Topic: Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread - page 5. (Read 2293 times)

I'm pretty sure there are millions of people who don't have the luxory of choosing a job that aligns with their personal morals.
You'll need a decent amount of FU-money to be picky about who's money to accept or not.

Governments will probably try, and corporations will have to comply. Binance for instance just got a 3.3 million euro fine in a tiny country for not following local laws.
But the Wasabi case isn't about government regulations, and not even about a government enforced blacklisting. They're voluntarily blacklisting addresses based on some third party's list.

Who said it goes against my principles? If the signature campaign advocated that blacks or homosexuals should be killed just because they are blacks or homosexuals, I would not have joined it.

The signature campaign I represent I understand has a moot point about blacklisting.

But what I see is that there is a global trend in the world towards greater government control of Bitcoin, via KYC/AML, blacklisting and other measures.

Would the world be better off with purely P2P transactions as Satoshi devised? Surely, but the price would not have gone over $1k. I highly doubt it would have gone over $100. Just seeing that Coinbase is on this list:

[Blacklist] of unreliable, 'taint proclaiming' Bitcoin services / exchanges

Without Coinbase and traitorous institutions like it, the price would be much lower.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I see a future with Bitcoin much more controlled by governments, where there is a reduced space for privacy or P2P transactions, but governments were not going to let what reached 1T market cap, 2T if we count shitcoins, to remain uncontrolled.


I think you didn't quite understand me before, because there was some irony in what I said, but I think I do understand you here when you say "I wish I could find a spot in a campaign that has more focus on privacy," because calling yourself PrivacyG and wearing the signature of a casino with KYC requirements, doesn't seem the most suitable thing to do.

If we get into this debate of whether it is moral and right or not to join a signature campaign that does not support your principles, we get into a really long one.  That is because I think all sides can have both good and bad points to score.  Joining Wasabi's signature campaign is perfectly fine if you support them, since that would be the ideal case anyway, but it is also perfectly fine if you do not because after all your mindset might be 'why would I miss this opportunity?', and it is OK to think that way as well.  To some here, it is probably extremely immoral to join a signature campaign that is against your principles, to others it may be perfectly fine.  This is fine as well to me.

Then you think about it, why would you help promote something that is against your principles.  But if you do not, then someone will take that spot anyway and the one on a loss is going to be you.  This gets worse and, on the other hand, also better at the same time if all the good posters of the forum avoid joining the said campaign while only shit posters apply and join it.  Worse because then you have shit posters earning in some cases from posts that suck more money than you earn from well thought posts, but better because if you have only bad posters promoting it then I am pretty sure chances of another user clicking the signature link lower down drastically.  I am very confident someone would rather click the signature link under one of n0nce's posts over the signature link under one of a shit poster's reply.  But then this is only better from your view, because you do not support what the company promotes, but the company is going to suffer.  So is it really better?

In some ways, 'renting' a signature room on this forum somehow resembles the process and motives of renting a billboard.  You, as the owner of a billboard, will probably not skip a contract with KFC just because you are a healthy eater.  It stands against your standards and diet, but business is business and if you skip the contract, the next person they contact will not.

There is obviously also a big exception of tolerance, at least in my eyes, which is scams.  When someone is promoting a straight up scam, there is zero way I could ever tolerate or promote it.  So as I said, there is a big debate and you have a lot of room for opinions and arguments that are probably never wrong really.  As mentioned in the first paragraph, all sides can be simultaneously right.

So while there is no way I can blame you for promoting their signature campaign, there are definitely questions I have for Wasabi that might never actually get a legitimate, honest answer from their team as I can clearly see from their reply to n0nce's open letter.

On a side note, I perfectly feel what you are saying about not being fortunate enough to be able to promote a campaign that stands for your principles and standards.  I have desperately looked for campaigns that did this, and I really do wish I could find a spot in a campaign that has more focus on privacy, but I think the choices have shrunk along the years of Bitcoin Talk's existence down to only a very, very small number of businesses such as Chip Mixer which have a very select and specific list of participants anyway.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I don't know if you say that because the casino that pays you with its KYC/AML policies strongly advocates the P2P spirit of bitcoin without going through centralized entities and defends privacy:

https://roobet.com/termsandconditions

In my case is that I was going to be a traitor to the cause anyway: I had had in my signature casinos with KYC requirements and Best Change, and the only signature that seemed not to be a traitor to the cause was Lightlord's casino Bitvest.io, lol.

As I said, I liked the conditions of this campaign better, although I took a paycut per post.

It is like if Coinbase comes to make a campaign to the forum. Do you think they are going to leave a slot unfilled because people don't apply because of their policies?

Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to work for entities that are the authentic Bitcoin advocates and that pay very well.

PS: I hope that some irony is noticed.

And btw, bad news for the cause, it looks like the campaign is extended:

Which is completely fine for my use case. I don't use, and will never use, any company or service which attacks bitcoin by enforcing taint nonsense, so I have absolutely no care about the history of the coins I receive. All I care about is that it is not my history and cannot be used to link my previous transactions to my future ones.

How funny when Wasabi's blockchain analysis partner changes their rules and suddenly Wasabi's team's own coins are no longer allowed.

If you send Monero directly from one centralized service to another centralized service, then sure, but if you send Monero to your own wallet and then to someone else in a peer-to-peer trade, then this kind of tracking becomes impossible.

This is exactly what happens. See my post here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.59905002. 25% of coins in Binance's hot wallet were blacklisted.

Although the comment was sarcastic in nature, let's say it wasn't. We don't know which blockchain analysis company Wasabi has partnered with and there are several of them. What if the bitcoins are considered free of taint by some institutions and centralized exchanges based on the info they are given by one anal company, but at the same time a different anal company considers some of those coins as dirty and send out different signals to their partners? Unless all blockchain analysis companies cooperate in terms of what is tainted and what isn't, I would expect that they show different results and taint scores.   

That's not a dependency on coins, but a dependency on the exchange that sells the coins to you.

After all, you're not sending an obfuscated Monero transaction, but a regular one that has a bunch of dummy inputs baked in. Authorities that know the source and destination exchange should not have any trouble following the link from source to destination (and hence find your new BTC coins).

You can pair Sparrow Wallet with Bitcoin Core directly; however, this type of connection, from my own experience, appears to be very unstable, and often it is very difficult to identify what's wrong. Of course, like in the case of Electrum wallet, you can use one of the public servers or one of the "trusted" ones that were chosen by Sparrow wallet devs, but it is always recommended to spin up your own Electrum server with the easiest option being Electrum Personal server, especially if you're a Windows user. The other options, such as Electrs, require tinkering with software or hardware and considerable disk space.

By using Monero you may break the link between past and future transactions, but essentially you are merely swapping your transaction history with other users like in the case of CoinSwap.

At least, those users promoting Wasabi Wallet will know for sure that they are getting paid with clean, carefully filtered coins that will never be blocked by regulated entities. sarcasm

Sure; give it a go. It does have a 'direct to Core' connection option. No need to install SPV software.

JoinMarket is just a CoinJoin implementation, of course. It's fun that in the original thread there's so much talk about 'taint' and how you get 'clean coins from exchanges' through them. Leaves a sour taste for me..

Later, though, he claims another thing, no? Anyhow; things might have changed since then.

Personally, I have this little distinction between 'on-/off-ramp' (fiat <> crypto) and 'exchange'. For me, such a 'fiat gateway' doesn't need the more advanced features and multitude of trading pairs that an exchange should offer. The services like ShapeShift (which you mentioned) or FixedFloat do allow basically any trading pair, so you'd only really need 2 services: Bisq and a crypto <> crypto exchange.

It was officially put on hold from the end of 2019 as per the Github issue I linked to above, but that does not mean it is impossible or that no coins have been added since then. Exceptions have been made for notable coins - USDT, GRIN, and RSK are the ones which immediately spring to mind, but there have probably been others. The hold was essentially to stop any and every shitcoin applying to be listed just so they could use the fact they were listed as a marketing gimmick, all the while wasting Bisq developers' time and effort to support these coins/tokens which ended up with zero volume.

Although as we've just discussed in another thread, RoboSats lets you use literally any payment method you like. Someone can always take their Bisq acquired bitcoin over there and list it for any shitcoin they desire. The combination of Bisq and RoboSats is very attractive.

You can't add any altcoins in Bisq for years, it was officially put on hold, and I doubt there would be any volume for other coins without someone making a fake volume like on centralized exchanges.
Someone is working on Bisq fork exchange based on Monero, so there is a chance for listing more coins if that gets some traction and activity.
If you look at Bisq markets you will see that Monero currently have highest trading volume even more than currencies like Euro, Dollar, Pound and Brazilian Real.
https://bisq.markets/

You can trade all of those except Tron on Bisq already. You can add an altcoin account by following the steps here: https://bisq.wiki/Creating_a_payment_account#Creating_an_altcoin_account. Also, I have no data to support this, but the thought occurs to me that the person who is throwing their money away on shitcoins left, right, and center, probably isn't a person who is closely guarding their privacy.

There is simply not enough demand. Bisq used to host even more altcoins than it does, but many were removed because they had literally zero volume over a period of months. The developers have decided that in general it is not worth their time and effort to integrate a new coin if it will have zero volume, which is understandable. There was a big discussion about this here: https://github.com/bisq-network/proposals/issues/153

Thanks for clarifying that for me.  I haven't used Sparrow although I've been seeing it mentioned frequently these days.  I looked into it a couple of days ago and like the features it provides, like an integrated block explorer.  I was hoping it could connect directly to core and wouldn't need to a remote SPV server, but from reading the documents it looks like it just uses Electrum SPV servers for it's connections.  I may install it and play around with it for a bit just get familiarized.

As for CoinJoin, I'm still on the fence about it.  Same with JoinMarket, tbh.  I don't mind using ChipMixer for some things, but usually I rely on Monero to break the link between me and my coins.

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You're not wrong, there are plenty of those types of services around, but I tend to forget about them because I haven't used them.  I have trust issues.  In fact, I mentioned one (ShapeShift) not long ago that I've been meaning to try out, but I still haven't had the guts.

My comments were more about tendencies, i.e. people want convenience; if I was a shitcoiner and I had to go to three of four different sites to trade fiat at one, XMR at another, Shithereum at a third, and Tron at a fourth just to avoid KYC or taint proclamations, I might just give up and hand over all my data to CoinBase.  If Bisq made trading those shitcoins easier, and included "accounts" for multiple smart-chains, more people might find it more attractive.

This could certainly fall into the category of "be careful what you wish for."  I do want to see more trade offers available on bisq, but do I want all these shitcoiners there?  Probably not.

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It is quite sad to see all these reputable accounts running around promoting a wallet that's hurting the fungibility of bitcoin.  Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.  I guess that's what you get when you mix greed with short-sightedness.

What problems did you have installing it? There are fairly detailed instructions and guides available on GitHub: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver

I suspect will we see more than one thread in the future from someone complaining that their coins are blacklisted and they are not being allowed to coinjoin, followed by a good handful of users calling them a criminal, saying it's their own fault, saying "wHaT aRe YoU tRyInG tO hIdE!?" and other such nonsense. Wasabi team members will obviously ignore these users beyond saying "You agreed to our terms so suck it up".

How usable is JoinMarket nowadays?  I tried using it about an year ago and I could not even get past the installation process without difficulties.  Failed miserably on multiple Linux devices.  Then I could not get it running properly so I just gave up and continued using Wasabi instead, until this blacklist.

You know what, this is a very interesting outlook.  Silently announce the blacklisting, let us all pull off our rant posts and then agree with a review campaign before actually implementing blacklists but AFTER they became public knowledge and guesswork.  Anyone an year from the moment blacklists are introduced that will be checking out the history of these blacklists will think we were just crazy conspiracy people because some paid reviews that were posted after the blacklist became public knowledge actually deny what we were discussing.

Anyway, while I always read both paid and free reviews of stuff that I want to order or use while keeping a neutral view, I can not ignore the fact that public reviews generally tend to be more biased towards the product so I usually take them with a pinch of salt and I sure do hope nobody else takes any review, paid or free for granted.  On the other hand, free negative reviews sometimes do not help either because sometimes they come from people who post one star reviews simply because they did not know how to properly use the service or product.  Check out Trustpilot reviews of any website, most of them have a ton of negative reviews because out of fury you get more willing to post a review when you are extremely mad at and disappointed by something or someone so negative reviews are many times more predominant.  So, to me at least, reviews are just relative.  I do agree though that, for someone in the situation Wasabi currently is, reviews are very helpful especially when you consider that these reviews come BEFORE the blacklists actually get to occur.

I do not think most of those have even taken their time to know what Wasabi is all about.  And this is generally speaking, not particularly about Wasabi's campaign.  I am willing to bet on anything that more than half of the applications were users who rolled in particularly due to the high payout.  Remember there was (or maybe still is, I do not know since I have all participants on ignore) a scam Casino with a ton of users willing to roll in for a signature payment just due to high promised payouts.  There are these kind of people in the world, we are actually flooded by them.  And it must suck for campaign managers, I think it is extremely hard to find a number of users that are actually good posters and not just copycats.

And then, I have to guess many Signature Campagin participants prefer to only check out the boards they will be paid to post in, and some of these boards such as Technical Discussions require more brain processes and thoughts than simple boards such as Bitcoin Discussions do so their thinking is, why waste half an hour for a basic post when I can write a post in less than 5 minutes.

Also, while I say this is just guesswork on my side, it becomes more and more evident the more you sit on this forum.  Otherwise, this thread would be flooded by many users that are not Chip Mixer campaign participants or well known users of the forum.  Unfortunately, and you probably know about this much more and better than I do, many of the users active today on the forum are here for the same reasons theymos introduced the Merit system.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I don't think most of those have taken the time to read what we've debunked here. I don't cross my fingers they even know that the default coordinator will start blacklisting certain inputs in the future, despite us talking about it since March.

And if you aren't willing to read some spicy discussions, you can't acknowledge their upcoming surveillance attitude.

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I've also written a review (wouldn't say positive), because:

• of the money
• of my curiosity to test the coordinator with different inputs

Then, I was informed it hadn't started blacklisting. How didn't they want the users' reviews afterwards? 

I don't care about any altcoin except Monero, so correct me if I'm wrong here, but I was under the impression that there are plenty of decentralized swap services out there which will let you swap bitcoin for some other coin directly to and from your wallet without requiring centralized wallets or KYC. The real challenge for DEXs has always been to integrate fiat pairs, since the legacy banking system is so slow and impossible to use with smart contracts or non custodial escrows.

Correct. Samourai/Sparrow are obviously better than Wasabi since they aren't pro-censorship an aren't colluding with blockchain analysis, but you must run your own server or else your privacy can be compromised by the centralized server. Which is why I suggest JoinMarket, since it is the closest thing we have to fully decentralized coinjoins at present.

It's exactly the same as all the entities I listed above which sell out their principles for profit. The average person is no different. Pump and dump altcoins? Proven scams like YoBit? Surveillance tools like Wasabi? People don't care as long as they get paid.

People entirely avoiding centralized regulated entities that harm bitcoin is also a kind of utopia we may never reach. Both promoting avoiding centralized exchanges subject to government policies and promoting the usage of bitcoin as a medium of exchange implies fighting with established narratives, status quo, and governments themselves, so that all also may take decades.

For example, we are consistently warning people about the dangers of using wallets that directly collaborate with chain surveillance firms. Yet, not only don't they stop using it but also participate in signature campaigns and write positive reviews about these surveillance tools. It may take decades to convince people since, unlike Wasabi Wallet devs, you don't and will not pay people to adhere to your views.

Oh, you count a coin that went back to miners through transaction fees as 'mined twice'? I mean, yeah, I guess that way it's included in block rewards twice and you get a number above 100%.
Whatever curious and actually objective, informative statistics could be put on such a page would be welcome!

Good point! Something like 'Coin security analysis' or similar would be fine. Each coin should be understood as just as secure and legit, and safe to be accepted as any other, because it is.

I would add that looking forward it's impossible to 100% trust new exchanges popping up, after we had enough companies with presumed 'good intentions' that went bad. So only consider services that don't collect any information about you, such as having no account, no sign-up, having Tor support (or exclusivity) and of course absolutely no KYC / PII information collection.
Two services I've used that ensure this are https://bisq.network/ and Robosats. Even if their devs were to go rogue, sold their souls or whatever, they don't have any information that I'm afraid they could leak or sell.

The whole point though is that this site would actually be more exact, more objective and more true to the facts than any of these existing blockchain analysis sites.
Even if something on it was wrong, I don't think anyone can shut down your website or sue you because the information on your webpage disagrees with another website's (e.g. exchange) subjective opinion.

Sure, let's stay on topic! I also think we won't hear anything else from Wasabi anymore.
I hope this thread can remain informational for anyone confused about this blacklisting update. They can just read the first page and get a good overview of the questions, responses and the community's reactions and counter-responses as to why the Wasabi team responses are unsatisfactory to say the least.

I'm not sure we should pursue the idea of an alternative coordinator, since as we were able to see first-hand, this central point of failure can and will be exploited unless the whole mechanism changes to something decentralized.

Sparrow simply connects to Samourai wallet's CoinJoin implementation and to Samourai's own coordinator.

I agree that the word taint shouldn't be a part of it.  Language matters, and the language applied by detractors shouldn't be adopted by promotors.  I would rather see URLs like "chainhistory.com" or "chainillumination.org," something that doesn't have any derogatory meaning and makes no promises other than providing education and facts.

I'm not a developer of any kind, but if I can help in a project of this type please count me in.  If all I can do is contribute to a fund to hire a developer, I'm willing.



Bisq is great for those of us who are bitcoin maximalists, but to be honest I think they would need a lot of work to make altcoins more easily traded.  The most recent release does a great job implanting XMR sub addresses, but more stuff like that is likely to help.  I don't like the fact that you have to include shitcoins to attract new customers, but that's the world in which we live.


There are other options out there, Sparrow wallet has implemented a coinjoin coordinator called Whirlpool.  Samurai Wallet also has coinjoin implementation, but I don't remember the coordinator.  I tend to agree with o_e_l_e_o, there are better alternatives.