Would you like everyone who has transacted to know how much is in your wallet and net worth? Of course not. That's why you need and want to mix your coins to hide where they came from before you use them. The level of privacy you can expect by default, however, varies significantly depending on whether you are using BCH or BTC.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is better than Bitcoin (BTC) at mixing coins because BCH transaction fees are almost free (less than $ 0.01 per transaction). The Bitcoin Core scaling roadmap is likely to intentionally cause onchain transaction fees to exceed $ 30/250 bytes again, the same as in December 2017. The only reason why BTC transaction fees are currently low is because the cryptocurrency market entered a bear market which shortly thereafter made $ 30. per transaction in 2017. BTC blocks are now starting to get full again on a regular basis, and fees are starting to rise.
There are rumors that regulators will demand that mixed coins will be required to change ownership at least six times before they are no longer considered mixed and that fiat-to-crypto exchanges will, at the very least, not be allowed to handle coins deemed mixed as regulators seek to combat laundering. money etc.
The obvious solution for traders or general currency users who wish to maintain their privacy is to send their existing mixed coins six times (to a new address each time they control it themselves) to make it appear as if they were mixed by a long previous owner in the owner's chain instead "recently". That way traders will maintain their privacy and the exchange will be allowed for consideration as the coins are no longer mixed.
The problem is that the intentionally high on-chain transaction fees will make "legitimizing" very expensive for BTC users. As a result, most BTC users won't mix their coins at all and only those willing to pay extreme amounts in additional transaction fees will mix their coins. That would make such an expensive mixed coin look very fishy compared to an unmixed coin.
Other way 'BCH does not have the problem of high fees so coin mixing is very cheap and with ordinary people it will most likely be the norm and even the setting is default in most BCH wallet apps. This will serve to make mixed BCH coins look normal and not suspicious because "everyone is doing it, it's practically free to do and it makes sense to keep everyone's privacy in a cheap and automatic way".
BTC Mixing is Expensive and Cumbersome
An alternative way for BTC users to obscure the public's knowledge of the total amount in wallet spending and their net worth could arguably be using the Lightning Network. But LN is so cumbersome to use for ordinary people that it is unlikely that many users will be in the near future which means maintaining privacy by using BTC + LN not just BTC which may not be the norm.
Think about this :
-People don't want to use LN when transaction fees are high because it is too expensive to open channels.
-People don't want to use LN when transaction fees are low because they can only send cheap and direct transactions on-chain.
means that most of the people don't want to use the LN regardless of the on-chain transaction fees of BTC.
If we notice how BTC's dominance suddenly declined again when uninformed users and currency speculators discovered in December 2017 that on-chain transaction fees had become $ 34 per transaction.
It seems now clear that Bitcoin (BTC) users don't and don't want to accept Wladimir's BTC scaling roadmap that tries to force everyone to use Segwit and LN, instead of just using on-chain direct transactions. Most BTC users will likely continue using BTC directly for a high fee or stop using BTC and start using one of the many competing cryptocurrencies instead. They won't want to pay expensive on-chain transaction fees regularly just mixing up their coins to increase their anonymity. That's very expensive, even for us first worlds earning over $ 2 a month.
The Bitcoin Core scaling roadmap appears to have been designed to make it unlikely that regulators, exchanges and tax authorities will allow “suspected expensive mixed BTC coins” to be used by the general public.
On the other hand, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) scaling roadmap is “Bitcoin as usual” which means that mixed BCH coins will likely be considered normal as they will still be cheap enough to mix so it wouldn't be “suspicious” for the general public to mix their BCH coins before use it. This difference makes BTC more like a traceable fiat currency, far from what the original architects imagined. Luckily we have BCH, a comparable cryptocurrency that is easy to use and cheap to mix over and over again.
