Hey @pteracodex,
Welcome and thanks for bringing up these questions.
Just out of curiousity, have you heard of a project called Epic Cash ($EPIC)?
It’s a privacy coin (but there’s a lot more to it). It has in-built, always-on Coinjoin which gives it unique properties like Privacy and Fungibility that would alleviate some of your concerns.
To answer your 1st question:
I had the same concerns when I first used Incognito. I asked a similar question and as far as I am aware, Incognito does not use Coinjoin. You probably shouldn’t think of Incognito as a mixing service.
However, Epic Cash has it built-in coinjoin that happens auto-matically. Governments will not be able to determine which wallets/addresses went through a mixing service because:
A) Epic Cash doesn’t have wallets/addresses
B) There’s NO NEED for a mixing service as Epic Cash does a Coinjoin with every transaction (no need to visit a separate site).
But the very best thing about Epic Cash is neither wallet addresses nor the amount you are sending is stored on Epic’s blockchain.
To answer your 2nd question:
Yes, when buy bitcoin there is always a risk you may receive it from a wallet that could be tainted (meaning has engaged in illegal activity). But with Epic Cash, there is no risk. This is because there’s no such thing as wallet addresses. Hence no wallet addresses are stored on the Epic blockchain and hence interrogation by crypto forensic teams like Chainalysis, Blockforensics, CipherBlock would come up empty (no data to interrogate).
Pretty cool tech.
Epic Cash is a fully open source project and below is a cheat sheet summary if you want more info.
But please DYOR. You can learn more at - https://epic.tech where you can download Whitepaper and Self custody wallets.
I also recommend you watch a few video, search on YouTube for Uncle Vigilante and then click on his previous “Live” streams.
Btw, Incognito Team is in discussion with folks on the Epic Cash Team ( @Izlo ) so we hope to see support for Epic Cash soon.