Topic: Can what happened to Samourai Wallet happen to Electrum ? (Read 821 times)

I guess that I'm missing something, since imho we have the same now: any contributor can upload his local files and start a new git. ...Just the change history will be gone.

On the other hand... I was thinking on forks of git where we take advantage of blockchains and... surprise, I've found out that there are already such projects, like GitTorrent where "Git objects are retrieved via the BitTorrent protocol and references are stored in Bitcoin transactions"^[1], or Git-Ssb (using Secure Scuttlebutt), or Mango "which combines Ethereum with IPFS or Swarm as a backend for Git"^[1]

Maybe other options are also there and this can be a next step. However, considering rather unlikely the scenario Bitcoin git ever gets threatened by US govt, I expect the devs will just leave it on GitHub for convenience.

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^[1] The info and quotes are from this page, which is not mine, I've got it from a search engine: https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely-decentralised-7aef8bcbcfe6

Git is the protocol, yes. Github is a centralized platform, yes. Gitlab is like Github, not exactly. Gitlab allows you to use it as cloud service (just like Github), but it also allows you to self-host your own repositories: https://about.gitlab.com/install/.

Yes, but after a few people start working on it, then the site that hosts it stops being a central point of failure. If the authorities shut it down, any contributor can set up an instance of the same repository; they have the repo stored in their computer.

You can indeed install and run your own git server. But that will be just another centralized server to host the source code.

But for example a much better use of those idiotic inscriptions would be to store a snapshot/zip of bitcoin source code for every tag/release also on the blockchain.
Then seizing GitHub would set back everything only one step back (actually even less, since the devs prolly have their sources locally).

You can run your own GitLab instance.

(I'm on mobile so won't link to it here, do a Google DuckDuckGo search for it)

Git is the protocol and Github is the implementation and the host of that protocol to share code. There is no viable alternative for that host that is not centralized or located in the same jurisdiction. For example some suggest Gitlab but it is pretty much the same as Github, it is centralized and just another US based company (GitLab Inc. with headquarters San Francisco).

Sparrow was using Samourai's whirlpool. Now that Samourai is shut down, the whirlpool server is not working, and if you try to mix with Sparrow, you'll get an error. They removed it in their latest version: https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/releases.

People. At first, they were confiscating coins sitting in mixers, and taking control over mixers, scaring people from using mixers. Now they're seizing developers who work on privacy-enhancing software, essentially scaring people from writing code that makes your coins anonymous.

If they don't have a person to seize, they cannot do anything. You can't stop decentralized software. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like Bitcoin.

That can't happen to Electrum. Electrum has existed since 2011 and the number of people and companies that use Electrum must be high. If they seize, block or ban Electrum, too many people will be in trouble, and this can result in protests.
To be fair, I don't know what they have to seize, a code? It's perfectly legal to use Bitcoin and to run your own node, not only legal, but it's necessary for the safety of Bitcoin. If they seize Electrum nodes, we can create our own node and connect Electrum to that one and use the Electrum wallet again. I personally think that what happened to Samourai can't happen to Electrum because these two are very different from each other.

You are right about Electrum, however, both mixers and CoinJoin are not illegal, but how many mixers have been taken down, and now Samouria which is also just a wallet that helps bitcoiners enhance privacy has also been taken down. while Wasabi didn't wait for the government to knock on their doors before they shut down their CoinJoin service.

The point here is that the government has opened the pandora's box and they can ban any service and claim that it enhances privacy for bitcoiners, even if the wallet isn't advertised as such. Personally i do not want things to go that far, but i think we are already heading in that direction.

Electrum is just a wallet that does not violate any laws that could allow the government to pay attention to it. There are no prohibited functions in it, only the most necessary things to receive and send bitcoins, also can hold there, but for this it is better to use a hardware wallet.

I was thinking about the sparrow, it has some kind of mixing function, although I have never used it enough, so I am well versed in all its capabilities. I just use an Electrum bundle with a hardware wallet and it seems to me that this is enough to safely store my btc.

Fortunately, it will always be possible to decentrally exchange BTC for XMR, so you can always opt-out to fully anonymous. But, if you want to stay anonymous without exchanging bitcoin for an altcoin, that's difficult. Your best course would be Joinmarket, which is far from ideal.

It's called git.  

Additionally,  electrum is open source.

Anyone can take the code and run, and keep the development
Samourai was basically a software and a service , electrum is just an open software

This is what I was thinking could be the next phase by Anti Privacy US Government. They are going to heap pressure on platforms like GitHub not to allow development of such apps on their platforms, just like the bans of Google play and App Store.

This will massively affect the collaboration and development of the projects we love here.

Do we have any good alternatives to GitHub? A platform that is more like a "decentralized GitHub" that the US Government can not just threaten?

Sad, but i think you are right. The government is our common enemy, and they have to power to ban, seize and imprison, developers are not going to risk jail time to preserve privacy on the BTC network. They make it look like it is a fight against money laundering, but this is an attack on BTC, against its fungibility and privacy on the network, it's going to be impossible to use BTC privately in sometime to come.

Privacy of Bitcoin is what I was talking about. Not everything. If developers are afraid of writing code that enhances Bitcoin privacy, then we've lost the war.

Not lost, losing.

It's not over until they completely ban privacy of everything.

Correct, if. Alone, these pieces of software are unlikely to provide sufficient levels of privacy, but if they do, then expect their developers to be in danger. For example, if a softfork was proposed to implement ring signatures and confidential transactions, which would obscure the amounts transacted and the sender in each transaction, then I'd expect the authorities to address them before tomorrow morning. Same goes for Electrum if they updated their client to support decentralized coinjoin, as another example.

Bitcoin is getting adopted, price increases, let's buy lambos! etc., but we're missing the point. One of the core principles of cryptocurrency, being privacy, is taken away aggressively. We may have won the fight, but we have lost the war, in Bitcoin. That's my view. 

If Electrum is dangerous, then so is Bitcoin Core and the whole Bitcoin with its blockchain. Then they have to simply ban Bitcoin but that's not going to happen because as you see they changed their strategy and instead of fighting it, they became a part of it and recently we even got Bitcoin ETF approval. This means that they aren't going to ban Bitcoin, they accept it's nature and that's all. It's also getting easier to tract transaction these days compared to old days and I think their main plan will be to censor miners, i.e. they'll be forced to ban certain transactions. If governments have this level of control, then even Samourai and mixers will not be a threat for them.
So, to sum up, Bitcoin is getting adopted, it's welcomed and ETF approval proves that. Electrum and similar wallets can't be banned or else they'll have to ban Bitcoin which they definitely aren't going to ban.

I agree it is safer than Samourai. But, safe in general? Depends on how people use it. If effective coinjoin plugins were developed, and everyone who coinjoined in whirlpool migrated to Electrum, then I expect authorities to address them.

Well, you can't cut a loaf of bread with whirlpool or with coinjoin plugins, so this analogy does not apply. Certain software is simply written to enhance your privacy, there is no other utility.

Whirlpool has been removed in v1.9.0: https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/releases.

I think that's why Electrum is safe, it doesn't advertise itself as privacy enhancer. Just imagine, a shop that sells knives for bread and a shot that sells knives to kill people. Which one will be closed and which one will be left open? Of course first one will remain open and the second one will be closed by authorities while it's equally possible to kill a human via knife bought in both places.
Yes, Electrum offers coin control but it's absolutely manual, you can use it save on transaction fees too, so this feature is not automatically labeled as privacy enhancer but definitely yes, it can.

I don't know if it's hard to think like me in this case but for all the reasons I stated above, I think that Electrum is safe and we shouldn't worry about it but I can't say the same about Sparrow if they don't remove some of their features.

And coin control enables manual control of which UTXO to spend when making a transaction, avoiding consolidating toxic change, making your tracing more difficult. 

Electrum doesn't directly offer you coinjoin service, but it allows you to install plugins, one of which allows you to join coins with other people. This means that it indirectly supports coinjoin.

It isn't advertised as privacy enhancing, but it does enhance your privacy if you know how to use it. Judging by the stance of the authorities right now in privacy, it will not surprise me if they start threatening Electrum developers.

Forget about the 5%. Privacy, just as every other human right, should not be invaded for "the sake of the children".

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,


https://twitter.com/acinq_co/status/1783878732865740940

Governments can always take down any website they want as history has shown us, but it doesn't necessarily make the software inaccessible. If for instance the authorities shutdown Electrums website, I'm pretty sure the software will still be distributed elsewhere.

Exactly, it doesn't affect the Bitcoin that you have as long as you have control over it.
The reason is that our Bitcoins are stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, not within the wallet itself.  As long as you have your private keys or seed phrase that you can access, you're safe, you can still access your Bitcoins using alternative wallet software, even if Electrum or Samuari wallets were banned.

Speaking of Electrum, IMO, it's impossible to be banned, they aren't the same as Samurai.

First of all, there is no such reason to ban the Electrum wallet and arrest the developer. They aren't doing any crime or earning money from Electrum. Let's say the government still bans and removes the Electrum from everywhere. But still, you will have the funds; you can simply import your seed to any other wallet. Even you can use an Electeum wallet by creating it yourself. Due to open source, anyone can clone it easily. So still, we will be able to use Electrum. It's also decentralised; no one controls it. 

People who used Samourai didn't lose their funds, if that is what you think or mean. It is a self custodial wallet, and even if they can no longer access their funds in the Samourai software, they can use their seed phrase and import their wallet into another recommended software in order to access their funds. Electrum is not a privacy solution and it is not a target of the government.

It's impossible to happen on Electrum it doesn't have a feature the same as Samourai.

Electrum does not have any tools that can be use for money laundering and we're using it as alternative lite wallet because Bitcoin Core needs more resources than Electrum.

The government only seeks for wallets or services that can be used for money laundering maybe Sparrow and Wasabi both of them have the same features as Samourai.

For other wallets, I don't dare to say that something like what happened to Samourai Wallet would not happen if the main party from another wallet did the same thing as Samourai Wallet did.
But I dare say what happened to Samourai Wallet will not happen to Electrum Wallet.

Aside from Charles-Tim's explanation about how Electrum won't end up like Sampurai, they (Electrum) don't get paid and don't make money.
There is a topic that I will leave here to read.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.62801387

Understand that government made actions against the founders for money laundering not for having the wallet software so I don't find any reason for Electrum to be facing the same problem that mixers are facing.

In future if Electrum goes down the path then someone can create a wallet similar to Electrum so no need to worry for now Electrum is safe to be used.

Government can not take down Electrum because Electrum is only a wallet and not centralized in any way than its users using central server to connect to the blockchain.

In short, Electrum is not aiming for money in a centralized way that can make government to take it down. It is not even a mixer. Not having anything that can make it to be the government target.

Hello,

I saw that the founders of Samourai Wallets were arrested and that the website to download the wallet was frozen. I guess this has made users of this wallet unsecured.
Do you think this can happen to other software wallets ? Especially Electrum ?