i am using the actual terminology related to bitcoin, you are misusing bitcoin terminology, so I cannot tell what you mean when you misuse the words.
A mixer is a way to mask the inputs to a utxo which contains an address that you hold the private key to.
yes correct. i misused it sorry for the headache 😳
related to mixing:
You withdraw bitcoin from an exchange. That is done in the following way:
You provide an address to the exchange. They create a transaction that uses some of their utxo's as inputs. One of the outputs of that transaction is a new utxo that contains the address you provided.
The government knows everything the exchange knows, and you are KYC'ed at the exchange, so the government now knows that the address you provided is related to your identity.
If you now spend some of that bitcoin you have withdraws you will form a transaction that uses your new utxo as the input to the transaction. You supply addresses to that transaction which are embedded in new utxos that are formed as a result of your transaction.
Those addresses can be used to watch exactly where all of that bitcoin goes, forever.
A mixer is a service that takes a whole bunch of utxos as inputs and a whole bunch of utxos as outputs and pumps them through a single transaction. You do not reuse addresses and the mixer thereby breaks the chain between inputs and outputs by mixing your uxto with many others.
So for example if you send 1.0 bitcoin into a mixer and assign 1.0 bitcoin to a new address, it's still trivial for the government to guess that you still control that 1.0 bitcoin and to know your new address and continue to tract you.
That's why when using a mixer you want to use multiple outputs with random amounts of bitcoin in each so that it is not clear which inputs relate to which outputs.
This is still probably not completely clear to you though because I think there is just some missing understanding there related to what a UTXO is, what an address is, and how they are related.
