Topic: Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread - page 7. (Read 2293 times)

But that's exactly what you are not supposed to be in their eyes. That's why there is so much focus on destroying what Bitcoin is and it has nothing to do with stopping criminals, pedophiles, and whatnot. It's about stopping all of us using and trusting something out of their reach. It's the same as with the POW mining objectors. It's not about having people move to clean energy sources or incentivizing them to do so, it's about attacking a core feature of Bitcoin in an attempt to give it a hard hit that would be difficult to recover from.

Mind boggling.  Even if local authorities did the investigation instead of whoever Wasabi is working with, how many times has the wrong person been called a criminal and thrown in jail for doing nothing wrong?  On the other hand, how many of the real criminals got a pass and never been put in jail just because they were wealthy and powerful, just because they bribed the right party?

Why would Blockchain Analysis be ANY different if this is happening at the highest levels with authorities, politicians and everyone else involved?

Look, maybe if there was a way to stop all crimes with 100% accuracy I would support it.  Hell, put it straight on top of Bitcoin's blockchain if that is the case.  But if we are talking about freedom and censorship free, there is no way we can start censoring Bitcoin users and transactions based on guessing and investigations with who the heck knows how much accuracy and still call it censorship free because that is so contradictory and then Bitcoin becomes useless really.

If I get to be treated as a criminal and wrongfully censored for my actions then why the hell would I even use Bitcoin at all when I have banks that under some conditions are faster and even cheaper than Bitcoin is.  They can censor me, they can question me.  I sure do know they can.  And at least I then know who I am talking to and what I put myself into rather than finding myself in a situation where I can not move money around due to a stranger telling another stranger that I am not a good guy.

After all, Bitcoin is here to set us free from the heavy chains of our current monetary system.  We are a community of people who supposedly and theoretically want just that, if we exclude the speculative investors.  I do not mind Bitcoin sitting at $20,000 for the next 20 years.  I just want it to offer me the same freedom it did so far.

But do not try making me accept that censorship should be part of a censorship free system because that immediately shows me what your intentions are and never in this life will I agree censorship is fair or works against crime.  Because at about any given time in history we know that a little censorship always led to more censorship and then ultimately led to some of the worst rules, regimes and choices that were definitely not for the people but against it.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

I can do that for free Here's a list of all taint free Bitcoin addresses! I can evey share how I came to this conclusion. It's quite simple: 1BTC=1BTC

Just to add to witcher_sense's good answer above: The methods aren't audited because their methods aren't even known. Most of these services will just take an address one of their paying customers feed them, and then return some breakdown of the percentage of coins from various places, such as centralized exchanges, DEXs, casinos, scams, etc., with absolutely no information about how they reached that conclusion, and then their customers will treat that as gospel. There's nothing stopping anyone from spinning up their own blockchain analysis service and charging extortionate rates to tell other people where you think coins have come from based on complete guesswork. And as we regularly see, they often get things wildly wrong.

There was a post I made a few months ago about how one such service shows that large amounts of coins in the hot wallet of large centralized exchanges are "tainted": https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.59905002

It is when individuals or companies take advantage of the fact that blockchain is fully transparent, trying to figure out and subjectively interpret what is occurring inside it.

Yeah, some companies make money selling their subjective interpretation of what's happening to other companies, exchanges, law enforcement agencies, governments, dictators, and also surveillance-oriented wallets like Wasabi Wallet.

This one is a ridiculous claim that they employ to siphon money off from people who naively believe surveillance companies provide valuable services and actually know what's going on.

The point is they do not "determine", they gave themselves the power to unilaterally decide which coins are to be deemed clean and which aren't.

How would you audit subjective interpretations?

Of course, they do, how else can they determine that some inputs came from Wasabi 1.0 or that particular UTXO has a particular anonymity set if not by looking at analyzing blockchain data?

What is chain analysis?  I searched multiple engines and two common results are companies selling a service. One of the companies claims to be building trust in blockchains lolz. The blockchain is already trusted that's the point.  By what method to these companies determine which coins are tainted? Are their methods audited for accuracy?  Why are they trusted?  Does Wasabi Wallet do their own chain analysis?  Sorry for all the questions.

Note that the same site also reports a decrease in volume for Samourai and JoinMarket for the last week, though. Not sure if it's a problem with their data or due to the market conditions, but I don't think we can take this as evidence of falling Wasabi volume.

Which again just highlights how stupid the whole thing is. If we take tainted coins and turn them in to a fee, then all services agree those coins are now clean since they can no longer be accurately tracked due to being consolidated with other coins. But for some reason, the exact same logic does not apply to coinjoins? Because reasons?

Despite the fact that Wasabi 2.0 made CoinJoins more affordable for the average user (one no longer needs 0.1 btc to participate) , the volume of mixed bitcoins continues dropping steadily.


Source: https://www.bitcoinkpis.com/privacy



Curiously, I used pretty similar reasoning as you when tried to explain why it is utterly stupid and absurd to deem bitcoin transactions or particular UTXOs dirty, tainted, or non-fungible.


But I came to a different conclusion, namely, that eventually, given bitcoin's active circulation, all coins once again become "pristine" since they are continuously being "laundered" by miners via transaction fees. I think this is part of the reason why mining in general and PoW, in particular, are being targeted by the ESG mafia - this is essentially a legal and very efficient way to get rid of "dirty" bitcoins and thus destroy completely stupid narratives of taintness and non-fungibility of money.


However, if miners stop acting, as LoyceV put it, "as if bitcoin is fungible" (e.g. reject transactions from OFAC list or refuse to build block-candidates on top of blocks containing transactions from such addresses), we are in trouble.

Speaking of, is it even available in e.g. Play Store? I can't find it.

I'd like to believe that users care but I don't see any discussion about it in their subreddit.


Not anymore LOL

Thinking about it a bit more. The *only* reason I could see a "financial institution" caring about using a service like this is to hide the amount of BTC their clients have, If everything is in one big mix then when they send others can't really know what else they have. Their keys stay with the institution but when sending it's all muddled.

Other then that I go back to the individuals with a lot of BTC

Or, something happened that they don't want to or just can't talk about. So they are doing this.

But lets face it, even if we hate the outcome it is fun to speculate.

-Dave

It might still be too early to count out any competition, but Wasabi's dwindling download numbers suggest that customers do care.



Say What?  Next your going to tell me that Fiat owns Jeep!?!?!  

It looks like wasabists don't think users would care (and they're probably right) so it's not worth splitting scarce liquidity into multiple services. And it doesn't look like there are any competitors lining up to ridicule them for chain analysis and to take their non-caring users.

BTW Mercury is dead and Mazda is not owned by Ford anymore

Introducing HorseRadish, the CoinJoin/JoinMarket privacy wallet that doesn't cockblock any UTXOs...

Really, what's wrong with offering two or more products that provide different services?  Lincoln, Mercury, Ford, Mazda...  They all compete against each other, but they're all owned by the same entity.  How difficult would it be to have two separate products/services that offer different types of obfuscation?

Good questions, but we got the same old expected answers from Wasabi team members, and most important things sadly remained unanswered.
I understand that Wasabi and zkSNACKs coordinator are looking on all this as a business and maybe they didn't have other choice but to operate like this with blacklisting, but they should come up and say that honestly.
They said they are not using Chainalysis but I never saw what other company they plan to use for this, I don't understand why would they hide something like this.
Oh and calling Samourai wallet Scamourai is childish and totally immature, so they can't expect us to take them seriously with anything they say.

I tested new Wasabi 2.0 wallet few days ago in THIS topic, and I have to say that my experience was not very good.
There is no coin control option in new version, my Trezor hardware wallet was not working with Wasabi or it is not supported, and I couldn't even perform coinjoin after two full days of running Wasabi wallet.
I wanted to give Wasabi a fair chance but I think this new version is step back in every way, and my hope is that some new better coordinator will show up in future.

I have no idea, but Wasabi have obviously reached the conclusion that the profit they will make from any potential institutional money is enough to justify censoring the average user. One more relevant quote:

I completely agree to this.


It's indeed arbitrary. Whether it's nonsense or how bad those assumptions can be debatable - not between you and me, but between us and them.


I guess that you have to shout louder about this. The average bitcoin user (I won't call it bitcoiner just as easy) doesn't know about this and probably doesn't care much either (you know the "I have nothing to hide" mantra) until something happens to them, obviously.


This answers it, I hope it's not old. (Is it only me who find it odd that they are boasting they're sponsoring, but they actually charge for their service?).


As I said, you must have been misunderstanding something. I was stating that some companies do, not what I do. (It could be seen as sort of devil's advocate to say so). For me any satoshi is identical to any other satoshi. I've never avoided mixers, I've never cared about the source of this or that UTXO and I don't see any good reason I'd change that.
So "I'm convinced" long before this talk. 

That's what I was referring to as "baseless speculation". Is there any plausible explanation why "financial institutions" would want to mix their coins at all? Even with the best chain analysis there is a massive reputational risk for them to get tangled up with some "unclean" coins or just generally getting blamed for helping launder bitcoins, and I don't think coordinator fees (assuming the talk about providing liquidity means they'd get a share of those fees) are sufficiently lucrative to outweigh that.

Answer to question 9 and 21 clearly show Wasabi 2 isn't ready for release.


Most users aren't even aware they can choose different coordinator, unless they're advance user who open Wasabi wallet configuration file.


1. Adding 200 other random Bech32 UTXO is pointless when they can just see Wasabi CoinJoin transaction on blockchain later.
2. If certain UTXO doesn't meet zkSNACKs criteria, that means owner of the API know owner of that UTXO attempt to use CoinJoin at specific date/time.
3. We need to trust about how the blacklist works.

Yes. They have claimed in multiple interviews and blog posts, including in the answers above, that they are being pressured or harassed to stop accepting certain inputs. We don't know by whom, when, why, or in what way, because they haven't chosen to answer those questions. They made it clear that the only two possible solutions to this in their view was to either stop running their centralized coordinator and therefore lose out on their revenue stream, or start surveilling their users and censoring their inputs. They chose the latter.

By allowing them to continue running their centralized coordinator against the unknown harassment they claim they are facing.

Having said all that, they have also said on more than one occasion that they aren't actually being forced to do this at all, and this is a proactive decision on their part, so it is impossible for us to know for sure:


The second quote is also relevant to your second point, where they say they primarily want to cater to financial institutions.

How exactly do they make money? Coordinator fees? How is paying for some shitty service helping them with that?

I don't understand the whole "institutional investors" thing. The idea that Microstrategy would mix coins via Wasabi, or that Wall Street would invest into a wallet that kinda sorta helps with privacy but not really - sounds utterly absurd. It seems they're getting swindled in more than one way, or it's all just a steaming pile of baseless speculation.