I see some people talk about mixing bitcoins...why dont people just swap bitcoin? EG, Say I have 10BTC and I'll swap one of mine, for one of yours. I give you a wallet address to pay, you pay it, and provide a new address for your coin, which I then pay with one of mine.
Is that not a good way to make your bitcoins a little harder to track?
No. Instead of trusting a faceless organization, you would now be trusting a single individual who would get firsthand knowledge of your Bitcoin address. If you know that individually personally, then the track will be ever so closer to you. Otherwise, you just trusted someone who doesn't owe a shred of loyalty to you with information that would lead back to you.
If you want to thoroughly mix your coins, then repeatedly swap them for altcoins (with not-so-volatile values) under multiple accounts and using different IP addresses, transferring them across multiple wallets during the process. That will require a lot of effort, and your balance will take a hit from multiple fees incurred, but you'll obfuscate your tracks to a degree that it would become obnoxious to follow it. You can even throw some into a mixer along the way since that's what they're for. Whether mixing coins itself is justifiable, I leave to your own rationalizations and delusions.