Thank you everyone for your responses, it's an unfortunate situation but there is nothing we can do without setting dangerous precedents or jeopardizing our integrity and we simply cannot afford to risk any of the 2 outcomes happening. This business is all about trust and the moment it's gone, it's gone for good.
As long as Whirlwind is centralized we will not make any decisions that could be considered questionable in any way, and if we will ever encounter another situation where we're not sure what the best course of action is we will use the same approach and let the community decide what needs to happen and we will respect that consensus regardless of our personal beliefs. We are working towards decentralizing the service so this is how things should work anyways.
With that said, I am interested in hearing from them, maybe they have some "valid" reasons for not doing so? maybe he saved the 3 files and they were empty? what excuse do they have?
We are not sure if the user in question would be willing to confirm this publicly, but he had no excuses. He is aware it's entirely his fault and recognized the mistake, that's the sole reason we even considered helping him out in the first place, it seems like a genuine mistake. We always assume everything we do will become publicly known so we were concerned about how our intervention would be perceived by the community and the responses here proved our worries were not unfounded.
It's important to mention that we will not treat this as a 'donation', if the user in question ever gains access to his private key then he can withdraw without any issues. If you don't donate yourself the Note balance will remain unchanged regardless of how long you keep your
inside Whirlwind.
deposit unless you have it stored safely. There are 3 warnings about this only at the first step (which is also named 'Generate and Save Note Private Key'), let alone the FAQ, so you should take it seriously.
There seem to be some misunderstandings regarding the Anonymity Mining campaign so I will quote the last message from that thread in full for better visibility, it also contains more general information about Whirlwind so we would recommend reading it:
I'm not quite sure if this will be profitable in the long run. I haven't heard of any mixer that has managed to run for that long.
Not yet? I thought the previous mixers had been around for a long time, for example Chipmixer, they had a very long time. It must have been more than 5 years, right? Furthermore, I think we don't have any problem in withdrawing, they don't talk about our withdrawal limit time.
It was 6 years. Still would not be long enough to break even though (assuming you start today).
You may have misunderstood how the campaign works, it would be insane to ask you to deposit for 6 years or any amount of time really.
Distributions are made every day around 12:10 AM UTC so to be profitable you would need to wait for a maximum of 24 hours if for instance you deposited at 12:20 AM UTC, or only 10 minutes if you deposited at 12:00 AM UTC.
For a 1 BTC deposit your balance would look like this:
Day 1: 1 BTC
Day 2: 1 + (1 * 0.01) / 30 = 1.00033333
Day 3: 1.00033333 + (1.00033333 * 0.01) / 30 = 1.00066677
Day 4: 1.00066677 + (1.00066677 * 0.01) / 30 = 1.00100032
..
You can withdraw your balance at any point, there are no special conditions to participate in the campaign. All Notes are eligible and automatically participate in the campaign, you will receive rewards for as long as your Note is funded.
We hope we will reach the 10,000 Anonymity Set goal as soon as possible. We do not necessarily care about how long you keep your funds inside Whirlwind because by the time the campaign ends we would have added our entire reserve. At that point the multi-sig balance won't be an issue, even if we assume there is no other depositor besides us it should be more than enough to accomodate any amount.
interesting concept, but in the long run how profitable is it on your side because this service has guaranteed rewards for anybody staking going with the "Anonymity Mining"?
In the short term we will almost surely lose money, but in the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant. A few
BTC is a very small price to pay for what we are getting in return through this campaign. After reaching the Anonymity Set goal we expect the business to become very profitable because at that point it wouldn't make much sense for anyone to use another service so it's only a matter of time until Whirlwind's popularity explodes.
Does this mean that over 10k deposits, there will be no more campaign payments? What will be the incentive for people to keep depositing, when the number starts getting close to 10k?
Yes the campaign ends once we reach 10,000 deposits. If you are only looking for rewards then there won't be any incentive to deposit anymore, we are not a staking platform. On the other hand if you're looking for real privacy then you'd get it by simply using the service, and you could get it for free if you don't choose to donate.
I'd be willing to deposit, but there's this thing in the back of my head saying: "What if they have access to these generated private keys? It wouldn't be the first time when the mixing operator lied about something. If whirlwind gets busted somehow, the way they got Tornado, Helix, Chipmixer, will they be able to get my bitcoin?"
We have no reason to keep the Note private keys, if we wanted to steal your funds we could simply drain the multi-sig since that's where the
BTC is kept. Currently the service is centralized, so you need to trust us if you want to use it.
From a technical point of view Tornado is the undisputed king and IMO it cannot be compared to anything else. Even though it got sanctioned no user lost any funds and it continues to function to this day, in fact it's unstoppable as long as Ethereum continues to exist.
If it's not obvious already Whirlwind is built on the same model, so it's already 'battle-tested' and we know for a fact it offers the best privacy assuming enough volume goes through it and the Anonymity Set is big enough. Considering this our only remaining important task besides reaching the Anonymity Set goal is to decentralize the service and we are already working on that as we speak.
We will also improve upon Tornado's compliance module and that should be more than enough to avoid giving anyone reasons to target us, more info about this will be released once we finalize the details.
Regarding Whirlwind getting 'busted' firstly there is no reason for this to happen for the foreseeable future, but our response to this concern is worth reading nonetheless:
Rather than asking a few questions about user privacy, I will ask another kind of question.
What preventative measures have you taken to protect yourself from arrest and federal government seizure of website assets (i.e: how do you plan to avoid Cipmixer's fate)?
It sure is a valid question and I understand the concern, I'll share my view on this issue. As I said since before I even launched the service, I am hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.
I could give more technical details about our security, but all I will say for now is that we took the most extreme security precautions possible. Our "hot wallet" is a 3/3 multi-sig with one of the signers being a physical server, so funds are safe. The infrastructure looks like a mini blockchain (with only 3 validators or signers which are all run by us for now), so even if the frontend or backend servers would get hacked, no funds could be stolen since faking guarantee letters using the backend server doesen't do anything as the signers would also have to verify. It's complicated, but like I said before if I'll find willing trusted members to run signers with us I am willing to do it.
Having said all of the above as far as I'm concerned I am not doing anything illegal. I don't encourage illegal activity and will never promote the service on the darknet or for any illegal purposes, I'm a simple provider of privacy services. There are no statistics regarding % of CEX funds coming from illicit sources so we can't compare to what we know about mixers, but my guess is that the number is very similar if not higher for centralized exchanges. There are bad actors in every industry, you can't just shut down all businesses of one type because of a few bad apples. If the service will start to get seriously abused by bad actors and big pressure will be put on us then I'd much rather shut down the service early and honorably than put users funds and privacy at risk, but for now I still believe there has to be a way to run everything legally. This is not because I don't believe Bitcoin is fungible or anything of this sort, but regardless if the service gets seized or sanctioned, the end result is the same as in it can't really be used anymore, so everyone loses. Having great security is a must, but relying on this by itself doesen't generate any value for the long term. I'd much rather try to find a way in which everyone is happy, or at the very least not too unhappy, while users enjoy full privacy. This is what they pay for and nothing less is acceptable
I also want to emphasize that I have not commited any crimes while creating Whirlwind, for example identity theft.
Even though I don't believe I have anything to worry about, I'd still prefer to add more signers to the multi-sig so I don't have full control anymore. This would make it safer for everyone, I really do not like the fact that users have to trust me. For now this is the only option though, and I will not take any steps in this direction unless I am 100% sure it's done in a safe way. The community would also have to agree with the plan before I set it in motion
