Are there any fans of online gambling using bitcoin here? You probably have already read that companies like Coinbase are closing accounts when bitcoin withdrawn from a gambling website are deposited to Coinbase to cash out. Gambling is against Coinbase terms of service and they are well capable of tracking the bitcoin you deposit to wallets run by gambling sites.
You may even have thought of using a bitcoin mixing service to try to fool Coinbase into thinking your bitcoin did not come from gambling. What is not widely known yet is that this year the companies who do bitcoin chain analysis for the likes of Coinbase are now able to see past mixers. You can read some proof
here.
This is where Monero enters. The Monero blockchain is now very opaque after the RingCT hardfork back this January. That hardfork did have an unexpected consequence of temporarily raising fees but the V5 hardfork yesterday corrected the issue and fees are back normal and low.
If you take bitcoin that was withdrawn from a gambling website you can use it to buy Monero at any of several exchanges. You can take the Monero you have in your local wallet (the
Monero GUI is what you should be using) and send it to a different exchange and sell for bitcoin. If you then send those bitcoin to Coinbase you can sell for cash and withdraw to your bank account without risking losing your Coinbase account.
Yes the process is a little drawn out but there is no danger of losing bitcoin if a mixer decides to steal your deposit. If you watch the Monero price charts you can start the process when Monero price against bitcoin is on the rise and may even make some extra cash. The important point to take away here is that mixing services are no longer safe to use. Hope this helps someone.