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There are still various tactics that can cause plausible deniability in regards to coins, and sure depending on who any of us might be wanting to be private from.... There is a lot of power to be able to directly transact with folks, and if we are drawing from wallets that might ONLY have as much as the transaction or maybe reasonable amounts higher than the transaction, then maybe no one would be able to figure out exactly how many hops back they might have to go to figure out if we might have larger stashes, and yeah we could end up making mistakes if someone is going back and looking at from where those coins had come. But yeah, if we get a lot more people transacting with bitcoin then that could also help to have the transactions to be more common... but we still might not want to spend from a 2 BTC wallet in order to buy $100 worth of something, but instead use our wallet that has 0.00634582 BTC.. and yeah maybe in some places we might want to use even a smaller wallet... but yeah, maybe $100 or less might be better done on lightning network to the extent anyone is set up with that ability..and practicing, too.
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What I do is keep a very small amount of BTC (currently, around 0.6 BTC) in an exchange, so whenever I need to spend/send some small amount (say, $100), I just do it directly on the exchange (either convert to fiat and withdraw to my bank, or withdraw the 0.001 BTC to my phone's hot wallet, and from there to the intended recipient). Any trace done on such transaction would point to my hot wallet and then to the exchange's hot wallet (used for daily customers' withdrawals), and not linking in any way to my cold wallet. The exchange is effectively mixing my 0.6 BTC and isolating the two wallets, so the recipient wouldn't be able to link to one via the other. Not talking about coffee purchases. I guess Lightning could be used for these, but, believe it or not, I haven't used it yet for anything. I don't even know how it's done in practice (Lightning wallet app?), but I'd like to get into it. The thing is, we (still) live in a fiat world, so buying coffee with fiat makes more sense, as things currently stand at least.
An obvious question could arise from the above: what's the point of converting to $100 of fiat from the 0.6 BTC stored in the exchange, instead of simply using $100 from my fiat bank account? Well, not all things we do make logical sense, and sometimes we may need to make use of our coins for some illogical, psychological reason. For example (I've probably mentioned this before), the current fiat value of my above mentioned 0.6 BTC exceeds my total fiat investment value used to buy my entire BTC stash over the years. My plan is to use that 0.6 BTC to slowly withdraw my entire fiat investment amount. The funny thing is that, during the Q4 2024 rise to $100k, I was seeing the value of my 0.6 BTC getting higher while I was actually withdrawing from it... Something like a never-ending money generator! Is this what our Bitcoin stash has become? A never-ending money generator? Was Saylor's comment to Laura really true? Are we really getting richer while we sleep? I still find it too good to be true (but it really seems to be!).