If you're moving in and out of BTC, you're making footprints on chain tied to balances you're spending. Swap to $50 of XMR from BTC, on chain tx, buy $50 of drugs with XMR, winner where that came from. Closely matches amount here on chain. With ever decreasing volume of activity, XMR becomes even less private. Best to just stay pseudonymous in btc
Discussion
How can you see who bought $50 worth of drugs with xmr? I thought amounts aren't publicly visible
Beaver explains it okay. You can't see who or how much XMR but feds can see that drugs were sold and funds moved on BTC chain nearly equivalent in value. If you're not careful, leaking your IP and this giving reason to start monitoring you. You could just stay pseudonomous in BTC and use tor, Satoshi.
A $50 transaction is highly unlikely to get you arrested.
The reason people got arrested "using XMR" is because they steal $450,000 of medical records, and then make poor decisions that cause them to get caught.
The Breaking Monero explains where Monero's privacy weaknesses are.
The Monero Blockchain at large cannot be cracked, broken, or traced, however with multiple factors individual transactions could increase probabilistic guesses.
These factors are malicious nodes (also an issue in Tor), poisoned outputs where you reduce the anonymity set (thus reducing the probability), and EAE/EABE attacks where the end points of a transaction could be hypothetically tied (however this is counteracted by avoiding KYC generally).
There's a few other attacks I'm less familiar with but those are the most commonly discussed ones.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSYUeVwrHBnAUre2G_LYDsdo-tD0ov-y
nobody can
but if you swap $50 of BTC and immediately do the deal, you're vulnerable to timing analysis.
and you were doing so well
until "with ever decreasing volume of activity"
which you just made up.
