Please critique this KYCed Bitcoin anonymization method.

[witcher_sense]

coin control

Whats that?

Do you know that Bitcoin operates on a UTXO model where chunks of coins are constantly being created and destroyed by transactions and where it is sometimes trivial to trace particular coins from their birth to the most recent transaction? Coin control feature is usually provided by software such as bitcoin wallet in order for you to have the ability to somewhat influence the history of coins. Especially this feature becomes highly relevant when you are dealing with KYCed coins because coin control enables you to prevent the accidental merging KYCed bitcoins with non-KYCed ones. When sending a transaction, you choose carefully which chunks of Bitcoin to send (you label those chunks to remember who is who); coin control helps you keep anonymous and "named" bitcoins separately. Without proper coin control, the preservation of anonymity becomes a very tough task.

[Flyingbeaver]

Neither Bisq, LocalMonero, or RoboSats are designed to be used as mixing services. Blockchain hopping isn't the most effective way to anonymize your Bitcoin. The Bitfinex hackers tried to use this technique but investigators were still able to follow their transactions.

Didn't they store their adresses AND passwords in the cloud. I'm guessing they didn't even encrypt them before uploading. Makes me wonder how they were able to get all that crypto in the first place when they couldn't handle this rudimentary point.

Since it uses Tor by default, you can run this on a non-live install without worries and less risk of losing funds (e.g. if the USB drive unplugs; poof: offer and funds are gone).

I lose the offer, ok. But i lose my coins? Wdym? I can't log back in for my coins?

Yes. There is nothing to 'log back in'. There are no servers, therefore no 'accounts' on servers that you could log back into. The only accounts that exist are your fiat payment methods saved in your client, locally. Your coins are in your Bisq wallet. Local. It's just a local hot wallet.

Meaning if your local install dies, and you have no seed phrase backup, those coins are also gone.

Wouldn't this be remedied by saving the seed phrase from the git go?

coin control in the Bisq wallet

Is that a feature in Bisq? I don't see it.

coin control

Whats that?

Do you know that Bitcoin operates on a UTXO model where chunks of coins are constantly being created and destroyed by transactions and where it is sometimes trivial to trace particular coins from their birth to the most recent transaction? Coin control feature is usually provided by software such as bitcoin wallet in order for you to have the ability to somewhat influence the history of coins. Especially this feature becomes highly relevant when you are dealing with KYCed coins because coin control enables you to prevent the accidental merging KYCed bitcoins with non-KYCed ones. When sending a transaction, you choose carefully which chunks of Bitcoin to send (you label those chunks to remember who is who); coin control helps you keep anonymous and "named" bitcoins separately. Without proper coin control, the preservation of anonymity becomes a very tough task.

What wallet with this feature do you recommend?

[n0nce]

coin control in the Bisq wallet

Is that a feature in Bisq? I don't see it.

Yes; under Funds > Send Funds > Send funds from wallet.
The 'input selection' has the option to select between 'Use all available inputs' and 'Use custom inputs'.

What wallet with this feature do you recommend?

Every proper wallet has a coin control feature; for instance, Electrum.

[NotATether]

7) Convert all the XMR in RoboSats to BTC.

I don't understand why people keep touting BTC <=> XMR as an anonymization method. It is completely dependent on the exchanges to preserve your privacy.

If you are converting BTC to XMR on one exchange and then back again on another exchange, you have no way of knowing that both exchanges are not sharing customer information with each other including transaction history. That provides extremely poor privacy which law enforcement will have no problem peeling off. Please use a real mixer (like the one in my signature).

[o_e_l_e_o]

I'm not sure about Bisq, but that's privacy focused as well.

You can use the same onion address on Bisq for as long as you want. Your account will show an age, and you will also show your local reputation to other traders. You can delete this onion address at any time you aren't actively trading, which effectively wipes your account and makes you appear as a brand new user to the rest of the network.

I don't understand why people keep touting BTC <=> XMR as an anonymization method. It is completely dependent on the exchanges to preserve your privacy.

Privacy and centralized exchanges do not go together in the same sentence. If you do anything with a centralized exchange, assume your privacy is zero, everything is being logged, and all those logs are being shared with third parties. Bitcoin to Monero is a good anonymization method if and only if you performs those trades peer-to-peer.

[dkbit98]

Can anyone recommend a noncustodial Monero wallet?

Trezor model T and ledger hardware wallets are supporting monero last time I checked.
There are several software wallets, but one that looks a lot like Electrum is called Feather wallet.

Also what about decenterlized exchanges besides Bisq, RoboSats and LocalMonero? Any thoughts on LocalMonero?[/color]

Last I heard is that someone from Cake wallet team is working on forking Bisq exchange and they are calling it Haveno, but things are not moving very fast.
Telegram owner Durov recently announced they are working on their own version of decentralized exchange, but nobody knows how and when is that coming out.
There are no other real decentralized exchanges as far as i know, but LocalMonero, AgoraDesk and HodlHold als also working fine.