Privacy or Risk?
The problem remains that centralized services, like the most popular CEXs get their 'risk ratings' for bitcoin transactions from service providers that don't see much differences between someone wanting privacy and someone trying to hide their illegal activities.
Centralized services are not the root problem—they are imperfect but functional solutions. Until decentralized CoinJoin coordinators emerge and gain widespread adoption, users must rely on what actually works. In this current landscape, that often means centralized approaches.
So they group those two together. Even if you perform your own AML filtering in an attempt to block out the bad guys, your coinjoins will still be treated as risky by blockchain analysis regardless of who took part in them.
That’s not entirely accurate. CoinJoins, in themselves, are not inherently problematic. Over the last seven years of CoinJoin history, only a handful of incidents—primarily during the pre-AML period of zkSNACKs—led to exchange freezes or bans. Once AML filtering was introduced, those incidents stopped. Now, we’re seeing them return for users participating in non-AML CoinJoin rounds. This clearly shows the problem isn’t CoinJoin as a concept, but rather when illicit funds and legitimate users are part of the same transaction.
As I already said in a different topic, the fight isn't against illegal activities only, it's also against privacy. It's unwanted by those who are in power and who make the rules. You will never satisfy them and make them happy because they don't want you or the idea of you to exist.
I completely agree that privacy is something we must actively defend—it’s no longer a default. That’s exactly the mission of the GingerPrivacy team: to build tools that empower users with privacy while navigating the realities of today’s regulatory landscape.