Topic: Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread - page 6. (Read 2293 times)

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.

Regarding the murderer/pedo analogy:

If I had a restaurant it is not my duty to not service them because the restaurant as a company is not responsible for apprehending these people, that's the police's responsibility!

Let's put this in slightly less extreme terms:

If there is a law in some country forbidding LGBT+ activity (or maybe black people if this was still 1950), and one of them comes to my restaurant, it is not my obligation to deny them service because the restaurant is not the law enforcement. The restaurant is responsible only for providing their customers with food & drink, and nothing else.

So now that we have gotten that out of the way, let us get to the crux of the issue.

---

The entire debacle of zkSNACKs blacklisting certain UTXO inputs from their co-ordinater is apparently due to pressue put on them (by who, specifically?) to stop serving what they call "suspect criminals".

This particular term, these two words, are so loaded that it is almost impossible to understand exactly who is being blocked, which is imparative if somebody wanted to provide some real security.

- It could refer to the US government's No-Fly list.
- It could refer to the CIA's own "criminal and suspect criminal" list.
- It could also refer to some hastily drawn up notes in some governor or chain analysis chairman's office which violently hate some partcular group of people that they want to classify them as criminals [example: Texas state government vs. women who want abortion => they are magically criminals].

The word "criminal" is thrown about by everyone from protestors to high cabinet officials to news reporters & guest commentators to your 70-year-old grandpa, even, who all have different notions about who represent criminals.

That's why you see such strange things as people welcoming the Taliban to afghanistan, or happily welcoming suppressions to non-binaries/vaccines/journalists/bitcoin. Because their definition of criminals is wildly different from our own. In some cases, the contrast between them is even a color-inversion.

So that is why that you should not trust people's definitions of the word "criminal" apart from an official government statement (and intelligence agencies who are too cowardly to confirm official statements do not count [this bold part was supposed to be in the original post, but the electricity went out for hours before I could finish this sentence and I forgot to include it afterwards. Fuck.]).

The community is still not very happy that you have created a UTXO blacklist, even if it came from institutional pressure and its not implemented yet. You should not be buckling down to such pressure and bending to people's own definition of "criminals". We also understand that you are not the perpretrator of such change - it came from your sponsor.

But since you have already decided which path to take, you need to follow it straightly, so that Wasabi can stay in one piece when it reaches the other side. You are at the point of no return, and there is no going back.

edit: spelling snafu

Don't do it for free, though! You can extort the clueless charge $0.50 - $1 for every single address someone looks up! That's what AMLBot charges for their provably incorrect guesswork, after all.

Here's the thing, though: Wasabi don't care. They are not doing this out of some misguided attempt to stop criminals or anything like that. They are doing it simply because they want to protect their income at the expense of their users.

Absolutely this. Just like when they push mass surveillance under the guide of "stop the terrorists" or "think of children", despite there being absolutely no evidence that mass surveillance actually prevents any crimes whatsoever. This isn't about preventing crime; this is about control.