The minute your address interacts as a counterparty to a known mixer you're automatically flagged and everything around your risk profile accelerates dramatically. That wallet is effectively burned and you'll be locked out of using any kind of reputable exchange.
Obviously you don’t go directly from the mixed wallet to the exchange. Send some of the coins to different wallets a few times and say you bought the coins with cash from someone you met once. Or, if you’re willing to go the extra mile use that wallet to buy an NFT and the NFT wallet can use the exchange.
The mixer may obfuscate what happens inside it but unless it's a coin like zCash or something it's impossible to obfuscate that your coins interacted with the mixer. The ledger is cryptographically verifiable and completely public. A mobsters cooked books offer more protection than a blockchain from that and good forensic accounts untangle those all the time. A blockchain just makes it easier to automate the untangling.
Throw in the fact that it's grey territory legally just using the mixer and I think most people are vastly understating the risks of using a mixer even if they did nothing wrong with the money otherwise.
It’s not illegal to have coins that at some point in the past were mixed. In fact I suspect that most bitcoins can be traced back to a mixer if you go back.
Perhaps, but as regulators step up it’s going to devalue things once people know coins from tainted chains are going to be harder to resell. That’s going to further increase the risk of using mixers since the people using them for ideological reasons are going to scale back their usage as it starts costing them money & adding risk.
