On mixing, one must wonder if every time to go to the store to buy a candy and pay with a bill, the vendor would ask you about the entire history of the bill from its printing years ago until the day you got it to pay for candy. Even though you are not a criminal but rather the most honest person in your city
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with exchanges its the same your given a risk rating.
if all your deposits are all mixed sourced then you have a higher risk rating than someone that does not use a mixer
meet a threshold and they start to look closer at you
deposit $10. dont worry.. however deposit $1k-$10k-$100k, then expect to be on a watch list with more involved investigation reporting the higher the risk/amount is
government, regulators and authorities dont chase after criminals or suspects over $1-$10. they want the big fish
In my opinion, it is not the same for several reasons.
Firstly, since exchanges go and will continue to go with automated software to check the blockchain path of the deposits, they can adjust their filters to check on deposits as small as they consider to be necessary. Unlike cash.
I can go with a 100$ bill to buy anything and that is okey, it may be different on exchanges.
Also, if I was a drug lord and I deposited 20$ to Binance I could get flagged, if the funds came from the bulk of the illegally obtained satoshis, on the other hand in the same situation, I could take a 20$ from the mountain of dirty money in my narco bunker and buy something with it and no reasonable human being would check for the bill serial number in a data base before selling me a pizza.
heres what most people dont know
when using a mixer yes you are flagged but its not a yes/no flag. its a number/%.. they are not interested in getting a human involved to do an investigation at business(CEX) level unless said number/% reaches a threshold. but they do put you on a certain level of evolved algos to monitor different thresholds more. monitor customers more as each threshold passes
up to a point where thresholds reach a certain level where they would then try to gain more info about you
for instance it costs a bit of money to buy data from other partners/businesses they know/associate with. so they wont waste money buying all details of everyone(unless they are bulk data dealers)
so if your just depositing $10 they wont waste $1 trying to find if you have other accounts on other CEX and your flag rating on those services. however the more you do the more thresholds you reach the more intensive their scrutiny becomes
so someone that is high percentage normal coin movements small percentage mixed several taints back is a lower risk threshold than someone who puts all their funds through a mixer before then depositing into an exchange
and if the value of highly mixed deposits is high enough to breach tax thresholds and border crossing thresholds then they start to gather more information and do investigations. and if in those investigations they see some criminal tracings of funds they report it to authorities
they wont reveal all the thresholds of each level but atleast knowing that they dont investigate everyone is obvious because to watch everyone takes many many people and most businesses and authorities do not have enough personnel to watch everyone
meaning that "government" dont see or watch or receive data about everyone. just the interesting highly suspect stuff that reached a certain threshold that has met some standards regulators require
and regulators in formal legislation DO class using mixers as a red flag. meaning the more you use it the higher the intensity is of being on watch lists where actual humans start investigating. compared to someone just depositing $100 or $10 a week into an exchange from their own employment income accounts