You pretty much
you know bank statements?
It basically leaves a trace from when you receive money, and when you send money off.
Well, Crypto has that same concept, except it is visible to everyone, pretty much. As long as you know the wallet, you know how much money comes in and out.
You can sign up to get wallets by using something like
Trust
Many would recommend MetaMask etc, but I wouldn't recommend it, it is known to tracks metadata about you, as a user, including your IP. So that's a no go.
So, how to make that anonymous, there are plenty of ways really. you can buy crypto through an exchanger/credit card or P2P, that leaves 1 trace of where the money came from right. For example, with Trust, you can buy it with Moonpay inside the app, that's trusted (and I personally brought it many times myself inside the app). There are other more "risky" platforms to buy it completely off the grid but why bother if you will just use a mixer anyways.
What is a mixer?
So, buy crypto using a wallet.
send x amount to mixer.
send x (not the same amount) mixer coins to another wallet (we can call this
Burner Wallet)
repeat until you kind of reached that amount but i would always suggest never to have it the same as what you had thrown in the mixer to keep it more "anonymous".
then now you
Now, your burner wallet, will have x amount of money coming in from the mixer, from differnet sources and places.
Where that money is coming from even more random area that is hard to trace back to your "Original Wallet".
That's the mixer way, the other way is through
Monero Crypto way.
Monero itself is labelled secured, untraceable and pretty much private.
This is a lot simpler and pretty much goes,
Buy Monero -> exchange that monero into an currency you can use to pay for goods (such as BTC/ETH/LTC etc) move it into a burner wallet
pay for goods.