Been noticing recently that people are saying tumbling is pointless. Then I see other people say you need to tumble. It seems that if someone wanted to find out where your BTC are going, they could just follow the original purchase down the blockchain. It probably wouldnt matter how many times your coins are xfered to a different wallet either. Is there any articles or info on this that will give evidence one way or the other? Right now it just seems like people have differing opinions, nothing concrete.
A tumbler does not irrevocably sever the link between the transaction that put coins into the tumbler and the coins that come out.
It is easy to identify addresses as being owned by a tumbler and therefore easy to see wallets paying into one and when one of them pay out.
These address typically are poorly active (they are either the DNM loading address, or a coinbase wallet address or whatever).
So while the coins are unrelated to your input coins. It wold be possible for LE to follow back through. Lets say they busted a DNM, they take it over, they find your your account and decide to bust you.
They provide you with address X then they could simply follow you back to your coinbase account and get your DOX... Shit.
lets say you tumble, now you've provided a massive inconvience to making that link between your account and your coinbase account. It's still there but under a pile of shit. You could be anyone of them, but if you are worth getting they could always check for priors for all those people and come up with enough to search you.
It is most likely that LE will be using automatic tools to do the search, so just passing it from address to address is likely pointless, tumbling has a better bet of providing some protection.
But, will LE ever bother? Who knows...