Ok, I listened to the podcast and reviewed the documentation for the two projects. I plan to use whirlpool to test it once my new node syncs.

Agreed that nopara doesn’t come across as very trustworthy. The sybil attack via the coordinator mixing was not something I was aware of, and agree that needs to be made clear as a huge trust assumption.

My feeling is that the chain analysis thing with Wasabi is usually misrepresented by critics. They’re a business protecting themselves from the liabilities of facilitating illegal activities. Govs don’t fuck around with that shit. I’m not going to judge them because I don’t know

their situation (family, jurisdiction, etc).

On the Samourai side, the obvious big thing is the sharing of xpubs. But I think that is fairly represented as a trade off.

Overall the ideal is to use join market like you said, and if that’s not a possibility Samourai would be my recommendation. But, I would also recommend Wasabi for someone who is really bad technically. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯