Topic: Can what happened to Samourai Wallet happen to Electrum ? - page 2. (Read 808 times)

Coinjoin is a manual attempt to combine multiple payments into a single transaction to make tracing more difficult. In other words, this is an attempt to make tracking of your transaction difficult and helps you to gain financial privacy. So, it makes it difficult to understand how you have money, how you got it. This is the red flag for governments and financial institutes. In other words, they want to know how you get your money. You would probably say that it's not their job and I agree with you but it is what it is.

Lighting network might be banned and unsupported soon as there is as scepticism about it from developers. Electrum doesn't offer you coinjoin service (but they might be forced to remove lighting network because electrum gives you the possibility to choose an UTXO, open a Lighting channel and do a submarine swap.
I still think that Electrum won't be banned, it doesn't offer you services that will improve your privacy.

That excuse works very well on dumb people and you know what I told about the number of dumb people recently . Probably more than 50% of world money is used by criminals but no one talks about that. Governments are a group of criminals who are in charge of countries, the rule is like, government is the only legal group of criminals and because of this legality, they are entitled as anti-criminals. So, people believe whatever they say. No one should be blocking any service where 5% of users are criminals but they do anyway because people agree with them and there is no massive protest.

Coinjoining is also a natural thing for Bitcoin.

It definitely helps engaging in illegal activities, because it is untraceable, just like whirlpool was. BTW, from all whirlpool's coins, it is said that only 5% are used in criminal proceeds.

Coinjoining using whirlpool's coordinator was also perfectly legal, until recently.

I read BlackHatCoiner's post for sure. No one knows what will happen in the future, who would expect if it become forbidden to go outside without mask? Right now, I can confidently say that Electrum is in no danger and no one will seize Electrum's domain, nor ban the wallet.

- Coin control - this is just a natural thing for Bitcoin, they can't ban Electrum for this feature, this is a native feature.
- Lighting Network - This is not prohibited and we don't see articles about Lazarus laundering money via Lighting Network channel, something like that. It is also never mentioned that Lighting Network helps in doing something illegal, so no worries right now.
- Tor support - They can't ban electrum for that, they have to ban Tor at first before they ban Electrum. Connecting to Tor is also perfectly legal, so no worries.
- What they want to ban is financial privacy, they want to ban the possibility of untraceable transactions, services that offer you such feature.
- There are many reasons to ban Bitcoin mining, for example unnecessary electricity waste.

There are many reasons to ban Bitcoin mining, for example unnecessary electricity waste. If your government thinks that Bitcoin is a money and electricity shouldn't be wasted on it, then they can ban it.

If everything was full privacy, the government wouldn't be able to find out what they want from us. I'm not here to say that they are anti-privacy, lest I be wrong.
Samourai wallet has features that can strengthen user privacy. Because it uses Coinjoin in its mixing services, this is a strong reason for the authorities to confiscate it.

When the government targets all services that can increase privacy for money laundering reasons, then I think they don't want everything to be completely private and that's where I think they are anti-privacy. Too political an act.
I don't see that Electrum can be their target with all that Electrum has.

That's a good point. I'd say there is a degree for their anti-privacy policies. For example I don't know of any country that spends billions of dollars mining citizens data every second of every day (ie. what NSA does).

@BlackHatCoiner already answered this above your comment.

I'd like to add that it's a slippery slope, when they start cracking down on Bitcoin related services there is no reason to believe anything or anyone is safe.
Why did the Chinese dictators shut down bitcoin mining? Mining wasn't breaking any laws. But that was the same slippery slope that started from authorities shutting down the CEXes that were obviously laundering money in broad daylight.

As for Electrum nodes, I wouldn't worry about it. They are already widespread across the globe to not have to shut down if authorities in one jurisdiction "went crazy".
You can take a look at default servers here and find more of them in your Electrum client or by going through the peer discovery protocol of Electrum itself manually
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/servers.json

To be honest, absolutely every country is anti-privacy. I don't care what they write on papers because that's different, not everything is as fulfilled as it has to be. So, absolutely every country is anti-privacy!

By the way, why would anyone want to shut down Electrum? I mean, it's a simple wallet, doesn't offer coinjoin or mixing, so, there is nothing to deal with it. But if they decide to seize their domain and ban Electrum, then many people will shut down electrum servers, especially those who live in countries where US has extradition treaties. So, in that case, we will be dependent on people from Russia, Iran, Belarus and so on.

Then they have to shut down Tor project and probably Mozilla's headquarter (why not? ).

Electrum comes with coin control, lightning network, Tor, plugin support, custom Electrum server support-- all of which allow privacy enhancement. If you pass a legislation that treats Samourai Wallet as illicit based on the criterion that it enhances privacy, then you open the Pandora's box to ban everything that can help you enhance you privacy. Everything, even your Internet connection; it's that vague.

I don't believe things will go that far, and the reason they were shut down is that they enhance privacy for BTC users, and we all know the government is targeting any service that enhances privacy, by charging them for allowing money launderers conceal their tx's. So Electrum and some of the services you mentioned do not fall under this category, because they do not enhance privacy or make it hard to track BTC tx's.

What happened in Samourai is that a non-custodial wallet was charged for "allowing" money laundering. That is so broad that anything can be considered likewise. We hadn't experienced such a case before, it was mostly mixers which were getting shut down, and lawfully, as they were transmitting money. Now this is a game changer. Joinmarket, Electrum, Bitcoin Core, DEXes, C++ libraries, Internet providers, this forum-- anything can be considered a money transmitter after Samourai.

And for those who think Samourai was shut down: It's just one coordinator. Another one might pop up. Whirlpool isn't over, and probably that's why they had announced decentralized Whirlpool recently.

You can always extract your seed words/private keys from electrum and use them in some other wallet software. If the electrum devs get arrested tomorrow, you won't get affected in a major way. You'll have to find another wallet software and there are plenty. However, electrum is still the best light crypto wallet software imo and without a doubt it will be a big loss for the crypto community.

But these are very theoretical events. Electrum isn't mixing coins or providing other privacy tools like coinjoin so nothing will happen to its devs.

It seems that we are in Wild Wild West, so they can do anything they want now, because they have the ''guns'' in their hands.

I don't think that Electrum wallet is going to be one of their primary targets, and I wouldn't worry much about that, but they could always add more pressure on electrum developers and servers.
Being anonymous bitcoin developers with good security practices is worth a lot these days, and it would be a smart decision hindsight.

Yes, assuming government don't want their citizen store Bitcoin or altcoin on self-custodial wallet. But for now, there aren't many excuse to get rid of Electrum or other wallet. Electrum by default doesn't offer much privacy either.


In addition, the website clearly state it's not available on Bitcoin mainnet for now.

But Joinstr is not bundled with Electrum or even mentioned once on its website. What are you on about?

It does thanks to Joinstr - https://www.coinjoins.org/wallets/joinstr

Electrum does not have the capability of mixing so it should not be affected.

That's unlikely to happen to Electrum and even if it happens there is nothing to worry about.
Electrum is an open source software so as long as you or anyone else have a copy of the source code, you can compile it any time and continue using it.
Also, even all Electrum servers are taken down, you can run your own Electrum server and connect your wallet to it. This is the beauty of open-source and decentralization.

Assuming that the United States seized Samourai Wallet due to money laundering, but does the United States need a reason to ban a service? The United States may decide to ban wallets, including Electrum. If this happens, you can still use the wallet if there are servers running, or extract the private keys and add them to bitcoinCore or any other full node wallet.
Full node wallets are the only wallets that cannot be stopped, but if the developers are arrested, updating the code may be slow or unreliable.

The FBI is going after Bitcoin mixers and those wallets that offer such facilities. They will never come after those wallets that they think are used to hold Bitcoin. In case they seek for the developers of Electrum walle,t they will need to do a big hard work as the developers are scattered all over the world.

Let's assume they got hold of everyone and then they confiscated the software codes, they will still not be able to come after you. If they still manage then you can delete your wallet and before that do create a backup and keep safe those seed phrases. With those seed phrases you will be able to gain access to your Bitcoin with any compatible wallet.

Almost all Bitcoin wallets are compatible with each other as per my understanding. If, I am wrong then someone with technical knowledge will update my understanding.

Anti-privacy dictatorships such as USA can always arrest anybody including developers like they did the Samourai devs and they can easily shut down any website or take down the open source code on Github.

What they can't do is shut down Electrum because it is not centralized the way Samourai was. Electrum relies on "indexed full nodes" known as Electrum servers that are run by individuals that are independent and can continue running these nodes as long as they want since they are from various jurisdictions.

Other software has to be analyzed independently and as a case by case basis because they are wildly different. As a rule of thumb the more centralized they are (eg. an SPV wallet relying on a single centralized server to sync) the more the damage of shutting them down will be.

Phoenix wallet forced their team to remove their app for US users for the "Lightning" nodes because it is considered as "Money Services Businesses" for their very own terms and reasons. So electrum getting affected to these bans is likely possible i just don't know how they will consider electrum as a "business", but only for US, unless some countries copy this kind of regulation,


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