1. They setup another project either by forking some existing code or writing their own - statistically nobody in the cryptocurrency world does real-world diligence so you’re talking, what, a web page, a few GitHub profiles and some people talking it up? That’s tiny by the standards of most national police or intelligence budgets.
2. Compromising someone’s project - want to bet someone wouldn’t agree to “accidentally” make a bug in exchange for a shorter sentence? (I’m not saying everyone who works on these are drug dealers or something but I’d bet there are a lot of cases for tax evasion threats given the ideology)
3. Mixers are critically dependent on having enough volume to meet demand but using one adds cost and persecution risk so most people don’t use them. If you knew someone like the DPRK was trying to launder a large amount of money, they’d be limited based the number of other participants – especially as news like today’s tells everyone that using a mixer means a non-trivial risk of permanently tainting the tokens you launder. If you started submitting transactions to and from your own wallets, you could make the analysis problem easier by ensuring that most of the participants are secretly known to you.
2. Compromising someone’s project - want to bet someone wouldn’t agree to “accidentally” make a bug in exchange for a shorter sentence? (I’m not saying everyone who works on these are drug dealers or something but I’d bet there are a lot of cases for tax evasion threats given the ideology)
3. Mixers are critically dependent on having enough volume to meet demand but using one adds cost and persecution risk so most people don’t use them. If you knew someone like the DPRK was trying to launder a large amount of money, they’d be limited based the number of other participants – especially as news like today’s tells everyone that using a mixer means a non-trivial risk of permanently tainting the tokens you launder. If you started submitting transactions to and from your own wallets, you could make the analysis problem easier by ensuring that most of the participants are secretly known to you.