most types of tumbling becomes very obvious

and basically you are probably gonna end up with _even_ "dirtier" money than you put in

(you don't want the FBI examining _you_ instead of some mexican mob boss)

That it is anonymous is the issue. There's a reason Monaro failed to launch

by participating in a coinjoin you anonymize yourself among all the participants

but A. the participants in a coinjoin are probably dirtier than you, and B. simply participating in one is probably illegal (money laundering)

I don't know how monero is/was supposed to work

but I do know there are theoretically anonymous cryptocurrencies

I think zerocoin had some cryptographers working on it

and there are some similar coins

I read some papers by some of those cryptographers (slightly related papers, not on the coin itself)

I mean, if you use anonymous crypto, you're just in a bigger coin-join pool

that is true

but if it is big enough with enough "clean" money to get lost in

then it can work

but yea simply buying a crypto whose sole purpose is anonymity raises red flags

Which is why they made Monaro illegal real quick

its illegal?

for exchanges

Yep

wikipedia doesn't say anything AFAICT

I could have sworn I got an email from Bittrex about it.

individual exchanges deciding not to participate makes a lot more sense

Like, because of regulatory issues.

the KYC AML laws are deliberately vague

yep

but they are vague

So, practically illegal if not explicitly

so it is usually a risk assessment for an MSB (money services business)

I actually tried starting an exchange back in the day

this is one of the things that red pilled me to being a libertarian lol

the regulations are fing impossible

lol, yep. MSB is not the way to go.

basically you are always guessing

so you need to have a law firm to tell you what they think

but they don't either know

Unless you accept a 5% chance of going to prison

so it is just risk assessments

yea exactly lol

I was considering going out of the country preemptively

(and never returning)