alfred on Nostr: Swapping UTXOs and breaking the UTXO link is not the sole purpose of coinjoin. Game ...
Swapping UTXOs and breaking the UTXO link is not the sole purpose of coinjoin. Game theory says you have to do it in a publicly visible and provable way (coinjoins are very visible on the blockchain) in order to be able to say "After participating in N rounds my anonymity set is X and there's no point in trying to link me or any other participants to any particular UTXO in rounds 0..N-1. You can try but you can never prove a particular link".
If you do it privately using LN or other methods, you can end up receiving a "bad" (tracked) UTXO that will land you in trouble if you sell it on a KYC platform. Conversely, you could end up giving up your good KYCd UTXO to a "bad" party who will then use it for nefarious purposes and guess who will be getting a visit from the authorities in that situation. If you coinjoin, a rational opponent has to say "This peer clearly coinjoined with 50 other participants, so in order to prosecute him we'd have to prosecute everyone from that round".
Re Whirlpool vs Wasabi, WP is actually a lot cheaper in the long run (per anonset) because they charge only for the initial round. After that every subsequent round is free, indefinitely. Wasabi may be cheaper only for smaller anonsets.
If you do it privately using LN or other methods, you can end up receiving a "bad" (tracked) UTXO that will land you in trouble if you sell it on a KYC platform. Conversely, you could end up giving up your good KYCd UTXO to a "bad" party who will then use it for nefarious purposes and guess who will be getting a visit from the authorities in that situation. If you coinjoin, a rational opponent has to say "This peer clearly coinjoined with 50 other participants, so in order to prosecute him we'd have to prosecute everyone from that round".
Re Whirlpool vs Wasabi, WP is actually a lot cheaper in the long run (per anonset) because they charge only for the initial round. After that every subsequent round is free, indefinitely. Wasabi may be cheaper only for smaller anonsets.