Topic: 'Wasabigeddon' article discussion (it supposedly solves fungibility) - page 3. (Read 1027 times)

I think it’s for two reasons:

1. Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live). But when cash is not accepted at all, it’s a lot of people that experience this directly at the same time. Their funds are all blocked at the same time. So there will be more outcry and it can hurt business.

Coin taint and blacklisting are sneakier and psychologically more tricky. Not all users funds will be blocked/ frozen/ stolen at the same time. Most people that didn’t experience it directly won’t care enough or don’t even know it’s happening. They will maybe even buy into the bs reasoning for it, because their weren’t victims of it yet and maybe really believe that this is done for legitimate reasons and to solve a problem. Even tho it’s complete nonsense.

2. Cash has been around for a long time now and it’s acceptability is already widespread. Bitcoin is relatively new, as acceptability and usage grows i also would expect more people to react in similar ways to when it would happen to cash, but it’s still trickier when only a certain % of coins aren’t accepted. Similarly, i never saw an outcry when 500€ bills weren’t accepted somewhere, they only make a tiny percentage of bills in circulation and it didn’t affect enough users directly for people to care.

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It would definitely help if Bitcoin can’t be told apart, I’ll definitely look into the possibilities more and study. Cash can simply cheat trough legal tender and always force universal acceptance of bills, if it wants to. Or reduce fungibility if the government wanted to. Code might be the only way to achieve true fungibility, but social acceptance will always play a role regardless. It might be worth trying to advance in both battles at the same time.

Pretty clear for me to not use Wasabi, but I also wouldn't strongly be against someone else using it, if they understood what they were getting into. Same thing about someone using an exchange or a custodial service -- suits their purpose and their needs.

Unfortunately (or thanks to Bitcoin non-discrimination), we will have people who want or hope for Bitcoin to be used in certain ways we don't agree with, and they will use whatever feature is available to meet their needs.

So agree with nullius here. I don't see the point of hating on exchanges and Wasabi and expecting them to fall in line with ideologies they're legally bound to go against. Well, okay, Wasabi's complicated in a way, they probably only used privacy as a marketing tool while wanting to keep their friendships with old money.

Despite the "caught between a rock and a hard place"  argument, I'll probably never have a shred of sympathy for corporate entities or their leaders/owners. Even less when they try to explain their actions.

Thanks for your elaborate reply, nullius!

So you are convinced that it has to be solved on a technical level. I mean; I'm not against having better on-chain privacy, such as in Monero - effectively removing the very ability to distinguish UTXOs, however I'm not sure like you that it is needed.
In fiat world, people accept bank notes without checking their history through its serial number and they aren't checking them for the anecdotal traces of cocaine (could also check for blood, etc.) - every fiat bank note is not the same, but is universally treated as such, around the world. Whenever they aren't, people get very upset, too, however not so in Bitcoin. I don't really understand why.

I'm looking forward to your project / proposal and willing to help if I can!

That talk of Adam Back is new to me, I really appreciate his work in the field in general so I will watch it later.

regulations are not about tracking after crime.
its about prevention of crime. or prevention of services facilitating a possible crime

sooo actually.. due to regulation. it is the job of a exchange to flag any privacy measure as suspicious.
because they have to, repeat HAVE TO submit suspicious activity reports.

i understand your philosophy of 'dont look at me unless a crime has been committed first and you have found the proof of the crime first. and IF there is linkage of me to the crime in this order of events, only then can you look at me '

but the reality is the question 'how are they to find proof, unless they are looking for something first' (prevention)

take other REALITY stuff(stuff that wont change in practice)
you dont have to get in trouble for instance in a murder, simply by not being the murderer. there are actual laws where you have done a criminal act by helping/facilitating a murder. (aid and abet a criminal)
this is why in reality. people do check who their friends are and are suspicious of their friends who act shifty, immoral, unethical before a crime has been committed, and shy away from these types of "friends"
(well moral people do)
EG if you have a daughter. and a neighbour who has not yet touched your daughter, but just looks at her while licking his lips. would you let your daughter near him? would you invite him over to babysit her simply because you have not witnessed him rape a girl yet?.. no, didnt think so

EG if you knew a friend was shifty, and doing suspicious things. and one day he hands you a box and says. 'dont look into the box, just deliver it to this address' smart moral people no matter how friendly they are, would refuse to get involved. even if they dont know whats in the box or if their friend is actually a person that has already committed, or about to commit a crime. they just dont want to be involved in the obvious risk

EG imagine there was a murder threat or a terror bomb threat. having the naive mindset of 'yea wait for the death/destruction, just let it happen, dont get involved dont prevent it dont care about it..  and then and only then after the event investigate to find the suspect" is not how moral real world people that want to keep people safe think. moral people want to prevent crime, prevent death, keep themselves and others safe. BEFORE the harm is done.
moral people want to prevent hackers/thieves from stealing.. not wait for a theft and then rely on a court system to punish.

it has nothing to do with having proof that a crime was actually committed first. EG seeing actual taint from a known darkweb criminal site that deals with drugs, porn, weapons, terror.

its about the RISK that the service might end up if they didnt do checks.. be facilitating a criminal presently or in the future! so they need to protect themselves by policing themselves and their users before they become facilitators of crime (and that is never going to change in practice or reality, ever)

imagine it like a point score thing. where users get ranked on suspicion

say i never use a mixer and my coins are fresh coins minted from mining from 10 years ago
my score would be literally 0 suspicion rated

imagine someone else that was using mixers and exchanging not to fiat, but to monero. their score would be near 100

and a little hint to certain people.. it is possible to see tx's that are 'locks' to altnets/sidenets/sidechains. and these too do earn 'suspicion points'(sorry but its true)
(sidenets and altnets that have known privacy tools like confidential transactions, rate as higher suspicion rank)

this is why fully compliant regulated exchanges simply dont trade in monero. some avoid using pegged coins of sidenets/altnets that are promoted as 'privacy' services

for instance coinbase avoids monero and guess what. although coinbase is a sister company of blockstream(liquid/LN) coinbase even avoids using these side/altnets(funny right!)
yep they dont even use their own sister companies designed "privacy" networks for their users..
..because they comply to regulations due to wanting to facilitate fiat exchanging legally, without risk

thus dont want the raised risk of their exchange linked to facilitating a possible future crime

point is. the more private you try to be by using the same tools criminals would use, the more suspicion flag points you earn. and the less you get to fly under the radar, and the more hassle you will have when trying to exit to fiat. due to the regulations of fiat jurisdiction.

and if you are an wallet/service that does use privacy services, then other services raise your suspicion rating.
and if you are an exchange that allows such suspicions services the exchange gets its own suspicious rating that make regulators, sec, and even their own business bank account bank company keeps a closer eye on the exchange.

reality hurts, but if you can understand reality and not the hopes and dreams of personal wish. then you can understand the realities of the world better.

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i have no problem with people wanting to be private.
i keep my personal information private, i even dont involve my homelife or work life stuff when on this forum.
(i have nothing to hide, so yea i mention that im british and i like to travel, but i dont say where i live or where i travel at the time of being in those places)
 i dont pander to companies or elitists by becoming friends and revealing stuff. on this forum my thoughts are my own and not advertisements of business/services/altnets.

but i am seeing alot of so called 'privacy' guys reveal too much about their personal life, affiliations and loyalties. and these privacy guys are not actually acting like they want privacy, but new idea's how to brutilise bitcoins audit/monetary policy for their own selfish loyalties/affiliations, pretending that its 'for the good of the people' when reality is it actually harms people.

yep promoting that everyone should use mixers is promoting that everyone should earn some suspicion points, all so that these 'privacy' advocates can than do shady crap and abuse good people, by facilitating criminals in getting good clean coins, whilst handing off the dirty coin to good people.
same with altnets.
these certain "privacy people" (they know who they are) want to brutilise bitcoin in multiple ways. and tell good people in their billlions that their value is no good on the bitcoin network, by saying they need to mix, lock and swap on altnets. while then trying to break bitcoins audit/monetary policy, and simple daily use functionality. which then breaks bitcoins function as 'digital cash for the unbanked', just for their own selfish desires.

i just find it strange that these 'privacy advocates' say billions of good people should avoid bitcoin. but then want bitcoin to facilitate suspicious tools and be used by shady people freely.

i got no problem with idiot/shady people playing around on altnets doing their secret crap. but just dont try forcing good people into your schemes, with fake promises, bad security, value risk and shady crap that can affect good people negatively.
and stop trying to break bitcoin by pretending you are suggesting good practices, which actually are the opposite of good practices

in short. mixing is not a good practice it WILL earn you suspicious activity points. (thats reality)

You are correct. zkSNACKs pays for Wasabi development through fees it collects from the coordinator (well, whatever is left over after they fund blockchain analysis companies, of course).

It is quite clear from their blog posts, interviews, social media, etc., that they see themselves as second only to Satoshi in importance when it comes to bitcoin. Without them, bitcoin would fail.

You obviously aren't, but mixers are one of the things franky1 hates, along with Lightning, Core, segwit, privacy in general, and a bunch of other stuff, so no amount of logical arguments will change his mind. Everyone arguing with him here is wasting their time and helping him achieve his goal of derailing this thread in to another one filled with his excessive rants.

Let's try to stay on topic here guys.

I would note that there have been (so far) unsuccessful efforts to try. For example, AOPP was proposed as a solution for centralized exchanges to whitelist users' addresses (i.e. apply KYC to external wallets), and only allow deposits or withdrawals to or from these addresses. It was supported by a bunch of projects and wallets, some of which I really hoped would know better. It was only after community backlash that they all dropped their support and AOPP seems to have a hit a dead end. So while I agree that educating the bulk of users will not and can not solve many issues, if there had been no education on the AOPP issue then it would have proceeded unopposed and would end up in widespread use.

An excellent question.  Dr. Back alluded to identity management in the above-quoted post, where he essentially referred to Zerocoin as how things would work in an “ideal world”.  I suggest reading that old 2013 discussion at length, to avoid retreading talk about problems that remain unsolved after nine years.  People just keep rediscovering the same old problems, while forgetting what has already been long known about potential solutions.

Looking far beyond that old discussion:  It terrifies me that as an ultimate form of whitelisting, it is entirely possible to design an all-KYC, fully permissioned blockchain system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to avoid ever publicly revealing any transactional information whatsoever.  Worse:  Such a system could use zero-knowledge proofs to enforce identity-based permissions in transactions that are fully anonymous between counterparties.  That sounds like a contradiction only to those who don’t understand what zero-knowledge proofs can achieve.  Worst:  There are projects already working on building such systems.

From the perspective of blockchain analytics, such a system would have privacy superior to any Bitcoin mixer system, superior to Monero, and infinitely superior to Wasabi:  The blockchain is totally opaque, with theoretically optimal privacy.  But it would obviously be terrible for privacy in a meaningful sense—and it would be terrible for freedom.  Thinking aloud here, I know that it is possible with today’s technology to construct such a system so that among other interesting features, governments (or banks) could switch off a dissident’s ability to use money.  Now, try obtaining food and shelter when you cannot use money!  The way that he has embraced taint tracing and coin blacklisting, I presume that nopara73 would find this system acceptable.

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I am pessimistic about the future.  Such things cannot be fought by “educating the public”:  The majority of people in any society are always stupid, apathetic, and myopic.  And please make no mistake about what I said:  People problems cannot be solved solely by technological solutions.  “Cypherpunks write code” is, in my own opinion, a call to create accomplished facts:  Fait accompli is the most persuasive political argument in the world.

Once upon a time, the sudden existence of PGP derailed then-Senator Joe Biden’s anti-encryption bill.  By the same token (so to speak), Satoshi Nakamoto created something that no modern government would have allowed to exist:  A totally permissionless, uncontrollable, unfreezable, irrevocable, unstoppable new form of money.  “Cypherpunks write code.”  Out of nowhere, this new thing just suddenly existed.  Thirteen years later, those who wish for a cashless dystopia are struggling to put the genie back in the bottle.  Such is the power of accomplished facts!

Alas, Bitcoin also created a transparent global ledger as an accomplished fact.  In the essential sense of permissionlessness, Bitcoin gave us new freedom—but ever since then, anyone who wants privacy has been struggling against accomplished facts.  And I must emphasize this:  Bitcoin has a transparent global ledger, only because Satoshi did not know any other way to create a decentralized system.  He was caught on the horns of a dilemma between DigiCash, a centralized system with theoretically optimal privacy (statistical hiding), and the decentralized, un-private system that he actually made.  He tried to find another way.

OP of a thread in 2010:
Satoshi’s reply:

The existence of Bitcoin thereafter motivated a new flurry of cryptographic research.  The initial breakthroughs came in 2013–2014; that generated a brief flurry of interest in the Bitcoin community, including from several prominent Bitcoin Core developers.  Thereafter, the state of the art has rapidly advanced.  Most Bitcoiners today are unfamiliar with this field; but I have followed it closely since 2013.  Only now, as of 2022, I am ready to declare the technology mature for general usage.  Among other criteria:  We now have zero-knowledge privacy systems with no trusted setup—the big breakthrough for that came in 2019, and needed another few years of research and development to reach production quality.

Upon the foregoing, tadamichi, I may properly answer your question:  In Bitcoin, we currently have a system where, as a practical matter, exchanges and other services cannot use whitelists to enforce the purpose of taint tracing.  It would hurt their businesses too much.  That is an accomplished fact.  We have the advantage, but we must defend it.

If Bitcoin were overthrown in the market by a system that is designed from scratch with built-in KYC whitelisting, and which advertises better “privacy” due to an opaque blockchain, then all coins would be under such controls, and a service would suffer no disadvantages by simply going along with the system.  To fight such a possibility, Bitcoin needs to get ahead of events and become permissioness, decentralized money with strong privacy and perfect fungibility.

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Bitcoin is freedom.  There is an old proverb that free speech belongs to those who own a printing press.  How much worse is a system in which the financial system can be used to starve anyone deemed undesirable, simply by denying the use of money?  That’s the system that we have today with banks, payment cards, Paypal, and other entities that are notorious for enforcing financial censorship even to prohibit legal expressions—anything from expressions deemed too sexy, to expressions deemed politically incorrect.  Now, I shudder when I learn about how China already has a totally cashless financial system—and some European countries are moving fast in the same direction.  It is a part of a design for the most inescapable tyranny that has ever been conceived to the human mind.

In this aspect, Bitcoin partially, imperfectly restores the default status of the majority of financial transactions throughout all history, until very recently:  Permissionless.  Old-fashioned cash transactions were permissionless—and they were also untraceable.  A Bitcoin upgrade with theoretically optimal zero-knowledge privacy and fungibility, i.e. a new Zerocoin, would restore what we had for millennia until, starting less than a half-century ago, new technologies began to allow for the permissioning and tracing of financial transactions en masse.

I get what youre trying to say franky, all im saying is that these services have no business flagging any privacy measure as suspicious in the first place, when they have no proof for anything beforehand. But im also aware this wont ever change in practice by itself.

Agree. We still need some preaching tho, to get more people aware and stop using these services, but its more important to have working solutions. Genuine question: lets assume Bitcoin had perfect privacy, would it be possible that these services would introduce taint trough whitelisting?

Coin taint and blacklisting are what break Bitcoin’s fungibility.  BTC is an NFT:  A non-fungible token, due to coin taint and blacklisting.  The subset of Bitcoiners who refuse to acknowledge this are either living in a Reality Distortion Field, or still under the influence of the blockchain transparency fetishization with which Mike Hearn, et al. poisoned Bitcoin early on.  I identify a lack of fungibility as the biggest long-term economic threat to Bitcoin.

Fungibility is both necessary and sufficient for privacy—and vice versa.  Attaining one gives the other; neither can be attained without the other.  Some people get this; e.g., in a post from 2013 titled, “Re: Coin Validation misunderstands fungibility and could destroy bitcoin”:


Dr. Back, an authentic Cypherpunk, has also given speeches on why fungibility needs to be assured cryptographically.^*  (Transcript of Adam Back on fungibility and privacy.)

Maths, not law.  When coins are anonymous and indistinguishable, then Bitcoin is no longer an NFT.

(* Notable:  Under the heading, “Fungibility? Why would I care?”, ChipMixer’s FAQ quotes from and links to the above-linked transcript.  Their understanding of these issues speaks well of them.)

Wasabi has embraced coin taint and coin blacklisting based on anti-privacy surveillance:  The exact things which destroy BTC fungibility, which thus threaten Bitcoin’s long-term economic viability.  And now, nopara73 claims that Wasabi restores Bitcoin’s fungibility?  That is so audacious a lie, I am mulling whether it’s time to start with the scam tags.

Wasabi also uses inferior technology.  CoinJoin was clever when it was invented; but CJ and any type of coin-mixing scheme have since been made obsolete by advances in the field of cryptography.  I wish not hereby to diverge into a tangent about that; I am intending to raise it elsewhere, as I prepare for my own campaign to get Bitcoin some fungibility.  Suffice it must for now benevolently to scare BTC holders where it hurts:  Vitalik understands fungibility.  While you all aren’t looking, while you are playing nonsense games with coin-mixing schemes, Ethereum has more or less quietly been building up the infrastructure for optimal fungibility (= privacy).  And so has Solana—a prospect which should properly frighten both BTC holders and ETH holders!

Wasabi’s attempt to abuse the fungibility issue for their marketing of a coin-taint service is a bald-faced swindle.


Privacy = fungibility.  Fungibility = privacy.  See above.  Dr. Back explained it well in his 2014 talk on the subject.


The reality is that Bitcoin isn’t fungible.  It is not fungible, because exchanges and other services (including Wasabi!) can do this.  Although I applaud your efforts to encourage a boycott of these anti-fungibility exchanges and services, ultimately, the only way to stop them is to assure that they cannot do what they are doing.


Strongly agreed.  But the problem cannot be fixed, if people can say that one coin is not like another.

Cypherpunks write code.  Trust the maths.  Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent.  Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking:  You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.

people that want privacy. are not looking to clear their coins so that if questioned they can say "you have no proof"
people that want privacy. are not looking to clear their coins that if caught. they can after the headaches of being question they can be released..

what they actually want is to be left alone from the start.. where nothing is 'about to happen' where they have to worry about if they being watched, or worrying will they be stopped or will they be questioned..  because what they want is situations where no one is watching them to even get to a stage of even questioning them

but if you are doing things that look suspicious.. you will get watched. thus defeating your goal

its like: not wanting to get seen on a street.. by making yourself obvious by jumping behind cars or running behind bushes. is the opposite of trying to remain private and unnoticed

while you are trying to find 'proof' and 'info' and 'innocence or guilt'... someone that wants privacy wants to not even reach the point of even being questioned or asked to provide info or attend a court to be told they are innocent after a lengthy court process of multiple questions and invasions of private life..

you say 'its upto the judicial system"
seriously. take 5 steps back. a privacy person does not want to even have a cop approach them asking for ID, let alone then getting a court order to attend a court, nor then have to explain self to a judge to prove innocence.

the true privacy guys want to be so far below the radar no one spots them in the first place to even start the snowball rolling of which YOU speak.

the issue is that MIXERS whether its a criminal using it or a legit person. just the fact of using one. is a red flag. that act of using a mixer (FOR ANY REASON LEGIT OR NOT) will start getting people watching your account. watching your coin movements.
so you already lost the privacy game just for using mixers

satoshi did not use mixers.. no one found him
no one stole his coins
i dont use mixers. no one knows me . ive never had my coins questioned.
many users that dont use mixers dont have the same headaches of those that do

but those that do use mixers are finding that their accounts are being put under investigations and demanding KYC and asking to explain source of funding and why they used a mixer.

if you dont want people questioning your life. then dont raise a red flag.

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this very topic is a mixers attempt to try its best to separate itself from criminal blacklists because it found itself as a red flag.

if you want to pretend that mixers dont cause flags. then this topic would not exist where wasabi would not be trying to survive against regulation that is making its service less acceptable

There are always going to be stark differences of opinion on this matter.  I choose to draw solace from believing that anyone who peddles anti-privacy rhetoric is taking the same side as the mainstream media, billionaires with vested interests and other such enemies of Bitcoin.  I'm glad I'm not one of those people.  Knowingly or unknowingly, people who oppose mixing are one of "them" and not one of us.  They're welcome to their wrong opinions.

Theres not any single proof that you received coins that have been used in a crime. Your coins get frozen automatically on some services for just having used a mixer. General suspicion without any evidence is discrimination. Its not anyones business which privacy services youre using on your own money, if theres not a single evidence beforehand that you have been part of a single crime.

Also i dont think you understand how criminals operate or which tools theyre using, then every single tool in the world is now a tool criminals use. They also dont need mixers to do money laundering, and these ridiculous regulations wont prevent any crime from happening or will even break down on real money launderers.

Bs, many of these coins get stolen afterwards or simply frozen. Its completely dependent on the arbitrariness of a non-judiciary entity.

Bs again. The police can investigate something, but its still up to the justice system to decide. They will need evidence to prove you guilty. With how these services are handling it, you need proof for being innocent, which is completely backwards and unjust. Creating an environment of complete arbitrariness for not criminal users.

Its not what criminals do. If you think you can catch criminals by the way theyre walking on the street, you might have watched too many bad movies.

They do, they say youre guilty until proven otherwise. If you dont understand why this is important, you would have probably also cheered when people hunted "witches" during the dark ages.


Any proof on how many criminals use mixers? It also doesnt matter how many use it, because no AML legislation will reduce Money laundering crimes. They will just move somwhere else and now only legit people are completely robbed of their privacy forever for no reason.

im not sure you understand the purpose of mixing from the prospective of services that have to by regulation have policy to spot possible suspicious things, coin movements that lean towards the suspicious

i understand why or how YOU may use a mixer.
i understand why or how YOU may want a mixer to be seen.

i understand that you may in your mind have morals, ethics and no desire of criminal act.
but being psychic is not a tool exchanges have to know your mind. they can only see what they see.
and if they can only see someone using a tool that is used by criminals. it then makes legitimate people using same said tools linked to the same suspicious acts they have to monitor

EG
from your prospective. you might be, for instance a beef butcher. you have no malice in your heart to harm another human. no intent to stab or murder anyone.. but if you went to a retailer each month buying a few large knifes regularly and there was a lil blood on your jacket from slaughtering a cow..
.. expect them to not know you are a butcher. and instead suspect you might be a serial killer and rather being safe than sorry. investigate you. (whether you know it or not)

same with guns. some americans dont want to kill. they just want their "constitutional right" to open carry.
but yea walking around a town waving a gun around . in your view might feel like its your "right" but to others may be seen as you scaring other pedestrians and passers by, and suspect of threatening behaviour.

yep walk around a town with a gun. even if you have not killed anyone.. expect to have a witness call the cops and then have a cop car approach you asking what are you upto. where they then ask who you are and where you are going and what is your intent and purpose of having the gun. .. even if its your "constitutional right"

I'm not sure you understood the purpose of mixing right. It's not about 'exchanging coins for clean coins' but about breaking the link between your various transactions.
If I'm getting a 'criminal's coins by mixing, that's fine for me, since I achieve my goal of unlinking a UTXO from my other UTXOs or payments it may be linked to.

Imagine I have a 0.1BTC UTXO in a wallet, for example earned through mining. Since Bitcoin is pseudonymous, the address and the UTXO are not tied to any identity of mine. I'm fine.

Then I spend 0.04BTC, roughly $1000, on a laptop that I buy in the trading section of this forum. Whatever I am going to do next with the other 0.06BTC, the seller will be able to see, since they can see which UTXO I used to send the payment and can easily trace where the change went.
Then they can monitor the change address and find out what other things I buy or businesses I use (e.g. if 0.03BTC goes to Coinbase). If they wanted to deanonymize me, they could even come up with a reason to demand my real name from Coinbase by having them check whose account that 0.03BTC payment was credited.

Instead, if I had mixed the 0.06BTC change, I would get back roughly 0.06BTC, but with a different history, and no link to the original 0.1BTC, and no link to the 0.04BTC payment to the Bitcointalk laptop seller.

I also don't care if you don't understand what privacy means, why it's important and to some people even necessary for survival. That's a different topic and there's enough information online to read yourself; no need to call people 'privacy nut guys' because they understood privacy and deemed it important for themselves.

its not about YOU being the criminal. its about you using a mixing service with criminals where your LEGIT coins are passed to the criminal. thus indirectly linking you to a crime.

its not about you having performed a crime before the mixing. its about you using a tool criminals use that then puts you on the same radar of suspicion as a criminal even if your coins were clean.
you can only then explain and prove your legitimate use.. AFTER being suspected.

meaning you caught yourself up in a suspected investigation of possible crime for doing things that are suspicious
many innocent people get called into police stations and investigated and interviewed and then let go/set free once you proved your innocence. but here is the think. your trapping yourself into being flagged up and "watched" by doing suspicious things(mixing)



same as "would you mind explaining why instead of just walking down the road, you are instead looking around seeing who might be looking at you."
is it a crime. not really. but you are acting very suspicious

yep huding behind bushes, coverig your face, looking out for CCTV camera's and sneaking passed via their blind spots. 'all for privacy', ends up getting you noticed more

its not a "crime" but the very act of doing things criminals also do, makes you flag up as suspicious, which triggers KYC (the thing you were trying to avoid)

again these flags are not to say your guilty, but just to flag a suspicion flag that you are using the tools of the trade a criminal uses

EG buying a large butchers knife. some people flag that as suspicious in a knife crime region

EG in america. some say that owning a gun is a "human right" and part of constitution. but in some places in america buying a gun in a region where there are no rifle ranges, hunting lodges and no gun sports for 100 miles. can be seen as suspicious

so by trying to hide "for privacy" actually becomes a question of "what are you trying to hide"
this is not about you being a terrorist. its not a ATL (anti-terror-law) policy its a AML anti-money-laundering policy
no one would be outright upfront calling you a criminal, instead they are interested in flagging anyone using tools that can cause suspicion of possible criminal sourced funds..

oh and one other thing.
mixers dont mix your privacy coins with some fresh mint clean coin..
most of the time legit people dont care about mixing so the majority of coins in a mixer are going to be privacy nuts and criminals. so in many cases you hand over your legit coin but just want privacy. and you end up with sone other criminals coins.

in the end no matter what your story is or your reasons.. your still going to get flagged and investigated, even if the mixed coins were from another legit but 'privacy nut' guy

Let’s also add that some people that were part of introducing AML legislations are money launderers or law breakers themselves. Just because justice systems worldwide operate under double standards, doesn’t mean that high tier individuals have clean records, even when they go unpunished. They demand the average citizen to become completely transparent with every single thing they do in their life, but can’t live up to it themselves.

People should come back to their senses again and not comply with every privacy violating legislation there is. We should ask ourselves first, who is actually demanding all this information about us? We’re the ones keeping the world running, not them. If they’re cheating and keeping their activity opaque, we should for sure not give these people all of our information on a golden plate. They’re not our friends and they also don’t introduce these measures to protect us from anything. If so, they failed hard and these legislations don’t achieve anything. Except damaging the people they’re trying to protect. Too many people still fall for false senses of security.

Mind explaining how by mixing my fully legitimate coins I am actually laundering my money?  I thought laundering was legitimizing dirty money by making it appear clean.  Does using Chip Mixer and Coin Join for the coins I purchased using my legally earned Fiat make me a criminal?  What dirty money am I washing, or am I getting the definition of 'laundering' wrong?

I think we need to make a clear, bold border line between laundering and the will of having privacy.  My Bitcoins have a history attached to them that I do not want this entire forum to see or a Blockchain Analysis company to process.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Wow. Now thats what I call an ego. "Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin". Even for marketing PR thats a bit too rich for my taste. Who do wasabists think they are? First they claim to filter out the "shady" transactions now they are turning their wallet into the shitcoin version of wallets. All hype, hyperbole and hyperego.

I was not impressed by wasabi wallet since the day I found out about it. It had way too much hyped-up marketing, especially on Bitcointalk. When something goes from barely noticeable to on every second page, thats when I know its a desperate marketing tactic.

Wasabi wallet is trying to undermine everything Bitcoin stands for as if the SEC were paying them personally. Im not buying into their BS.

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

Wait a minute; are zkSNACKS and Wasabi really such separate entities? I was under the assumption that they're one and the same thing. zkSNACKS is just the company behind Wasabi, no? And nopara73 is zkSNACKS' CEO - so I don't think it's wrong calling him the 'boogeyman', if he's literally the head of all this. Edit: It's all pretty unclear and not openly available, but I just read that since June 2022, one of their developers @HillebrandMax became CEO. It doesn't change that Wasabi seems to be nopara73's idea, and he's still heavily influencial in both Wasabi as a project and skSNACKs as a company. I wouldn't call them separate entities..

They could definitely be more transparent about the project / company structure, but https://zksnacks.com/ uses Wasabi's logo as favicon, and it says 'zkSNACKs' flagship product is a privacy oriented Bitcoin wallet, called Wasabi Wallet.'
Soo, in my eyes: zkSNACKs = Wasabi = nopara73. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Here some proof:
Good point: by creating 'fungible / private / [whatever] Wasabi coins' that are somehow different from all other coins, they are actually introducing non-fungibility and firmly plant this idea in their users' heads (which is the only location taint exists).

Thanks for chiming in! I always appreciate someone joining into a topic and giving their take / understanding - no matter if late or not; especially since this article left me a bit puzzled. But yes, you put it very nicely. That's exactly how it sounds like... The issue is that they don't achieve this goal, due to their blacklist not matching with governments' or exchanges' blacklists; potentially giving you coins that are only 'clean' in Wasabi's eyes, but not in everyone else's. That's one of the issues of the whole taint concept itself; that there is no central, universally accepted database, auditable and accessible by everyone.

I'm definitely late to the party on this one.  It's almost as though Wasabi is fuelled on some weird combination of hypocrisy and saviour complex.  It's hard to make sense of.  The way I'm reading it is something along the lines of:

"Government censorship is bad.  Our censorship will help us stay in the government's good books.  This will allow us to help others avoid government censorship, which is worse than our censorship."

Am I close?  Or does that sound even more stupid than what they're actually saying?