I started using circle well over a year ago, though I haven't used it in the past month and a half. I never tumbled (I was in the camp that assumed for small time buyers like me, tumbling was overkill and unnecessary). But I always made sure to send my coin from circle to an intermediate wallet made on Tails before sending to a market, and I always used a different address for the receiving intermediary wallet. I never had any problems. Circle even greatly increased the cap on how many coins I could get in a week, a few months back.
But I've read a couple threads on here recently about circle banning users who send to intermediary wallets before sending to a market. I am skeptical of this. First of all, would circle really put in the resources for tracking coin that way?
Secondly, there is no way for circle to prove the first transaction (circle->intermediary) isn't a totally legit transaction between two people, and the second one decided to use the coin to get drugs. (Right?) In such a scenario, they're punishing the first person for something they had nothing to do with. This seems like a really shitty and unsustainable business model.
So... is this really a thing now? Might these posts--warning of bans even when intermediate wallets are used--be shills for tumbling services? Is my tinfoil hat on too tight?
I'm also going to ask a question brought up in other threads that was never really addressed, at least not that I could see: How does circle (and the other BTC sources that ban for such behavior) know if coin is being sent to a DNM at all, so long as different addresses are used for each transaction?
Finally, I imagine that direct deals are almost guaranteed not to be cause for circle to ban a user. Then again, I don't understand how they can know an address is that of a DNM, so might they also have a way of knowing the addresses of well-established DD vendors? This seems far-fetched to me, but so does getting banned even while using an intermediate wallet.
So far I've loved circle, and getting banned would really suck, because other options are either no good for me or much more involved and considerably less convenient.
If anyone can shed some light on these questions and hopefully help prevent me and other users like me from losing our source of coin, it would be appreciated. Thanks.
tl;dr: See title.
EDIT: I admit, I somehow missed this thread several days ago and it does answer some of my questions, such as how a service like circle can know you're sending directly to a DNM: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/47o39c/how_can_a_market_address_be_identified_as_a_dnm/
I haven't heard anything about this personally but I'd just say use Helix Light as a solution... You send all of your coins to one address and they become irrelevant. That's the end of the transaction right there. Plus it's a new address every single time