Will someone be able to anonymize their Eth if they send it from a ledger to their incognito Eth wallet address, then send it back to their ledger to a new Eth address in the ledger?
Or do you also have to transfer the Eth to a new Eth address within the incognito wallet before sending it to the ledger to make it private?
Yes if you shield coins they are anonymous (on chain they are transferred to a one time use address and then swept into the main smart contract holding all funds). If you unshield the coins, they will show coming from the smart contract mixed with everyone else’s funds. However, if you deposit a very specific amount like 1.82762 and then later withdraw 1.82762 it will be very easy to figure out it was you.
Unshielding is extremely expensive so price a withdraw before going forward with your plans. Incognito can be used as a mixer but it’s not cheap and it is not the desire of the developers to be simply a mixer.
Your post is a bit off topic here to the title, so maybe check out some other threads if you want to learn more about this aspect.
Thank you, I’ll post in an on topic forum from now. How much does unshielding one Eth cost before sending it to a ledger? Would using a mixer be less expensive to make it anonymous? I heard there’s software that can track the mixer hops. It’s safer to anonymize your eth before investing in an ico if you’re from the US, or trading on exchanges not allowed for US traders. It’s better if their eth and btc transactions not easily be tracked back to them.
Stay within the Incognito Environment and all transactions will be anonymous.
Nodes are selected randomly to earn. It can takes days, or weeks, from one earning cycle to the next.
And…threadjacked 
What if you want to send to an exchange anonymously or to your ledger anonymously, or without anyone knowing where the eth address came from?
The longer the funds are within the incognito ecosystem the more difficult it is to trace a transaction back to its original starting point(on the public blockchain). If you want to unshield tokens back into the respective public blockchain without anyone knowing where it came from i would suggest:
As Jamie very well mentioned. Your best bet for total privacy is to keep your funds on Incognito since transactions within the Incognito ecosystem are private. Do note Incognito is not a mixer service and if you shield and instantly unshield, with some chain analysis, you are able to trace transactions back to the starting point, thats why using Incognito as a mixer is not adviced.
-Hope that helps some!
Thanks a lot for the information. Will doing this for one eth be more expensive than using a mixer like tornado cash?
I don’t mind following the steps you outlined if it’s less expensive than the mixer.
How long should someone keep the shielded eth in incognito before they trade it for another shielded token to insure privacy? Does “shielding” your eth mean sending the eth from your ledger to an incognito eth shielded address?
The time needed depends on how interested you think people are in tracing what you do with your money.
I found an article about showing you how to anonymize Eth without a relayer.
But in general are we talking hours, days, weeks or months? Like what would be a pretty reasonable amount of time to leave it in there and at what time period does it become kind of pointless to wait for longer than?
It is not a mixer. If you want to use it like that, experiment. Ask a hacker friend to track your transactions, see if they can find it.
