The only positive thing that we, as mere plebs who have nothing to hide but also want a private cold-storage, can get from this is there's some assurance that if you want a CoinJoin without the risk of "taint", Wasabi can be the tool for you. North Korean hackers or Mr. Heroine Dealer should find another tool.
That's the wrong path, buddy. We should use, accept and spend 'tainted coins', because Bitcoin being fungible is one of its most important properties.
If you start trying to get 'coins without risk of taint', you're starting to play after someone's arbitrarily set rules and not after Bitcoin's rules.
It was just practically speaking ser. If you read my posts, I have always debated that "taint" doesn't exist in the blockchain. But because some exchanges refuse to accept your deposits because of "taint", I believe for plebs like us, it's better to avoid further problems regarding "taint".
If your exchange won't accept your 'tainted deposit', don't use that exchange. Simple as that.
I generally don't recommend centralized exchanges; if you use
Bisq, there will be no 'taint issues'. If you do want to use a centralized one however, recently
Kraken started accepting LN deposits and withdrawals. Lightning very effectively hides the origin / history of UTXOs, so I'm very happy to see this happen.
They even link to open-source software like BTCPayServer and recommend Breez, Phoenix and Muun; the two former being my favourite mobile wallets - both open source and non-custodial.
I agree with everything in your post, and we are in the same side. But for the plebs' sake, especially for someone very new to Bitcoin, I won't recommend them to risk tainting their coins if they merely want privacy for the sake of privacy. That's just practically speaking ser.
I'm also for Lightning as a privacy application, which I believe could help increase its adoption futher than just for faster/cheaper transactions. I believe that pivot to a "privacy layer for Bitcoin" narrative will be a necessity.