeah, basically I'd just like to have a developer chime in real quick and clarify what exactly the settings are meant to do and how a better consolidation could be achieved (bigger amounts of BCH spread out over fewer addresses). After all, what would someone with 3 or 4 digit amounts of BCH do? Spread out their couple hundred or thousand BCH over 10k+ addresses? While BCH offers very little transaction fees compared to other cryptocurrencies, consolidating the UTXOs into a single address causes the fees to reach quite expensive levels very quickly (5 cents or more per transaction).
It tries its best to work towards the target. Once it is reached, it has no other options than to fan out again if you want to keep fusing. If you want to consolidate, you best stop the fusion process once your target is reached. This will improve when there is better fusion liquidity.