CoinJoin wallet a privacy wallet

[Charles-Tim]

This is the title: Study: Over 13% of All Proceeds of Crimes in Bitcoin Passed Through Privacy Wallets in 2020

Robinson highlights one of the most famous crypto-related incidents due to its mainstream nature: July’s Twitter hack, where hackers took control of over 130 high-profile accounts on the social media platform and whose bitcoin collected through the deployed scam campaign were laundered through the Wasabi Wallet.

Another example mentioned in the report was the $280 million in cryptos stolen from the Asian exchange Kucoin in September, where, again, Wasabi Wallet was used to mix some of the stolen funds, according to forensics analysis.
https://news.bitcoin.com/study-over-13-of-all-proceeds-of-crimes-in-bitcoin-passed-through-privacy-wallets-in-2020/
Or, am I the one not getting what privacy wallet is? I see privacy wallet as a self-custody wallet. Wasabi wallet is a privacy wallet but also a CoinJoin wallet in which the bitcoin transactions sent through the wallet will be very difficult or nearly impossible to be traced, while 99.99% of bitcoin self-custody wallets are not CoinJoin wallet because transactions sent through them can be traced. Why generalizing these on all privacy wallets?

[o_e_l_e_o]

You can read the actual report, instead of some low quality news article, here: https://www.elliptic.co/resources/typologies-concise-guide-crypto-leaders

You can enter any credentials and a disposable email to receive the download link.

I think the issue here is that there is no real definition of "privacy wallets", and the report does not provide one. The closest it comes to providing a definition is this sentence:

Privacy wallets such as Wasabi Wallet use built-in anonymization techniques like CoinJoin to achieve a mixing effect that hides a users’ ultimate source of funds.

It seems to therefore class privacy wallets as wallets with built in anonymization techniques. Not all non custodial wallets fulfill this definition, and indeed, there are plenty of non custodial wallets out there which communicate via a central server or service and are not in the least bit private (such as Coinbase's standalone wallet app).

[tranthidung]

@o_e_l_e_o raised an important factor to assess quality of the news you read.

On the side of statistics and research (academic, crypto, trading), "Garbage in, garbage out" and with a same quality of data, bad variable definition and bad analytical method can cause bad results.

Some decisive factors:

• Data quality: depends on data collection or data scraping
• Variable definitions: such ones need to be presented clearly and avoid misleading intention
• Analytical methods: it is important but it is a step after data collection/ scraping and define variables
• Data interpretations: from results, from articles

Bitcoin blockchain is public so any analysis is reproducible with same data, same variable definitions, and analytic methods. The forum, websites are not academic place to publish researches so people have their reasons to hide those details but such vague articles should be read with questionable point of view.

Reproducible research. When you publish article on top journals, you have to give editors your dataset, variable definitions, dofile (or script), then they will be able to reproduce your analysis and know you are liar (fake data, fake results, ie.) or not.

Read to have info, and try to verify them, don't trust on what they present.
The article is from bitcoin[cash][dot]com.