The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs - page 5.

mk4

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Quote from: witcher_sense on March 14, 2022, 02:33:09 AM

The precedent is set: bitcoin wallet developers and providers now get to decide which transactions are accepted in their wallet and which are not. Bitcoin is not fungible anymore, even on a non-custodial wallet's level.

That's probably too much of a stretch. I mean, there's a reason why it's heavily recommended for people to run their own full nodes. You've worded it as if "it's over" with bitcoin lol.

PrivacyG

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Wow, this sucks. It confirms previous fears of mine that if they can not censor Bitcoin directly, they will try to do it by strictly censoring exchanges, ATM's, wallets et cetera. If and when Bitcoin gets a fully working user friendly and fully decentralized Atomic Swap mechanism with Monero, this problem will be gone as it allows you get to privacy immediately without having to rely on trust or censored coordinators. That is unless GitHub gets censored too..

Quote from: witcher_sense on March 14, 2022, 02:33:09 AM

Anyway, what options do users, who want their transactions coinjoined with Wasabi Wallet, actually have?

1) Should they use other mixing solutions like centralized mixers before sending their funds to Wasabi?Wallet?
2) Should they create a sufficient number of hops artificially before sending funds to Wasabi?Wallet?
3) Should they start looking for, or building their own, custom, more decentralized, coordinators?
4) Maybe they should switch for other CoinJoin implementations like Whirlpool or Joinmarket and forget about using Wasabi Wallet?

1. If 'illegal' UTXOs are banned, then we can safely assume coins coming out of mixers will be banned as well.
2. This seems to be the best option. I think Samourai already has this option of generating artificial hops? I highly doubt an 'illegal' UTXO that has been through 20-30 hops would still be banned. That is, unless they decide to ban a UTXO and include any future address they may end up at into the ban. This is however unrealistic, the number of non banned UTXOs will very quickly shrink to zero.
3, 4. Maybe Joinmarket, although if this is a precedent then expect Whirlpool and Joinmarket to join the censorship.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

witcher_sense

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Quote from: mk4 on March 13, 2022, 11:08:22 PM

that they're taking extra safety precautions because they expect the government to interfere.

According to this tweet, they "are trying to protect the company and the project by minimizing the amount of these hackers and scammers using the coordinator and getting us in trouble. This should be in the rights of the company to do but believe me, none of us are happy about this."

Perhaps they are afraid that Russian oligarchs will try to circumvent sanctions by obfuscating their transactions with Wasabi Wallet CoinJoins?

Anyway, what options do users, who want their transactions coinjoined with Wasabi Wallet, actually have?

1) Should they use other mixing solutions like centralized mixers before sending their funds to Wasabi?
2) Should they create a sufficient number of hops artificially before sending funds to Wasabi?
3) Should they start looking for, or building their own, custom, more decentralized, coordinators?
4) Maybe they should switch for other CoinJoin implementations like Whirlpool or Joinmarket and forget about using Wasabi Wallet?

The precedent is set: bitcoin wallet developers and providers now get to decide which transactions are accepted in their wallet and which are not. Bitcoin is not fungible anymore, even on a non-custodial wallet's level.

pooya87

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Quote from: mk4 on March 13, 2022, 11:51:23 PM

It is sad, but it's either you cooperate or you get shut down; or worse, you get put to jail.

There is always a third option which is full decentralization and full transparency.
Unless the dev lives in a traditional dictatorship (instead of the modern dictatorship) they can always be transparent about everything including if the government has put any pressure on them to change any part of the open source code they've released and also being open source and decentralized, any such change would be found out immediately.

mk4

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Quote from: n0nce on March 13, 2022, 11:21:12 PM

I think that's one of the reasons Satoshi actually disappeared. If you've got a centralized team, no matter how decentralized your software is, governments will have a weak spot to put pressure on and they'll sooner or later have to cave in.

Yes. To be fair with Wasabi/zkSNACKs though, they never claimed to be decentralized in the first place, no? Their software is just non-custodial.

Quote from: n0nce on March 13, 2022, 11:21:12 PM

It's sad, since I like to give developers the benefit of the doubt that they don't want to play along.

It is sad, but it's either you cooperate or you get shut down; or worse, you get put to jail.

n0nce

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Quote from: mk4 on March 13, 2022, 11:08:22 PM

Quote from: pooya87 on March 13, 2022, 10:36:34 PM

So where is this censorship going to stop? Are they going to say we are no longer accepting users from country A, B, C, D? Or claim the government ordered them to censor a list of addresses?

Thinking realistically — it's not going to stop. And yea, I'm pretty sure it's either due to government intervention or that they're taking extra safety precautions because they expect the government to interfere. It totally sucks, but I really don't blame them for the decision.

I think that's one of the reasons Satoshi actually disappeared. If you've got a centralized team, no matter how decentralized your software is, governments will have a weak spot to put pressure on and they'll sooner or later have to cave in. It's sad, since I like to give developers the benefit of the doubt that they don't want to play along.

mk4

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Quote from: pooya87 on March 13, 2022, 10:36:34 PM

So where is this censorship going to stop? Are they going to say we are no longer accepting users from country A, B, C, D? Or claim the government ordered them to censor a list of addresses?

Thinking realistically — it's not going to stop. And yea, I'm pretty sure it's either due to government intervention or that they're taking extra safety precautions because they expect the government to interfere. It totally sucks, but I really don't blame them for the decision.

pooya87

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This is exactly why I always complain whenever I see even a small trace of centralization (mainly about DEX and the fact that there is a central server involved in it somewhere).

So where is this censorship going to stop? Are they going to say we are no longer accepting users from country A, B, C, D? Or claim the government ordered them to censor a list of addresses?

witcher_sense

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The tweet: https://twitter.com/wasabiwallet/status/1503091503207432193

Essentially, they will start refusing UTXOs associated with illegal activities, preventing them from participating in CoinJoin transactions. The list of what they are considering illegal can be found here: https://twitter.com/ODELL/status/1503141547071754242

It is not clear how they will determine if certain UTXOs are illegal or not, but it all definitely can be called an attack on fungibility and privacy. If this news is true, the default coordinator run by zkSNACKs company is no longer a reliable solution to coinjoin your transactions.

Topic: The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs - page 5. (Read 1595 times)