  Unlike suggested during their early years of existence, Bitcoin and similar
cryptocurrencies in fact offer significantly less privacy as compared to
traditional banking. A myriad of privacy-enhancing extensions to those
cryptocurrencies as well as several clean-slate privacy-protecting
cryptocurrencies have been proposed in turn. To convey a better understanding
of the protection of popular design decisions, we investigate expected
anonymity set sizes in an initial simulation study. The large variation of
expected transaction values yields soberingly small effective anonymity sets
for protocols that leak transaction values. We hence examine the effect of
preliminary, intuitive strategies for merging groups of payments into larger
anonymity sets, for instance by choosing from pre-specified value classes. The
results hold promise, as they indeed induce larger anonymity sets at
comparatively low cost, depending on the corresponding strategy
