It bears repeating explicitly I think: you're not working against today's analysis tools, you're working against whatever analysis tools exist far into the future, since everything is recorded for eternity.
From what I've seen, success in this industry is predicated upon planning, caution, and constantly thinking of ways that people are going to screw you over.
Most people who break the law do so because they either don't consider the consequences or accept the rewards as justifying the risks. And plenty of criminals go to prison because they judged wrong. That those who are successful for long periods of time buck this trend is just survivor bias.
only as far as statute of limitations. figuring out the crime after that point is not a risk ... but it does put a target on your back
For a buyer, this isn't as big of a deal because you won't have that level of target on your back, but for anyone running a marketplace I don't think statute of limitations will protect you once they figure out who you are.
Basically, if you dont want to deal with the onchain transactions, you could sell the risk of that to someone else and only deal in internal offchain transactions. Dont know if this actually happens though.
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-blockchain-fifo-dirty-co...
You might find that the mixer, rather than washing your bitcoin, unexpectedly taints them.
The threat being considered in this thread is a future crackdown on bitcoin and how the blockchain may be used against bitcoin owners. Legal threats seem very relevant.
While some will try to do everything the legal way, the the wily people who believe they are getting away on some kind of technicality sometimes find themselves charged with a different crime, or maybe just unlucky after a pre-dawn police raid or traffic stop goes south.
The idea isn't necessarily to de-anonymize the transactions here but to disincentivize people from using mixers. Either a haircut kills a portion of your value, or you lose it all, the idea is you won't do that again.
That doesn't change that legally it still kills all your money, and creates a liability on the person who put in the dirty money. If you figure out who they are it's all you, you're welcome to sue them. If not, you've learned a hard lesson.
I'm fine with either.
You're not solving the problem, you are just introducing new problems that affect other people in the hopes that the entire system becomes unworkable.
The security in the Lightning Network doesn't come from settling on-chain after a transaction happened but from signing over all your money in a Lightning Network channel to the other party should somebody catch you cheating.
They are unconfirmed transactions and there are many ways of losing your funds compared to confirmed ones. Such as having your harddrive corrupted and your node trying to propagate an old state.
You are correct that funds in a Lightning Network wallet are at higher risks than those in a cold wallet, but this applies to all "hot" crypto wallets. Most LN wallets supports "Static Channel Backups" which you only create and store once after setting up a channel. In case your phone goes up in flames, you can use it to safely close your channels and receive your balance.
It involves either buying or creating a tamper resistant device and a reputation for authenticity.
It's significantly more complicated.
... for now.
The thing is, 2-3 tx/sec is basically snail mail. That's such a small number of transactions that there's not even a forest to hide within.
As the analytics tools improve the de-anonymization will be faster and more automatic, and that "tens of millions" figure will dwindle down to pennies. State actors can easily combine that data with actual fiat, and you'll be in court before you know it.
The problem is you're committing a ledger of your criminal activity to the cloud forever, and CCing your attorney general, smirking that they'll never figure it out. Of course they will. Either they'll figure it out or ban it. Or both.