You're right, there are no "guarantees", but nopara73 also can't just wait for a government agency to sanction WasabiWallet, and have the police come to his home and arrest him.
Again: nobody from Wasabi is talking about arrests (or threats of arrests) at all! It's not even on the table. I have no idea where these ideas of yours are coming from; according to their own words, there is
no regulatory pressure on them.
They say themselves that it's just because
a private company has the right to choose its customers
and that they are acting
in a way that society allows us to do
Furthermore, they explicitly say:
there's no legislation that specifically says coinjoin coordinators must blacklist their customers' UTXOs
It's just that
challenges encountered operating the business in even the most liberal jurisdictions are numerous and multiplying
Now,
encountering challenges is a very vague terminology and I'd argue every single business has its own set of challenges sooner or later.
It is
absolutely clear from their blog article that it was a proactive decision to potentially make their life easier when regulators start asking questions.
He accepted the trade-off to keep Wasabi's pool "untainted" and probably hope that he doesn't get arrested.
No, the pool is not untainted. o_e_l_e_o has proved how e.g. the majority of a large exchange's coins are considered 'tainted' by the biggest blockchain analysis company, while the exchange itself considers its coins clean (and they do - similar to Wasabi) freeze supposedly tainted coins.
This concept has thus been proven
not to work (if it wasn't sufficiently clear in theory that it can't work without a central database).
Again, arrests are totally off the table for now - maybe you've watched one too many movies lately.
But he only had two paths, shut Wasabi down, or block tainted outputs. He chose to block tainted outputs.
That's wrong; that's what they say in the blog post, but think about it.
There was the option to continue running it
as it is, and face the
challenges encountered operating the business
that every business has to face. Especially if you're a Bitcoin company and face challenges because of it,
you do not solve these challenges by going anti-Bitcoin.
Another option: develop a new, decentralized system. At least implement a huge GUI option for changing the coordinator!
It is clear it was a deliberate profit-maximizing business decision that just threw fungibility and Bitcoin itself under the bus in the process, as well as users that rely on it.
I am once again presenting you the scenario of persecuted journalists which use Bitcoin to collect donations. Imagine they now land on Wasabi's blacklist as their job is illegal where they're operating; if this leads to their funds being freezed, what the hell do we need Bitcoin for? At that point can't they just use PayPal (and get their account frozen there, as well)?