kugelblitz
Explorer
I read the book. The only mentions of Monero are early on where Chainalysis spooks claim to be able to trace some small portion of Monero, but decline to offer any evidence, because they have smoke to sell to the law enforcement muppets who believe them. Later on in the book comes this quote:
Of course you can get arrested and convicted using Monero. There are infinite number of operational security mistakes you can make yourself to deanonymise yourself. However, the core technology is secure, and there is no public evidence that anyone has fundamentally broken the protections of Monero (Zcash is a joke, so I don't care about that one). We know this because about a year ago, a training video produced for IRS by Chainalysis leaked about a year ago and they had nothing to show for their multi-year effort to trace Monero except showing how they exploit OPSEC errors.
The existing attacks on Monero are either timing based (you send 100 USD, the criminal receives 100 USD, if they're monitoring both sides, you can infer what happened) or malicious remote node based (the Monero node is hostile, and it messes with you and collects your IP address) which is easily addressed by using TOR or running your own node. While those are a problem, they are being addressed, and only the most high profile users need to worry about them.
Monero is not a magic bullet, nothing is, but when used correctly, it is, for all intents and purposes, untraceable.
That's better, but it is not ideal. You're still sending money to a vendor from an account that has your real identity tied to it.
You should still put a self-custody wallet as an intermediary step, so that anyone who looks into the transactions sees a wallet that they cannot prove belongs to anyone. Sure, there's still a link to you, but it is the investigator's job to prove that you're in control of it, and if you don't blab about it, that's very hard to do, and not worth the effort.