my point is that most people don't have the opsec skills to outsmart big data. it doesn't matter if you coinjoin/whirlpool into thousands of outputs that go off and do different things. You can simplify the graph traversal by targeting the person at the start of KYC instead of trying to trace backward from the point of offense. You don't need to traverse back from a channel open request and get lost in a coinjoin if you are looking to target a specific human and find out what they've done, just start with the human, examine all of their KYC outputs to flatten out all the coinjoins to specific Lightning Node channel open operations. If you find that all (or even a significant number) of the channel opens are children of coinjoins that this user originated with KYC, you found your node operator. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand or a million shuffled operations. This can be examined in a few seconds of compute.

Patterns of spending are an opsec vulnerability and doing something like running a business or operating a routing node are going to create a trail.

The thing I have a hard time with is thinking that they will just say, “oh well, the coins went from KYC to a mixer, I guess we lost that trail” instead of filing a law suit and compelling the individual to purger themselves in defense against hidden data collection that proves you either operated a node or donated to a go fund me or engaged in any other kind of commerce deemed illicit.

It also seems like wishful thinking to be able to hide a lightning node unless you fund everything from non-KYC coins or fund a wallet in one operation. If you have a regular stream of KYC coins going into coinjoin transactions that then can be correlated into outputs that later open channels for a particular lightning node, you can be sure your meatspace identity is attached to that node through analysis.