Topic: Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread - page 6. (Read 1967 times)

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.

I don't disagree, and I regularly speak about the benefits of avoiding centralized exchanges and other centralized platforms, of spending bitcoin directly, of avoiding government regulations, of avoiding services which buy in to this taint nonsense, and so on, but reaching the utopia you describe will take decades, if we ever get there at all. Fighting against taint analysis is something that needs to be done now. And if we continue to let faceless organizations dictate how we are allowed to use our bitcoin, then we will never reach that utopia.

No point. Why take a flawed concept and try to mitigate the flaws, when you have non-flawed projects like JoinMarket you can use today.

This is actually not a bad idea, but keep in mind that some psycho or regulators could sue or shut down your website you for not providing exact information like it is shown in other analytics services.
You should be fine as long as you add information in footer or in about section that website is created for fun purposes, and that you are not responsible for any coins being frozen on exchanges.

Let's get back on Wasabi wallet topic.
They answered best they could and we can't expect them to change course now when they decided the route they are going.
We can still support the idea of alternative coordinator or some Wasabi fork that would work without any censorship, but someone needs to take risk with this.

On the other hand, we probably shouldn't be focusing on non-fungibility and tainted coins because these erroneous and misleading concepts anyway lose their relevance once we completely get rid of the need to use fiat on- and off-ramps. Instead, we should be promoting the advantages of the bitcoin circular economy, which is an economy where all prices are being measured in bitcoin terms, where everyone is transacting and earning exclusively in bitcoin, where all exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial, and where government intervention is ineffective, if even possible. In other words, instead of promoting the "store of value" function of money, which makes people think about their future spending and whether their coins are clean enough to spend in the future, we should be promoting the "medium of exchange" feature, because pure P2P interactions without involving nefarious intermediaries result in a healthy economy and also perfectly aligns with core principles of bitcoin. 

Take the opposite: tniat.com. It's available

Words are my own. I hope someone sets them in stone or brass one day.

If anyone does run with this idea, choose a name which does not have "taint" in it please. No point lending credence to their made up nonsense by naming your website after it.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are so many projects in this space which started out with good ideas and fantastical claims, and have ended up scamming or selling out everything they supposedly stood for. Wasabi is a prime example, given this thread. Or look at all the collapsing platforms like Celsius and Voyager, which made claims of "Unbank yourself" and "Take control of your money", and then leveraged your money even more riskily than banks do. Look at Brave, the so called "privacy browser" that now lets Binance inject code in to your system and whitelists Facebook and Twitter trackers. Look at "DEXs" like LocalBitcoins which sold out and now collect KYC. Or as per my previous comment, all the exchanges which were built on bitcoin and made all their profits from bitcoin, and then actively attack it and everything it stands for.

And to answer your question - we already have good alternatives such as Bisq. The problem is getting enough people to leave all the anti-bitcoin examples I gave above and use these other pro-bitcoin platforms instead.

It makes you wonder whether making a new exchange will make things any better or if the new owners will simply become as detrimental to bitcoin's development as the other exchanges.

I don't even see this problem as one about agencies pressuring exchanges anymore, it's more like exchanges doing everything they can to keep their profits high, at the expense of decentralization (even if this includes lending to risky enterprises ang going bust like Voyager and 3AC).

I don't see exchanges as necessary for the support of a cryptocurrency' economy, except as foreign exchange ATMs or as "money transmitters" (as the government calls them). Exchanges cannot fix the price of BTC, because that will either ruin the exchange if they fix it low, or their users will dry up if they fix it too high. They are not miners (i.e. "the decentralized central bank"), so cannot signal or avoid signalling for any activations. So their opposition is mere drum-beating at best.

They also cannot cripple the cryptocurrencies by voluntarilly banning them outright, or their profits will similarly dry up.

So the status of exchanges is that of the unwilling "enabler" of the crypto economy, they cannot overtly withdraw their support so they try to manifest their dislike for it with other means.

Why stop at 100%? I used blockdata to check all cumulative transaction fees (up until block 744341). It turns out 256,732.07240401 Bitcoin was paid in fees! With slightly over 19 million Bitcoins mined, that means 101.34% of all Bitcoins currenly in existence came from a miner
Even better if you trace back an exact percentage for each individual input

I'm all for adding more information, as long as it's legit like '100% comes from miners' and such; funny, informative, making the page a bit fuller and more similar to previous 'taint analysis sites', and - most importantly - true. This is what should set this site apart from all the previous ones. 100% undebateable truth and facts, opposed to empty speculations and accusations.

All sound pretty good to me! Are the previous three available, too?

Honestly, what started as a joke might actually be a very good idea to implement.. Even if just to stand against all that other bullshit that's floating around.
Unfortunately, I'm not a big web developer, but I could try my luck throwing something together and putting it on GitHub for someone to host, if nobody else has time for this.

Edit: I'm OT'ing on my own topic *sigh* - if someone's honestly interested in pursuing this idea, let's create a thread and discuss our options!

Most exchanges only love profits, and don't care about bitcoin at all. Take Coinbase as an example. Let's even leave out their pro-surveillance, anti-privacy stance and the fact that the sell all their users' data to a variety of government agencies, and look solely at the technical side of things. They supported BIP101, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, Segwit2x. Basically every hard fork which would make bitcoin less decentralized and give them more control over it, they supported. They took years to implement transaction batching and spammed the network with hundreds of thousands unnecessary transactions. Then, despite being front and center supporting all the hard fork proposals which would give them more power, they took years to support segwit. Most exchanges are no different. They will promote and support forks and legislation which weaken bitcoin, but give them more control. They will list and shill pump and dumps and scams which give bitcoin a bad reputation by association, but make them profits. And they will censor transactions, contrary to the whole point of bitcoin in the first place, if it means they can keep lining their pockets.

Maybe. Or maybe on luring the never ending stream of newbies to lose all their money on altcoins ICOs DeFi NFTs whatever shit comes along next.

It is indeed mind boggling.  There's absolutely no excuse for any crypto exchange to trust third-party chain analysis organizations.  If these exchanges love bitcoin and crypto in general, they have inherent motivation to limit the power of chain analysis organizations.  Their financial future is dependent on keeping bitcoin fungible.  

Chain analysis isn't here to help bitcoin, it's rather obvious the intent is the opposite.  Having governments and regulatory bodies oversee chain analysis isn't the solution either.  Governments are threatened by bitcoin; their power is largely determined by how well they can control the flow of wealth within their jurisdictions.  The less control they have over money, the less power they can enforce.  How do we know that it isn't the FBI, CIA, NSA, or the SEC behind these taint proclamations?  We do know that they stand to benefit from hurting the fungibility of bitcoin.

Speaking specifically about the US government, many of these organizations are abusing their power by implementing rules and regulations that, constitutionally speaking, are an over-reach.  Many of these regulations, if they are to be legally enforced would need to codified by Congress, not left to unelected officials to implement.  But, members of congress have to answer for their proposals and congressional votes.  They have constituents that can vote them out of office if they're unresponsive to their constituents' needs.  Delegating the dirty work to unelected officials is a sneaky tactic, and they've used this tactic to avoid accountability for a number of unpopular regulations.


That's exactly the threat to their authority they're trying to avoid.  Throughout history authoritarians have struggled to ensure their authority isn't under threat.  Bitcoin is causing them to shake in their boots.

Top-level domain name recommendations:

• taintobjective.ly
• tainted-defac.to
• coinri.sk

taintanalys.is is available for registration. 

2%? Why not add it all up? 230% of the coins have been used in a casino, 412% has been mixed, 100% came from miners and 0.0002% was touched by LoyceV

I wouldn't trust that either. There are governments in the world who enforce capital punishment for LGBT individuals, for speaking out against the government, or for drinking alcohol. And anyone thinking "Well, that would never happen in the West" - there are various US states which now criminalize woman seeking life-saving healthcare and providers for providing that healthcare. Governments are not the arbiters of morality or truth, and Wasabi (and their blockchain analysis buddies) certainly aren't either.

This is not a bad idea, especially when we consider that many entities which buy in to taint analysis do not have the slightest clue as to how taint analysis actually works or how the whole thing is (bad) guesswork.

Either that or go the other way to highlight the stupidity of the whole thing. "Approximately 2% of the coins in this output were once used in a casino, and have transacted through 592 addresses in over 10 years since then!"

That's not enough for taint believers, you should add the parent addresses to convince people they're also 100% clean Even better if you can add some history: "parts of these funds were mined in the years 2012, 2014 and 2018". All 100% clean, of course

Heh, I think I can spin up a JS template on a subdomain of mine for that , but my dev schedule is as notoriously congested as a traffic jam.

This just gave me the idea to make a website where you put in a transaction ID and it gives you a 'taint score' (just like those other blockchain analysis services), but this score is simply always 100%, with a nice green background and informative text saying 'This UTXO is wonderfully clean; it is yours if you have the private key to spend it and you can send it anywhere you like.'..

Then whenever someone is accused of having dirty coins, they can pull up a screenshot of this site and it will be 'word against word'.

Edit: I should read all replies first...

I've stopped trusting Wasabi developers since the blacklisting update, but thanks to this letter, I can confirm how clown they are. I haven't seen such childish and undignified responses for a while, especially that flawed analogy with the restaurant.

Dude, the restaurant's job is to serve you food. Not to protect your privacy. Do I need to remind you, you have a "PRIVACY BY DEFAULT" sign up there? Your default coordinator is said to preserve privacy at all times, remember? Cut the crap.

We're talking about zero coding ethos.