Topic: Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread (Read 2293 times)

I finally created said thread today. A big work in progress, but I hope for it to become a nice resource over time.

[Megathread] Bitcoin Layer 1 Privacy - concepts, ideas, research, discussion

And on top of that, with storage being relatively cheap to purchase for big businesses, I doubt there would be enough willing participants to overload their systems anyway.  I'm also pretty sure that if the source of that information is from 2008, things have probably moved on since then and they can hold data for longer periods now.

In that case I've misunderstood - apologies. I thought you were talking about specifically overwhelming Wasabi's capacity for blockchain analysis. Assuming they have to pay for every address they query with their blockchain analysis buddies, then this would be theoretically possible but as I mentioned would require encouraging people to voluntarily be spied on by downloading Wasabi and submitting many UTXOs to their coinjoin.

The problem with overwhelming blockchain analysis as a whole is as the bitcoin user base grows, so too does the value of bitcoin, which then in turn increases the amount of money governments and three letter agencies are willing to spend on blockchain analysis.

How is that related to downloading/using Wasabi wallet though? I merely said Bitcoin users at large are being tracked - and with 18 million or so addresses used in total so far, their servers are already being kept busy but it is by no means enough addresses to overwhelm their (AWS/Azure/GCP) compute capacity.

In addition to not disclosing the origin or destination, the amount of the transaction is also obscured.  Monero is, in my opinion, the most secure and effective way to maintain privacy.  But, like anything else of course, the weakest link is the user.  The most secure privacy coin can't save you from yourself.

Such an approach would require encouraging tens of thousands of people to download and use Wasabi and compromise their own privacy in doing so. Not a great approach.

It's a fundamentally different approach, and overcomes many of the downsides of coinjoining. Ring signatures are constructed locally and do not require any input from the ten decoys you use, meaning no centralized coordinator, no liquidity problems, and no coordinating with other users. The outcome of a Monero transaction is not a case of "this input is definitely linked to one of these outputs, but I don't know which one" as it is with coinjoins, but rather "I don't know which input is being used, and I don't know where it is going".

I do still believe it's glorified CoinJoin, with the shortcomings that come along with such a band-aid type solution. But glad to discuss!

Sure, I can get it done. Will tag y'all / reply here when ready (might be a day or two).

Yes, but instead of CoinJoining, which creates economic problems (as it requires coordinators and other users to be online at that time), it utilizes ring signatures, and to avoid revealing the amounts, ring confidentiality. It also makes use of stealth addresses, which have a point because of the other two.

We need a thread that will be technical enough to fit the Dev & Tech board, but not altcoin enough to be moved to the Altcoin Discussion (AKA, the forum's graveyard).

Have you run the numbers? It would be hilarious, in a way beating them at their own game by feeding them so much data that they can't process it anymore.

I know! Just listing protocols / concepts I've read through in my quest to find something suited for Bitcoin. I guess this could be an interesting topic for a new thread, if it doesn't exist yet.

That's interesting. If memory saves correct, Monero is basically CoinJoining all the time, plus hiding amounts. I guess if CoinJoin can be skipped altogether, it would be even better - that's what I like about the aforementioned protocols. But it would be great to discuss in a dedicated thread.

I guess mimble-wimble could be considered because it's already working in Litecoin that has similar code like Bitcoin, bit it is arguably inferior to Monero.
Problem is that adding mimble-wimble or any other privacy related code change would probably create new Bitcoin fork and drama in community, but maybe that is not such a bad thing.
It could also be possible to create some second layer network that would have full privacy working on top of Bitcoin, but I didn't see anything like that getting any tracking.
You can see most privacy based altcoins on Coingecko page, but most of them are centralized junk with no real development:
https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/privacy-coins

To paraphrase Antonopoulos, if you can't use your money to buy drugs, which is the second largest market in the world after food/drink and has been for thousands of years, then your money is not really money at all. There is no money in the world which you can't use to buy drugs with, and if your money can't be used in the second largest global market, then it isn't actually money.

That doesn't stop governments and their agencies using this to help promote their taint nonsense. Just don't pay any attention to the fact that the annual fiat spending on illegal drugs eclipses the entire market cap of bitcoin.

Zerocoin and later Zerocash are the protocols which led to the creation of Zcash, not altcoins in their own right. Zcash is not private by default, requires trust in the initial set up, is ran by a centralized entity which awarded themselves 10% of all Zcash ever created, and is transitioning to proof of stake. I have seen nothing which convinces me it is better, or indeed even close to, Monero.

Because when you are working on an important project you must triple-check everything to avoid introducing a single error or crash, that's why you must drive at 10mph, whereas these companies are driving a Lamborghini at 100mph and making reckless decisions like making a sharp turn at a corner and then they flip over and burst into flames, like Celcius, or any of these exchanges that are in financial trouble right now, or even those blockchains that were foolish enough to change their proof algorithm and now face an uncertain future (Hi Ethereum).

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Whatever chain-anal is sending data to Wasabi wallet already has a record of the sold data and has probably coughed it up to the NSA by now and is being used to correlate wasabi users with whatever other data they have on Bitcoiners.

The end-game is to take action against individual bitcoiners and harass them legally, not to merely trace outputs back to you.

So it is important that the userbase of Bitcoin must grow in order for their databases to be flooded with so much data that they can't keep a permanent record of them, but only leave them in their stores for a few days. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Data_sources)

For what it's worth, Silk Road was a black market / free market, in the sense that you could sell and buy whatever you wanted. So it's right that he showed how free money (Bitcoin) allows to to freely buy and sell whatever you want, if it's fungible.
That's why it's not bad it's being brought up in this context. We need fungibility to be able to use Bitcoin as free(dom) money.

I'd really love to hear more about altcoins which do have a working product and real value in the cryptographic realm, new research and papers, that may be interesting for us in Bitcoin, maybe helping us solve this on-chain fungibility & privacy issue. I'm sure those must exist.

I am aware of Zerocash, Zerocoin, Zcash and Monero - anything else to have a look at?

Yes they are. There are various entities which give regular salaries to Core maintainers and devs to allow them to work on bitcoin full time. Wladimir van der Laan is employed by MIT under their Digital Currency Initiative. Pieter Wuille has been employed by Chaincode Labs and Blockstream. Blockstream also employ Andrew Chow. These companies all employ other developers too, as well as companies like Lightning Labs and Square.

Bitcoin Core development is only slow when compared to altcoins, most of which have no working product or anything of value to lose should they introduce some major bug or accidentally fork their chain.

Bitcoin Core has no money? Bitcoin Core is money. I get what you mean, but it isn't always about money, it's about incentive. Whoever works for improving Bitcoin Core isn't paid (although they do get donations), but there's incentive to make your own, self-controlled money work better.

Ross is known for creating the most popular drug marketplace in the dark net. I'm sure he went to prison because of that.

You sure? Chainanalysis can de-mix Wasabi coinjoins, and Wasabi is pretty much infamous for it's flawed address reuse and combining of coinjoined and uncoinjoined outputs.

A wallet which is actively censoring some outputs cannot be called "censorship resistant". And Electrum is not a privacy wallet and makes no claims in regards to privacy.

Wasabi are contributing nothing to fungibility. They are actively hurting it.

Given that you are a brand new account which is simply repeating all the now thoroughly debunked Wasabi talking points, I question who is actually behind this account.

The problem is not that they, as a company, decided to start blacklisting transactions on the input side (they certainly have done that before, just for different reasons), but that the privacy-oriented company collaborates absolutely voluntarily with adversaries (blockchain surveillance companies) whose business model is to make revenue by infringing on privacy of bitcoin users and selling their data to corrupted governments, dictators and those who bid more. zkSNACKS is no better than those evil companies and persons because they are sponsoring censorship, and attacks on fungibility and privacy, they take money from people willing to gain some privacy and use it to destroy the privacy of others. They give privacy and fungibility with one hand (providing CoinJoin services) and take them back with the other (selling data and blacklisting undesirable inputs), making money as a centralized intermediary.

You know what, Google turned evil and it advertises itself as the best search engine.  I do not mind this.  They are definitely censoring and spying on all of us, but they never tell you they do not.  They do not tell you they do either, of course.

But Wasabi is censoring and telling you this is the best and only solution to fungibility and privacy.  Here is where things change drastically.  If they called themselves for what they are I would not mind it, but by actively lying and deceiving things are getting really bad in my eyes.  I understand they want a profit, they want a living.  I understand they have to protect themselves, but then were they really fighting the things they were supposedly fighting in the first place?  And if they have innocent thoughts, why deceive and lie telling us they are the only solution to whatever Bitcoin does not fix when in fact they are the exact opposite of that?

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Taint is a human psychological problem and only way of fixing it is to taint every possible bitcoin that exists, to make exchanges refuse -everything-.

The fact tha zkSNACKs had to start blacklisting is just an intensification of the effect then nation state have with its encroachment on everyones privacy.

Bitcoin Core have slow progress, everything that doesn't have money have slow progress, companies make faster progress. Protecting yourself against the attacks of the nation state is acceptable.

We also need to get some facts straight, when zkSNACKs looks at addresses on the input side, it have the right to determine who it will let into it, since it is a centralized mixer either way, but it can no longer track outputs as some of the naysayers here are saying. It also have absolutely no ability to profile its userbase, or to collect any informationa about any user who have installed up the wallet, which is still censorship resistant and have better privacy than electrum wallet with default settings. I have been personally against the implementation of the blacklisting and voiced my concerns about it to no avail, but further consideration proves it was an acceptable decision otherwise the company would have shut down and there would be one less player in the privacy space who works on actual privacy tools that contribute to the fungibility of bitcoin.

And anyone here who is so vehemently hostile to the idea of censorship to protect a company, are stuck in a fantasy land, so better wake up from that fairy tale before you end up getting 6102'd. People who have not commited any crimes in the past have went to prison. Ross Ulbricht went to prison because he was willing to show everyone that bitcoin can function as a payment mechanism for merchants and to exchange goods and services. That was not a crime he did, yet he serves double life sentence without parol plus 40 years.

The stakes have gone higher, and we on the road to freedom and privacy is not a straight one.

There's only one positive connotation of the word "taint" and it would be impolite to discuss it here.