Looking for informed opinions here - when sending some sats, is it best to try to engineer the amounts to be random, or rounded amounts?

For instance- random (.00798312 btc) vs rounded (.00700000 btc). This is assuming you have flexibility about the amounts, and can split them if you need to.

I had 2 different AIs working on this, they came to opposing viewpoints
DeepSeek - yes, random amounts are better
Kimi - no, random amounts are not useful, overall.

But DeepSeek (when I presented the Kimi arguments) basically changed it's mind. I give a summary of what they both advise, at the end.

I know lightning is an option. And coin join would be ideal.

Here's Deep Seek (after getting the counter-argument from Kimi)

How I Changed

The specific error was prioritizing the wrong threat. I optimized against a heuristic (round = suspicious) that primarily operates at spend-time for change detection, while ignoring the far more concrete threat of exact-amount UTXO tracking, which operates continuously and is trivially exploitable by anyone with an off-chain record of the amount. The other AI correctly identified that a unique amount is a permanent, globally visible identifier — and that's a much bigger privacy hole than whatever marginal suspicion a round number might attract.

What Survived

Not everything was wrong. Two points still hold:

• Don't match an exact amount tied to an off-chain record. If an exchange sent you 0.01000000 BTC and that number sits in their database next to your name, don't leave the UTXO at exactly 0.01000000. A few hundred sats of jitter breaks the exact-match correlation at near-zero cost.
• Don't use artificial digit patterns (0.01234567, 0.01111111) that fingerprint you as someone trying to look random.

But these are minor footnotes. The main lesson is: indistinguishability through commonness beats disguise through variation, every time.



And here's Kimi

Sizing

• Sweet spot: 0.01–0.1 BTC per UTXO for most people; larger holders can go up to ~0.2.
• Avoid anything under ~100k sats — small UTXOs risk becoming unspendable when fees spike.
• Avoid single giant lumps — every spend exposes your balance to the counterparty.
• A tiered "banknote" mix (e.g., 0.2 / 0.1 / 0.05 / 0.025 / 0.01) lets you assemble most payments without change.

Amounts

• Use standard sizes with a few hundred–thousand sats of jitter (0.01021, not exactly 0.01 and not 0.0123882).
• Exotic precise amounts are unique fingerprints, not privacy. Jitter just avoids the "laser-cut identical outputs" look and mismatches with off-chain records like invoices or exchange withdrawals.
• Don't expect amounts to deliver privacy — this detail ranks near the bottom of what matters.

Privacy priorities (in order of impact)

1. Never co-spend across compartments (especially KYC + non-KYC coins).
2. Use coin control to avoid change outputs where possible.
3. Keep coins from different sources labeled and separate.
4. Splitting within one transaction is compartmentalization, not anonymity — it only limits future exposure.
5. For real unlinkability, CoinJoin — and if you mix, keep the post-mix denominations untouched (don't break or merge them; amount-correlation attacks shrink anonymity sets).

Security

• Test the new wallet with a small amount and confirm the backup before moving the stack.
• Verify receive addresses on the hardware wallet's screen, not the computer's.
• Splitting across addresses on one seed is not security partitioning — same seed compromise takes everything. Large amounts warrant multisig or multiple seeds, geographically distributed.
• Freeze/label any unknown dust that lands later; never spend it alongside other coins.

Execution

1. Generate fresh addresses (mind gap limits — don't leave huge address gaps).
2. Small test send first.
3. Move the rest as one batched multi-output transaction with your chosen denominations — cheaper than many separate sends.
4. Time it for low mempool fees if it isn't urgent; label every UTXO when done.

One-line version: batch it, use standard sizes with slight jitter, keep chunks in the 0.01–0.1 BTC range, never merge compartments later, and treat the move itself as hygiene rather than privacy.