It won't do anything to help you avoid paying the tax man, come April.
[1] Assuming it's not a honeypot ran by a TLA.
[2] Assuming that, by legislature, tumbled coins don't become 'tainted'.
In order for a government to enforce taxation on cryptoassets, they would need to definitively prove that a person owned coins at a specific address. This is basically only possible if coins are bought/sold through an exchange following KYC laws.
For starters, the government is allowed to simply ask "we think that maybe you might have had some income in the form of cryptoassets. Please provide an exhaustive list of such income" with the understanding that any lies or omision on that answer changes it from "how much do I need to pay tax?" question into a "go-to-jail-for-how-long" tax fraud.
If they find your answer suspicious (for example, it doesn't match some third party info that they have e.g. from a TLA running a honeypot tumbling service, or a honeypot 'trade crypto for cash in a park' op or Tor node monitoring or whatever, all these things are being done by gov't), then this can be followed up by a tax audit (i.e. have you purchased any assets or services that are above your declared income?) and/or a warrant to search your devices (possibly without you knowing) for forensic evidence of your crypto transactions - which might, for example, result in evidence that you used a coin-join service with an intent to circumvent KYC/AML laws, which by itself can be treated as a crime even if they don't find definitive proof that you owned coins at a particular address.
It blows me away how flippantly so many cryptocurrency enthusiasts discuss criminal money laundering.
We're discussing the technicals on what it takes for a government to enforce taxation on a new asset class. There's no conspiracy here, only an attempt at sound understanding.
Did you not realize we talk about topics like how to penetrate computer security, with great specificity, ALL the time here on HN? Does this objective discussion about potential illegal acts blow you away too?
Or how many drivers speed.
I know its volume is way higher than Zcash's shielded transactions.
Do you have any details on how it might work?
I assume you're just not talking about simple timing correlation combined with trading BTC->XMR->BTC (poor opsec).
As far as I know, you can't reveal XMR amounts, receipent, or sender if you're just remaining in XMR and not going through a third party (exchange, conversion service, etc). So I'm really curious about the details of your claim.
Previous HN discussion about article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687008
r/Monero discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/87hr28/hn_discussio...
There are much better people to discuss any problems you think it might have over at r/Monero, including people with PhDs (I'll never be as smart or have as much dedication as they do). I suggest using the search function about your concern, and if you don't see it, create a post or make a comment in their Skepticism Sunday threads.
I learned about Monero here on HN years ago, understood its limitations then, and keep mostly up-to-date. I won't claim that any thing in the world won't have its limitations or problems, but I do still believe that Monero is the best project currently and still looks promising going forward in terms of user financial privacy.
Most of reddit is self-aggrandizing cliques who believe they are much smarter than they really are -- especially in the cryptocurrency space. My concerns are not obscure or unknown, everyone who pays attention knows that Monero has issues.
There are multiple projects that are better in terms of financial privacy -- Monero is primarily an ugly hack to barely obfuscate transactions.
I highly encourage you to visit r/Monero. Those devs are the first to say it isn't perfect. They've never promised the moon or hype themselves. They acknowledge that people's lives could balance on whether or not their finacial transactions are private, so they don't overpromise and always continue to look for ways to improve.
It seems like you have an agenda and a viewpoint that doesn't line up with reality.
(And a lot of people seem to criticize Monero because it's not anonymous (which is not the goal), so that's why I say it isn't perfect. And of course there will always be an attack vector for everything: people could track serial numbers of physical cash, the NSA could track every keystroke/tap on every device, etc, but realistically it's very good and getting better about blockchain analysis attacks.)
I don't have an agenda. My "viewpoint" is reality. You don't have to like it, and feel free to put your trust in technology that does not deliver what you believe it does.
I hope you wouldn't also suggest using a dex with 100k/day volume, and receiving pedocoins?
These privacy-enhancing technologies would be good if a fraction of the people advertising their merits actually used them, but the reality is, the only people using coinjoins/monero/dex are people who need to, which is a huge problem to associate yourself with.
The sort of responsiveness described from LE by the poster also sounds downright unbelievable, I'd bet that's a fake story.