A caveat, I have not used any of these tools just yet. The closest I got to adding a layer of anonymity to my transactions and other people's transactions was by running an LN node. At some point, I am pretty sure people were using services such as LOOP to clean relatively large amounts of Bitcoin by running it through my large channels connected to LOOP. I don't run this node anymore, and I don't know if I got any "tainted" coins because of that. I guess I will find out if one day I need to move some of these coins to some CEX that checks for this.
Anyhow, this will be a worry for later (or hopefully never), and is out of the scope of this post.
As I try to look a bit closer to privacy tools such as Wasabi and Samourai (are there others?), I just can't get past the constant in-fighting by what seems to be a bunch of immature nyms to figure out which one to use. Also, the out-fighting, as observed most recently with the interactions between Whirpool and Luke, is not helping.
My main questions:
- What tool to use, from an outsiders perspective?
- Using these tools might not solve my issue of interacting with a CEX as they like to flag coinjoined transactions, so would using the LN as explained above, be a solution?
My secondary question:
- Are these stupid Tw*tter fights hurting the credibility of these tools? If I am to use such a tool, I'd like to interact with tools developed by mature people that I can trust, who can objectively state the weaknesses and strengths of their tools, rather than seemingly intellectually dishonest people.