If people are not convinced yet that wasabi devs are incompetent clowns, here are a few notable assertions from the podcast:
You’re changing the acceptance of which coins do you consider valid—not on the Bitcoin consensus layer—that’s the other important thing. Bitcoin consensus is still permissionless and decentralized enough that you can make payments even if you are blacklisted: you can just either get hashrate yourself or bribe a miner to hash a block with your transaction in it—so Bitcoin works. But what we’re talking about here is: will you get access to someone else’s computer? Will someone else allow you to write stuff on his computer, basically? And in my opinion, ultimately it comes down to property rights. A coordinator is just someone else’s computer—and it’s not yours. So you ought to be quite thankful that someone actually provides you a service where you can use his computer for certain things like coordinating a round.
This guy just asserted that my decision to join my inputs with someone else is the same as taking control of his computer. He also stated that blacklisting does not happen on Bitcoin because you could bribe a miner, which is not true. The reason you do not get blacklisted is because it is censorship resistant. A mining pool blacklisting transactions would directly attack their revenue and reputation, but even if it did not, then some other pool would mine it sooner or later.
By the way why doesn't the same apply on coinjoin? "Coinjoin consensus is still permissionless and decentralized enough that you can make payments even if you are blacklisted: you can just leave Wasasi and use a censorship resistant alternative".
But then the more pressing matter is it’s not always gonna be clear-cut, especially when you start making transactions, especially when you have things like CoinSwap, Lightning, PayJoin—we’re working really hard to make the life of chain surveillance miserable, and that means that they’re gonna have many more false positives.
This is the plan guys! They are paying a blockchain analysis company so that they can verify beforehand that their product becomes less and less accurate!
So they’re gonna say that this coin is owned by a criminal, even though it’s actually a peaceful individual. And they’re gonna have false negatives.
And we are going to censor the individual nonetheless because not only do we buy from blockchain analysis but we even
allow them to reject any coins they dislike from the coinjoin!
And I think technically how this is gonna work is that during input registration or at the end of input registration, an API request is made to the chain surveillance firm, and then you see which inputs are not allowed or blacklisted, and these then get a response from the coordinator with, Sorry, we could not allow your coin to be registered because of these reasons. But the cool thing is: your money never moved—this was all during the coordination of the PSBT.
Money never move because you are a criminal! Cool!
But if, on the other hand, only politicians and other violent criminals are getting blacklisted—well, you know, then I’m happy.
You do not deserve privacy if you are a bad boi!
There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general what we can say is: yes—that is another precedent that UTXOs are not fungible, that there is metadata associated to UTXOs that are outside of the consensus implementation. And that’s just super difficult because now you’re gonna have different surveillance companies that have different blacklists and different risk scores associated to it. And now you have competing soft forked clients, basically, that reach a different consensus of which coins are good and which coins are bad. And well—there’s no solution to it.
Blockchain analysis is flawed, different surveillance companies produce different "coin risk factors" so they are not to be trusted, but hey why not buying from one?
