Quote from: Timothy Martinez on April 27, 2020, 10:47:32 AM

I began to study this issue, and found a lot of information that users of Bitcoin mixers can really get in trouble ... why not just use coins that specialize in anonymity?

traditional letter of guarantee style mixers are mostly broken, but there are still bitcoin mixers that---combined with the proper threat model---can provide very strong privacy guarantees.

the problem with some privacy coins is they aren't really that private. stay away from dash:

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Dash users that wish to mix their coins contact a random masternode, which then collects the coins from the different users, and mashes them together in the CoinJoin transaction. It’s important to note that the masternode cannot steal the coins.

However, it does mean that Dash users must trust the masternodes with their privacy. After all, the mixing masternodes can link the sending and receiving addresses together; they know exactly which coins are going where.

While Dash does, with its GUI-interface, offer a more user-friendly CoinJoin solution at this point time, the privacy guarantees are weaker than on Bitcoin — never mind serious contenders like Monero or Zcash.

zcash and monero have their privacy drawbacks too:

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Though Monero scores relatively well on practicality and decentralization, its anonymity has been put into question in the past.

Fireice_uk, a pseudonymous Monero contributor and the developer of the xmr-stak miner software, identified several weaknesses in the ring signature approach, noting that churning immediately exposes the true origin of the funds by creating a loop of transactions. They also demonstrated a way to break normal ring signatures based on leakage of metadata: the transaction’s time of creation can be compared with internet service provider records to identify the true output.

Though the cryptography powering Zcash shielded transactions is often described as fundamentally better than that of Monero’s, the dominance of transparent addresses places strong restrictions. Researchers from University College London, now officially known as UCL, were able to de-anonymize several transfers by tackling the conversion step between shielded and unshielded coins.