The part that I do not understand is how far back the retrieval of funds goes. If they managed to seize $46 million in Germany via the confiscated servers and the 7TB back up data (if I understood correctly), would that have been all the
unused chips that were not sent out to those that wanted to mix and it so happened to account to $46 million, or was it something else.
Maybe you are right, the 7TB data could have been contained minimal mix related information, we have to wait for the information to be put out by the relevant agencies to understand what data it contained.
Besides the fact that these types of speculations have no productive outcome, I personally believe this is too far fetched.
After all, ChipMixer has been one of the longest-standing mixers out there, mixing a ton of BTC, meanwhile others have come and gone. Even to the point where a few months ago people started speculating whether CM was a honeypot.
To me, it looks like the ChipMixer operators have run it quite competently, with the one mistake (if actually true) to store 7 actual TB of data. What makes or breaks a privacy service (for me) is that they collect and store as little data as possible.
In a business context, 7TB is nothing. That's what people have in their personal home NAS systems. But for a privacy service, I don't know what kind of big files you really need to permanently store.
One remark: I had a personal theory that 7TB was just the amount of purchased server storage (again, nothing for a powerful / enterprise server), which was simply mostly empty. Law enforcement could have seized old, funded keys by getting their hands on the drives and performing forensic techniques to recover permanently deleted files.
However, since even chips created a few days before the takedown were affected, this is not really plausible.