How can I check if a coin is tainted? Are there services or lists?

I have a straightforward question. Is there any way or a service that tells you if a coin is considered tainted?

There is no way you can know a tainted coin. What the centralized platforms are using to know tainted coins is because they tainted it by themselves because they noticed that the coin passed through a coinjoin. If you coinjoin your coins and send it to a centralized exchange, they may seize it and tell you to provide your identity. Some cases are not coinjoin, but coins used in drug or weapon purchases and something like that. I can use fiat to buy a gun and the money later ended on an innocent hand. That is how coins are also. We can even assume that all coins are tainted. If you need a clean coin, you will need to buy the coin directly from a miner from a newly mined coins.

I think "tainted" is an arbitrary label which just gets abused by exchanges as a reason for withholding funds. Pretty sure that they simply use AML tools like Chainalysis, Elliptic, CipherTrace, Crystal Blockchain etc. which basically only filter out the coins that come from unregistered exchanges, illegal services and mixers. If you contact those service providers, they might provide you with a blacklist or something that you can use to check your own transactions.

I have a business partner that is looking to do large escrow movements. 100 btc and up. I don’t want people dumping tainted coins on him. I have seen a few addresses marked bad on a few threads. I am hesitant to let the person offer to do escrows unless there is a mechanism to protect him from a tainted coin dump. I suppose I can word contracts a certain way but I really would like to check for tainted stolen etc since it wont be small amounts.

amlbot.com also can check an address and return a risk score for little to no fee But because there is no from-a-to-z guidelines or tech that every platform follows in regards to taints, receiving a low risk score does not necessarily mean the client is off the hook. Utlimately, it would depend on how each custodial platform investigate -- they may or may not use amlbot tech and/or use it in combination with other tools so other variables are at play as well.

What describes "tainted" coins to you? If it's coins that have been mixed or coinjoined in the past then you can use chain analysis tools which are available. Researching on how mixers work, identifying their addresses directly and recording them can help your filtering. If you're looking out for coins that have been involved in illegal activities, then you'll have to do the same by looking out for addresses that have been blacklisted to belong to scammers along with the UTXOs and block them.

There is only one way for someone to be sure that he will not buy or in any other way come into possession of what some call "tainted coins", and that is to buy Bitcoin directly from the miners, and such coins used to be called "virgin coins", and it was said that some even pay a premium price for such coins. Considering that we have about 19.6 million BTC in circulation, of which we mined 10+ million in the first 4 years, and another 5.25 million after 8 years, all the bad things that happened in the first years and after that in some way marked all that coins. Of course, every BTC seizure that has happened since then has cleaned up a lot of BTC in some way.

If this large amount of Bitcoin will come from multiple sources, I expect that the process of verifying the cleanliness of each address separately will take a long time and may be expensive. Instead, why not try to buy this amount from one of the Bitcoin mining pools, or there is another option that may be more difficult, as you can buy it from US government confiscations, this way you will guarantee that you will get 100% clean Bitcoin.

That's my opinion which is why I have delayed advising the people asking me to do hi end escrow amounts unless they can get into a direct relationship with coinbase. I do not see the 1-3% fees working if they get 100 'bad' BTC coins in an escrow.

AML services do not guarantee 100% results. If your business partner carries out large escrow movements, then he needs to enter into an agreement with AML providers in order to later avoid accusations of illegal activities. This will reduce legal risks for his business.

In addition to direct purchase from miners, it is possible to get "clean coins" if they are bought at auctions - and the US has a considerable amount of seized BTC that it occasionally sells at auctions. However, even if clients would buy 100 BTC through the OTC of one of the well-known CEXs, wouldn't that be a sufficient guarantee that that BTC is "clean" enough to not have problems with it in the future?

https://cryptonews.net/news/bitcoin/28718789/ "The U.S. government’s holdings of 210,392 BTC worth $14.4 billion make the country one of the largest holders of the coin. The head of CryptoQuant, Ki Young Ju, noted that the U.S. Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and other departments have not sold a single Bitcoin (BTC) since July 2023. The government’s unrealized profits increased 2.4 times." I would say that such auctions do not happen very often.

The US Marshall is no longer doing auctions for digital assets such as crypto unless it's a repayment seizure, they re doing OTC deals, same happened as per the article you quote: You will only hear about those sales after the fillings for each case are submitted. As for Phil, initial question, aml bots are crap! I don't know who was lying about that but look how an adress that was funded via crypto.com It might trigger a ton of false positives and at the same time label them as clean coins from an exchange despite those being stolen from somebody via phishing.