Topic: 'Wasabigeddon' article discussion (it supposedly solves fungibility) (Read 1027 times)

congratulations

another step forward.
you finally getting it.. (though you then try to not openly just say you actually know by then twisting things into a point finger in  different direction after omitting it)
the answer is: stop using services.. especially ones that are in print of regulations know to cause red flags

funny part is you and your group idolise the DCG who pay blockstream and LN devs... and who own bitpay, kraken, coinbase, circle, gyft and chainanalysis

i have been saying the solution is not to use more middle men services(which you are advertising)
so stop trying to twist things around

i have shown you that mixers do cause red flags and all coins that went through a mixer is on a chainanalysis watch list which is sold to exchanges.

again.. your groups pretence is o imply that the blockchain openly tells the world how many sex dolls you bought if they/you didnt use a mixer..
if that was reality.. show me ANY bitcoin transaction that shows what product someone bought.
show me the raw blockchain data that proves your point.

again. can you agree that its not a flaw of bitcoin. but a issue of SERVICES that are a privacy concern.
you know the services you idolise and advertise so much.



get with reality.
telling people to use mixers is telling people to get red flagged and noticed and surveilled more than people that dont

https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/recommendations/Updated-Guidance-VA-VASP.pdf
VA = Virtual Asset - VASP = Virtual Asset Service Provider - AEC = Anonymity-Enhanced Cryptocurrency


try to read and do research instead on what the hopes and dreams and scripts your buddies tell you where you aimlessly then believe the utopian hope because you hear the same echos from the other buddies reciting the same crap

look outside your groups utopian scripts and learn what actually is a surveillance red flag.. and then when you learn the ACTUAL red flags you then know what actually to avoid

and yes.. the blue writing in previous posts quotes are a hint to the other project you advocate for being another red flag trigger..
LEARN and then understand

i am not acting like a government agent, i am just not afraid to do research to know what reality is and what actually happens in the real world.
i dont reply on the fantasies friends tell me to make me feel good with lies. i actually do the research.. so go try it and stop trying to find your social groups confirmation bias. and then stop trying to push your silly adverts on others knowing full well it will red flag them


oh..
and as for your use of de-fi /dex
much like the old local bitcoins. they to are running into regulations
oh and when you do crypto to fiat. what you find is that instead of an exchange having automated scripts(no human eyes watching your account). de-fi users manually type in their bank account associated birth name and their bank account number, and the person on the other end does the same thing to send you the fiat.
(many human eyes)

so each time you use de-fi you are adding one extra person that knows your name and local bank branch
so again your not being that private by letting loads of people know your name and bank account details.

oh and another lesson
even with your bank. when you receive random deposits from lots of different people(de-fi). your bank red flags that too.. far more so then regularly doing deposits and withdrawals from one exchange
so even de-fi doesnt actually help privacy.

but hey, your not thinking deeply about actual privacy. you just want to advertise certain services.

i guarantee you if someone was to read your post history. they would see YOU have advertised the most amount of services that are red flag triggers..

the more services and the more middle men you use.. the more noticeable you become

think about that

---

here is the difference between me and you

you:
"by using an exchange the government watches your every move"

^ WRONG
reality. by actually doing research is this

when using an exchange. your data just sits on the EXCHANGES computer where no human eyes bother to look at it. as it raises no alarm bells and because they have millions of customers they just dont have the time to care.

however by using a mixer then an exchange. you WILL get highlighted as worthy of looking at. by which then and only then would your details most likely end up in a SAR

so learn how things really work in reality.. then you can learn how to work around such things to stay under the radar

My last response to franky1's nonsense and then hopefully we can stop derailing this thread.

It is both. Centralized exchanges and now Wasabi treat bitcoin as non-fungible, but the ability to do so is based on an open ledger which is not private (like Monero's is, for example).

Mixers have never once let me down. My coins are impossible to trace through the blockchain, and I've never once been subjected to taint analysis or had coins frozen because I do not use centralized exchanges. Blaming mixers for exchanges implementing taint is like blaming Tor for Google spying on you. The correct response is not to stop using Tor and make Google's data collection as easy and thorough as possible - it is to stop using the products and services of Google, a company which is intent on invading your privacy and selling your data. And the correct response is not to stop mixing or coinjoining or otherwise obfuscating your funds and allowing centralized exchanges to track every single payment or transaction you make - it is to stop using centralized exchanges which are intent on invading your privacy and selling your data.

All I get is that you behave like a government agent, advising people to open up themselves as much as possible, take no steps to protect their privacy or even actively surrender it, and allow the government to monitor absolutely everything that they do in order for the government to leave them alone. This is just the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument, which has been debunked so thoroughly so many times that anyone who still repeats it is either stupid or malicious.

I'm choosing to ignore the rest of the post since it is just the usual completely off topic junk about big blocks and Lightning which franky1 shoehorns in to every post he makes.

point is exactly that

YOU were blaming anti-privacy based on the blockchain. where now you have omitted the problem is in services.
(one step forward. congratulations)

the funniest part now you have omitted it, you might now realise that asking everyone to stop using the blockchain
to just move funds, but instead lock funds up to middlemen services that control who gets what. and altnets involving partners and custodians will some how in your mind resolve the pretend bitcoin fault you wish to imply

sorry but no.
just read this very topic.
wasabi is generating blacklists.. the very thing you think mixers prevent.
they are literally telling you to your face that mixers are not what you think they are.
your response is then get angry that mixers have let you down. but then trying to sales pitch mixers to everyone else to use as their 'must use' thing to avoid normal blockchain usage

do get it yet(your hypocrisy)

using middle men services and forcing others to lock funds up to services and altnets pretending your offerings/advertised services hides people.. doesnt. ....it actually red flags those users.

try to read, try to learn, try to understand

---

again it seems the lagging is in part by certain people not wanting to do the research or actually think for themselves what actions people themselves are advertising that actually causes people to be highlighted and surveilled

so because your crowd want to not do the research and instead want to promote middlemen services

let me show you one more time..
and this time actually read and understand and take the time to understand.. and not just hit the reply button trying to defend a service you pals want to advertise for personal greed, malicious intent

maybe i should make it more colourful to grab your intention


yep mixers will earn people a red flag that puts them not in the normal user data base that doesnt get looked at for 5 years before getting deleted.. but instead gets users put into a suspicious activity watch list

GET IT YET

..
lets put it another way
imagine there was a known law for years that anyone depositing funds into a casino would be on a watchlist by default, no matter the purpose or source of funds. just using a casino gets you surveilled

and now your group come along and try to scare people that every cent people spend is being watched, so they need to use casino's to hide.
sorry but no.. not everyone was being watched.. but those using casino's are. and you are trying to get everyone watched by telling them to use a casino

do you know why oeleo and yourself cant find my stash or my real life info
yep i dont use silly middle men services to the extent that you lot advertise.

as for why i am against the silly groups tactics of advertising silly things. is because their underlying motives is to declare bitcoin as dead, try to tell people not to use bitcoin. and instead put people at risk of being watched or have their funds controlled by others, for their own malicious greedy motives.
because they dont care about other people. they only care about getting profit at any cost as long as that cost is passed to others and they can get away with it

take their silly agenda of saying bitcoin cant scale for daily use by the unbanked. yet they then WANT bitcoin to be spammed up with useless mixers tx's and data that cant account for its good money limited supply accounting mechanism. thus making bitcoin useless as good money so they can declare their crappy flawed altnet is deemed (by them) bitcoin 2.0 that everyone should use.

back to the point though
ignore the silly mindset of a few idiots.. and realise once and for all
using a mixer WILL GET YOUR RED FLAGGED and surveilled

The problem is that more and more coins get solely acquired trough kyc, what is preventing them from doing it? They benefit from it and i think we don’t need anymore proof if mass surveillance is happening or not, it has become clear over the last years. We should think of what we can do against it, before things are getting really bad. And it would be hard to get this information out of closed circles, we’re always lagging behind in getting to know about surveillance measures.

Expected, but doesn’t change anything.

If all of your hoard would’ve been acquired trough kyc, all of a sudden there would be a lot more potential attack vectors on you. If everyone goes completely trough kyc for all of their hoard in the future, we might have a problem.


I don’t hate you franky and i still don’t have anything against you personally. Our opinions just differ on this.

I wouldn’t dox you even if i had the ability to. Because i respect your privacy and revealing yourself should be your decision only.

It’s not broke, but the practice of linking more and more sensitive data to it and making it mandatory for more and more people, is risky.

franky1 of course totally missing the point here, as usual. The ability of a random person to track you down or trace your transactions with no starting point and only using a public blockchain explorer is in no way equivalent to a massive blockchain analysis company which is collecting data from most centralized exchanges, including your real name, all your deposit addresses, all your withdrawal addresses, and your IP addresses, and cross linking that against huge amounts of data bought from data brokers and their own private blockchain analysis software. Saying "Well, you can't find me therefore I'm anonymous" is utterly juvenile; it is akin to inviting you to hack my computer, and if you fail then declaring my system impenetrable.

yawn
my coins are not KYC linked nor surveilled by default

BUSINESSES may link my id from one site to another. businesses may keep records of how many sex dolls your chums buy.. but none of that is put on the blockchain

emphasis the blockchain does not store data about how many sex dolls doomad/blackhat/oeloe/or yourself buy
again emphasis the problem is not the blockchain. its the middle man services that are the points of failure

also you just got caught out exaggerating things with the "surveilled by default" nonsense
maybe if you can back it up by some regulation/business policy.. then you might have a point.
yet the funny part is that regulations actually show that its users of coin mixers that get red flagged and surveilled by default, not the normal people just doing normal peer to peer transactions

heck there are some mixers that dont care to such an extent they want peoples coins red flagged as being mixed.. they use the vanity address "1chip" to actually super highlight that people have used a mixer

...
anyways. i set the challenge to o_e_l_e_o .. but ill now ask you.
find me on the blockchain, find what my birth registered name is and my location

my birth certificate is in a government registry, my bank knows it. and some exchanges know it, my name is on drivers licence which another government registry has. same with passport.
the tax office and so many places know my real life name.

but they dont know where my hoards of coins are nor do those who know where my hoards are know my life info.
so if you want to pretend you can prove it wrong. come on tell me my life story via the blockchain

show me a transaction that reveals my info.
find anything about me via a bitcoin transaction. anything

...
oh and your buddies are trying hard to kiss ass the owners of chainanalysis. so how about ask your buddies you pal around with on this forum for a character reference. but first. you might want to prove that you can find real life info about the most irritating person your chums hate so much, just to prove you have the skills required for the job you want

so the challenge is set.
please give it a try and if you succeed you probably could add it to your resume that you were able to dox me as a credible provable skill they would want to pay you for.
so go at it

prove that blockchain is broke and reveals private info..

So by your logic it’s more privacy preserving that all transactions are kyc linked and surveilled by default, than breaking this connection as much as possible trough mixers etc and simply avoiding using government-simping services that never had the courage to do what’s right for Bitcoin.

It seems the right path going forward is less centralized services in the first place, so if most people chose option B the result is looking more promising in the end(it’s enough if they don’t use centralized services already, mixers are optional for whoever sees a benefit for themselves, but let’s not act like using a mixer is a shady act, that’s ridiculous too, it’s ridiculous that 3rd party companies get access to sensitive information and that people are almost powerless against it, stop bashing mixers or other privacy services, start with why your beloved government allows this to happen in the first place). It will be harder to stop Bitcoin if we stop using services of soft ass ceos that want Big Brother to govern them harder, because they’re scared of losing their bag. With option A we already lost in the long run, more P2P and decentralized services would be unstoppable on the other hand. It will probably take a lot of pain tho, before people realise that going into the bed with the government will only lead to bad outcomes and absolute mass surveillance down to the last penny leads to dystopia and dysfunctional economies.


It’s actually not that hard to make a link between purchasing behaviours and stances on blockchain surveillance. The color of underwear of most authoritarian surveillance loving control freaks is pink mixed with kittens. Maybe chain analysis should hire me so we can do some targeted marketing to government officials, ceos and the bunch of useful idiots that comply while loving it. Sales will go trough the roof.

bitcoin does not ask you to be naked
bitcoin does not even ask you what is in your pockets or what colour underwear you have on

the problem is not at the bitcoin level.
its at the business/service level..

wake up

by using a mixer. you are literally putting a flashlight on yourself and shouting look at me, im doing something shady.
which obviously is going to trigger a response

so again..
dont do things that are going to get you watched.
if you avoid such things then you can preserve your privacy

EG.
im not on a watchlist. no physical pair of eyes has investigated my exchange account.
yes my transactions data is on a database(congratulations you finally learned what a ledger is)
but no one is physically able to look at the blockchain and find out all the products i purchased or where they got delivered to or what colour underwear i have on right now.. and i dont use a mixer

however if i did use a mixer. i would get flagged by an exchange/chain analysis and i would then have to explain the origins of funds and have to be questioned about other personal details
not due to the taint being from some ransomware/hack. but purely due to being linked to a mixer
where by i then have to prove my pre-mixed funds were not criminally obtained. which becomes a harder job to do if you cant prove funds(x) that went into a mixer is funds(y) coming out of a mixer are related to me and are not some other transaction of similar amount randomly plucked from a block explorer.

do you get it yet. mixers and privacy tools cause exchanges to question you more.. not less

bitcoin does not ask for your wifes bra size or how often you had sex in the last year. so stop pretending that using bitcoin is like going through a airport metal detector naked.. because its not

..
ok here is a challenge about privacy for o_e_l_e_o
show me where on bitcoins blockchain that any transaction of your reveals that your professionals skills is in the medical sector

now show me a service to which you personally gave out personal info about yourself, to which i read and now know about you

and now go back to the blockchain and again try to find me a transaction that repeats your omission of your private life..where by that omission appears on the blockchain after you announced it..

hmm
cant find anything on the blockchain.. hmm i wonder why(rhetorical)

now here is the next challenge
i know i have revealed i live in the UK
but try and use bitcoins blockchain data to find my home address. what vehicle i use, what where my last X products i bought using bitcoin. what colour underwear i am currently wearing.
try and find out something about me using bitcoin blockchain data.
something unique that is not publicly known from other sources

goodluck
well should i need to wish you luck? i mean i never use a mixer so it must make it really easy for you to learn everything about me, right?

oh then go check this out and see if mixers help you hide or get you noticed more
especially read the last quoted passage
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.60729993

have a great day

Indeed. When the average user does not understand the importance of protecting their privacy, it is unfortunate. When a so called privacy wallet does not understand the importance of protecting privacy and advertises themselves on lies and deliberately misleading information, it is a scam.

I unhid franky1's post exactly because I was sure it would prove the point being discussed here, and he did not disappoint:
Perfect example. "If you want privacy, it's clearly because you are trying to get away with a crime." Of course. There is no other reason to want privacy than if you are trying to hide a crime. That's why everyone walks through airports naked. Why would you need clothes unless you are trying to smuggle something across borders? That's why all emails ever sent are publicly published to a central database that anyone can read. Why would you need email privacy unless you are trying to commit a crime? That's why franky1 posts under his real name and address and not a pseudonym, right? Why do you need privacy, franky1? What are you trying to hide?

taint is not a word invented to find criminal activity

its original meaning in regards to bitcoin was the bitcoin transparent accounting to prove all coins originated from a block mined coin reward.

it has only in recent years become re-defined as the fear and scare tactics of 'anti fungible'

bitcoin does not ask or reveal any info that breaks fungibility.

EG
imagine you received funds from bitpay.
bitcoin does not reveal if those funds are
a. employee wage(income tax implications)
b. merchant funds from sales(corporation tax sales tax implications)
c. customer refund from a product return (no tax implications)

so bitcoin itself does not harm peopls usage of value not tag what peoples use is.
pretending bitcoin reveals KYC and criminal acts is the lie.. the scare tactics people use to promote middle man services and altnet requirements to off board regular users into.

what you find is that its the businesses themselves that categorise things. not bitcoin

and it does not matter what you do with bitcoin to change that.
by brutalising bitcoin as a whole to become like monero. businesses just stop using monero/bad bitcoin.

take things like coinbase, they dont accept it as they deem any funds from monero as a high risk
and yes they also deem ANY funds coming from a mixer as high risk

those mixers are trying desperately to try to survive and pretend they are not a risk
some (like wasabi) are trying to pretend they offer a clean service by blaklisting criminal acts.. but this will fail because no matter how 'clean' they are.. they themselves are still a mixer no matter who their customer is, which is still a suspicion rated level that other services will rate them at.(they cant escape being a risk by being a mixer. because they ARE a mixer)

there is a big difference between a mixer and a exchange. even when at basic level their business is to swap currency. because the PURPOSE of the swap is different
exchanges swap currency for allowing gateways between currencies..
mixers swap currencies to try to evade investigations of sources of funding and links to crime.(laundering)

mixers will always be mixers and always come with a suspicion rating by other services. they cant escape this no matter what they try

some mixers try to vary their coin collation and coin redistribution process to try to not show the pattern, and thus try to hide from appearing as a mixer.
again this wont work, because when users deposit their mixed coins into exchanges, exchanges can question the users and customers if they dont want their coins confiscated/forfeited, would need to explain AND PROVE the origins of funds.

here is the thing idiots dont think about or dont mention when they play the distraction games of fear and scare stories pretending even innocent people need to use mixers, or need to vote for bitcoin to break its accounting system to hide coin origins


by not being able to prove origins of funds came from legit transactions. then innocent people get treated as accessories to a crime by facilitating and being part of money laundering.
by having their legit coin transactions swapped out and handed to a criminal and the criminal giving the legit person the criminal related coins makes the innocent person now guilty.

..
the only reason idiots are trying so hard to promote everyone should hide their transactions and break bitcoin accounting rules is out of pure selfish greed and malicious intent by the shady people that want to get away with a crime and allow innocent people to be thrown into the fire.

mixers DO NOT HELP preserve privacy nor create fungibility.
mixers cause exchanges to highlight people as suspicious purely for using mixers.
it gets people noticed and put onto watch lists.
and due to not being able to prove honest good legit transaction value sources. all coins then become suspicious

you cannot win against the regulations by creating a community where by if everyone is treated as suspicious then regulators give up.
that utopian dream will never come true. instead the risk bar is risen where it then becomes even harder for normal people to just use bitcoin

however innocent users can protect themselves by not getting involved in shady propositions that malicious people advertise. dont allow malicious people to ruin bitcoin in the short term gain of their selfish whims. while destroying bitcoins utility for the long term.. instead stay clear of malicious things and enjoy bitcoin as it was intended, open, free transparent good money that has rules that wont allow counterfeitting double spending or injecting random new units outside of the rules. and enjoy using bitcoin without needing to process a transaction or lock a value into a group/partnership through middle men

no currency is fungible, its a myth. people just have become used to the rules of a currency by learning their limits and functions that people learn how to treat different allocations of money in certain ways that its no longer a headache or a task to use money.

EG people dont bother using a $100 bank note to buy a $2 can of pepsi. because they know that the retailer will question it and object to accepting it
people get used to only gettng $500 out of an ATM due to limits of bank policy
people getting funds from their investment portfolio and their employer know how to treat them differently on their tax filings. so much so that they forget that these different treatments are proof that fiat is not fungible
people know if they are handed money from drug dealers they become implicated in proceeds of crime so they to try to do things to hide their involvement

yep even if you have $10k from legit sources. taking it across the border, you can have that money confiscated and forfeited. if you put that $10k into escrow for a mortgage deposit. that can trigger stamp duty taxes and have other KYC stuff done where they check your credit rating and speak to your employers about your income, etc.

no currency is fungible. and if funds are even semi linked to a criminal act. its then the innocent person that has to prove their innocence if they are to have any hope of getting it returned. no matter what the currency is.

these silly scare tactics of pretending bitcoin is broke and people need to use mixers, or bitcoin needs to actually become broken to protect people is wrong and the opposite of fact.

bitcoin should be used by the masses that want to use it. it should not be a testing ground to offboard people into middle men services or altnets for the greedy and malicious groups to syphon and steal from the innocent

if malicious people that want to do shady crap want to continue their lifestyle. so be it. but go play with your own middlemen services and altnets. and stop trying to drag everyone down to your level using fear and scare stories that bitcoin is attacking innocent people. bitcoin is not

Indeed, you have long been one of the most consistent and well-spoken advocates on this forum for the principle of privacy.

My argument was directed not at you personally, but at some widespread and pernicious wrong thinking that I know you have so oft opposed.  It is too bad that many people just don’t or won’t get it.  In the big picture, since last week, I have been discovering and rediscovering just how broken everything is—the subject of a new project which forced me temporarily to set aside something I’ve been working on for zero-knowledge proof privacy.


That is an interesting point.  I didn’t think of it that way.


The evidence indicates as much.  Indeed, if privacy and fungibility are considered valuable, it looks to me like nopara73 and Wasabi are doing something tantamount to an exit scam:  They build up a good reputation, and they are now using it to slip in support for Mike Hearn’s old agenda.

This is one of the oldest debates in Bitcoin.  Most newer users do not realize it.  I will soon place it in its proper context.

I am fairly certain that most of the people behind Wasabi don't believe many of the things they are saying:

Just to address this point: So do I. You are well aware that I have argued long and hard against nonsensical statements such as that anyone who has the slightest interest in maintaining some financial privacy must be a criminal, terrorist, money launderer, or what have you.

However, given that nopara73 has consistently and repeatedly failed to answer basic questions as to how he thinks blacklisting and censorship is somehow beneficial to fungibility, has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated that he believes in taint and taint analysis, and is building a product specifically designed to cater only to those good little citizens with "nothing to hide", an answer to a basic question using his own preferred terminology might be more forthcoming.

Orwellian “Fungibility”

Quote from: nopara73 on August 07, 2022, 09:46:24 AM

Of course I am more than happy to hear thoughts on this topic, but I hope I demonstrated that my fungibility claims aren't pulled out of my ass, in fact they are the result of years of research on the topic, so I'd appreciate not calling me a liar, because of them.

It will profit you not to make breathtakingly audacious claims in public, and then get huffy and play the victim about people calling you a liar.

This is an exercise in classic Orwellian doublethink:

• Divide the set of all bitcoins into two distinguishable subsets, “bitcoins accepted by Wasabi CJ” and “bitcoins rejected by Wasabi CJ”, based on vague, arbitrary, centrally decreed secret criteria derived from blockchain spying (“analysis”).  This is a new problem on the input side of a Wasabi mix.  By citing your own 2021 essay, you divert people’s attention with (anyway unsound) arguments on the output side.
• Declare that Wasabi solves Bitcoin’s fungibility problem, because on the output side of a Wasabi mix, coins within the minuscule anonymity set of one Wasabi mix are indistinguishable from each other (see below!).  Perhaps you should better say that it is more or less weakly difficult overall to discriminate between coins in the “bitcoins accepted by Wasabi CJ” subset.  (Your argument, quoted below, is poorly stated; I am sorry to fix it for you.)

Accordingly, I propose a new marketing slogan for Wasabi:

Quote from: nopara73 on August 07, 2022, 09:46:24 AM

Learn more on this here: https://nopara73.medium.com/privacy-fungibility-anonymity-451d029355f7

I hope that you are not mining these discussions for ideas to twist to your audience on Medium, even as you tell people here who have proficiency in the subject to “learn more” from your marketing fluff article that you wrote before Wasabi hopped into bed with blockchain analysis.

Anyway, let’s take a look.  The key quote, the only part that is really relevant here, is this:

All formatting is in the original:

Quote from: nullius on December 05, 2017, 11:36:54 PM

Quote from: no0dlepunk on December 05, 2017, 09:45:26 PM

I guess they could identify you only once you cashed out. Other than that, your identity is safe (unless you have verified your identify in an online wallet, of course);

WRONG.  For but one of a hundred other ways your identities could be linked, even if you mix with CoinJoin, check out this pretty picture from a research paper I referenced in my earlier post on this thread:

Stop giving dangerously bad advice!

I doubt that blockchain analysis companies ever fully disclose their current capabilities to the public.  Never mind state-level threats, such as the NSA’s mass-surveillance program against Bitcoiners.  The academic literature has years-old attacks for unwinding CoinJoins in realistic scenarios.

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on August 07, 2022, 01:44:30 PM

Quote from: nopara73 on August 07, 2022, 09:46:24 AM

is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible?

Maybe you are making some bitcoins fungible, but you are not making Bitcoin fungible. If anything, you are actively working against Bitcoin fungibility by enforcing taint and directly funding blockchain analysis.

Well said.  It is merely Orwellian doublethink—or perhaps, a marketing sleight-of-hand to pull the wool over the eyes of nontechnical users who do not think in such precise terms.

---

On dirty language:

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on August 07, 2022, 01:44:30 PM

Quote from: nopara73 on August 07, 2022, 09:46:24 AM

That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing.

For carefully selected outputs which are already treated as fungible by your blockchain analysis partners. To paraphrase someone from Twitter: What good is a washing machine which only washes clean clothes?

I strongly disagree with that use of terminology.  I intended to address that in some drafts that didn’t get done because my time was eaten up by some drama last week.  I hadn’t seen that at the time; I found it shortly after I had fixed something in the Bitcoin Wiki that really horrified me (another WIP):

Quote from: n0nce on July 30, 2022, 08:32:06 PM

Quote from: nullius on July 29, 2022, 02:18:13 PM

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

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!

Thanks.  Pending whatever other topics I create on these subjects, I should note in brief two things:

Fiat cash is no longer so private—not “untraceable”.  The automated scanning and logging of serial numbers has been sort of privacy-lore passed about in privacy circles for some time; and I have seen Snowden mention it as a major problem nowadays.  But I did not know of any specific, citable information about this.  Thus, I spent some hours researching systems that are available on the market today, and presumably in common use.  This will be the subject of a new thread.

You have mentioned Monero a few times.  Thus although I don’t want to diverge too much into a topic I intend to address in other threads, I want to make it clear for the record that I do not consider Monero adequate.

My own analogy:  Any sort of mixer scheme (including Monero mixins) is like stabbing yourself with a rusty fork, and then putting on a bandage.  Such schemes leak information onto the blockchain, and try to generate noise covering up the information that is leaked.  The true transaction graph is still there, hidden in the noise.  This information can sometimes be sussed out with probabilistic attacks, or used for confirmation attacks, or cross-correlated with other information—and it is a rule in security, attacks only improve.

Ultimately, I only deem adequate a technology that leaks no information at all.  Instead of stabbing yourself and bandaging the wound, don’t stab yourself.

Digicash (1996–98) had perfect unlinkability—statistical hiding.  However, it was unavoidably centralized.  The blind bearer note system that I almost built a few years ago would have similar properties (with quite different cryptography).  I have remarked before that Satoshi was caught on the horns of a dilemma between privacy and decentralization.

This is both perfectly unlinkable, decentralized—and now, fully trustless [paper now linked above]:



That is not k-anonymity.  Rather, statistical zero knowledge provides what Jameson Lopp (2014) properly called “infinite anonymity”.  To understand it requires an entirely different mindset.  Few people get it; even in the Zcash community, I am frustrated by a widespread lack of comprehension about what zero knowledge really means in practice.  There are no “anonymity sets” partioning zero-knowledge shielded coins within a shielded value pool.  The concept does not even apply.  And within the shielded pool, a public transaction graph does not exist.

(N.b., I am hereby discussing a privacy technology in itself.  What I have just said applies to transactions that occur fully within a zero-knowledge shielded value pool.  The well-known attacks on the transparent value pool, and on people who have careless opsec at the boundary between pools, are not relevant.  In particular, attempting to use a privacy coin as a Bitcoin pseudo-mixer is a well-known footgun; that has nothing to do with the technology.)

Some people get it.  I was pleased to learn that Snowden secretly participated in the creation of Zcash, under a pseudonym.  In 2021, Snowden declared that “Bitcoin is really failing comprehensively on the privacy angle,” and he called for Bitcoin to be made “private by design”; he made similar remarks in March and in June of 2022.  Although I don’t agree with him about everything, Snowden understands the privacy issue; thus, I am unsurprised that in 2016, he was secretly onboard with the same privacy technology as I have been wanting in Bitcoin since 2013.

Like Snowden, I myself have said that “Bitcoin has a fatal flaw...  an append-only global public ledger [is] an idea which frankly horrified me.”  I now modify what I said there in 2020 about “my proposed solution”.  The solution ultimately needs to be on L1, but I clearly understand the state of zero-knowledge proof technology.  In 2013, applying NIZK proofs to a blockchain was a research idea; and Turing-complete zk-SNARKs were first invented.  In 2016, the first fielded implementation was bleeding-edge new technology.  In 2017–early 2018, I myself suffered some severe problems as an early adopter.  By late 2018, it was basically usable, albeit with some significant remaining problems—worst of all, the trusted setup.  In early 2020, I knew that it was still not yet sufficiently mature for Bitcoin.  Only in 2022, after nine years of R&D and a fully-fielded implementation of refinements of the 2019 research breakthrough that got rid of the trusted setup, I am ready to declare that the technology is mature for widespread general adoption.

Right, so as a result, you felt the need to encourage blacklisting in a project that isn't censorship resistant in order to avoid blacklisting in the one that is censorship resistant?  I think we need a clearer explanation of how that's supposed to make sense. 

Maybe you are making some bitcoins fungible, but you are not making Bitcoin fungible. If anything, you are actively working against Bitcoin fungibility by enforcing taint and directly funding blockchain analysis.

For carefully selected outputs which are already treated as fungible by your blockchain analysis partners. To paraphrase someone from Twitter: What good is a washing machine which only washes clean clothes?

Because profits are more important than philosophies.

yet again it must be said
certain people are trying to create a problem. trying to tell everyone that bitcoin is not fit for purpose and that normal people have to use a service/altnet as a solution to the dreamt up problem instigated by the selfish people in the first place.. and then say bitcoin as a whole is broke unless bitcoin as a whole changes to satisfy the problem they dreamt up.

put simply. by wasabi being a mixer makes other businesses treat wasabi as a suspicious service by default. and wasabi is now trying to fight back by saying it will make its own black list to keep criminals out of its service in the "hope" to reduce its own suspicion level with other services.
sorry but other services will still deem it suspicious even if it did only work with 'legit/clean' customers, because other services will still by regulatory policy need and want to identify source of funds and identity of fundee's

and yes i know the ploy. due to the lack of customer use of wasabi when blacklisting criminals. then to keep their business/service active/viable it needs an injection of fresh users.. otherwise wasabi dies.
much like an altnet dies unless it can sway people into using it
yep wasabi's 'rounds' of mixing have become less and more delayed and so it needs more customers to try to remain viable as a business/service.
so it and idiots with selfish motives, pretends bitcoin is broke to then sway clean users to then use such mixer by pretending legit people NEED to use it.
yep emphasis: their agenda is to try to make their service sound like its 'needed' by clean/legit people.. when reality is its not needed.  
these selfish people are only promoting it because they are selfishly not getting to mix their own coins as often so they want to push naive people towards the service so that the selfish people can get what they want. mixed coins from clean people. (similar selfish game with LN too. get naive people into LN so selfish people can syphon fee's off them in routing games)

anyway
fiat money is not fungible and fungibility is not a pre-requisite of "good money"
take the many many confiscation laws, the counterfeit laws, tax laws, income laws. policies of banks that questions their customers utility of funds. etc etc.

so pretending bitcoin fails as money due to not being fungible is wrong on so many levels

bitcoin in fact is GREAT money due to its accountability where people can trace their coin they own back to the original coin reward block it was mined into existence.
this tracking allows people to know that no random coin was just added. counterfeited or bugged into existence.
this accounting show the coins creation was done by a certain level of workload/effort, which helps define its underlying value of the coin.
its the very accountability and transparency of bitcoin that makes it better money than fiat in many many ways.

no matter what ploy these idiots want to employ to break bitcoins accounting/archiving feature, for their selfish whims. actual regulations will find a way to still require users to prove who they are and where/how they acquired their value. and infact will cause regulators to up the pressure on it if people are made to use even more invisible money currencies, thus defeating the privacy promise their scheme started off with.

yep, reality check: a well regulated exchange that actually follows regulation, if it were to accept liquid and monero would have tougher KYC requirements, not less

emphasis:
it then if bitcoin was a privacy coin, actually becomes more of a headache for people. not just by being watched/suspected by default just for using a privacy coin. but then when questioned, having  to prove their usage was all legit and clean. (something they cannot then do easily because they cant just let the exchange follow the taint back, thus force exchanges to have to question the user)
which is now even harder to achieve easily. thus now 2 headaches deep for regular clean legit users to have to perform
and so suspicions are raised due to the lack of easy accounting of their clean funds

if you really think that making everything invisible is going to result in regulators just quitting their jobs and leaving people alone. you lot are really delusional to think you can work around regulators in the hope the regulators back down.
 wake up and grasp reality outside your selfish whims and realise how the real world works outside your dreams and hopes of getting maliciously, unethically rich whilst hoping not to get noticed by the tax man.

emphasis:
making a currency harder to prove, causes such currency to be treated as a tool that regulators do not want to have businesses associated with due to the higher risks of criminal use. its why places like coinbase does not accept liquid or monero and also flags users that use mixers.

yep coinsbase is sister company to Liquid sidechain, but it does not use or accept customer use of its sister company product for the very reason of it going against its regulatory duties as a money service business.

it doesnt matter that other coins like monero/liquid has some special code 'for privacy'. by just having the special code makes money services businesses that follow regulations just avoid using those crypto's OR treat users that do use them as a higher level of suspicion. and thus causes users to be put onto watch lists. thus defeating the privacy ploy the selfish people tried to promote the need for the changes..

do you get it yet

so here is an option
instead you the certain known group of people trying endlessly to say bitcoin is broke and normal people should use other altnets or services and then attempt to break bitcoin to then fit these other altnets/services.
about about you silly group just go play with yourselves on your favoured altnets.

yep the silly mind games of "bitcoin should not be used by normal peoples daily lives" whilst then promoting that it should be bloated up with locks and mixer spam is absolutely stupid game to play.
sorry but bitcoin should reduce the mixer spam and instead just let normal users use bitcoin for normal use

stop trying to break bitcoin. and just go play with your own altnets if you want to mix your 'clean funds' go on. go play around over on your altnet. have fun over there. its your altnet. so go play with it.

stop trying to break bitcoin by pretending its already broke. just to fulfil your selfish silly agenda's

as for you silly group of known people
do you realise that the influencers you adore so much, the ones that you idolise that are offering you these privacy altnets and sidechains and privacy services.. are paid/sponsored by the same corporations that do the chain analysis and have the regulatory exchanges that are the ones that share information and ask users about KYC.

yep you are sheep in a wolf valley being told by wolves to run away from shepherds that have secured land, when you should be running away from the wolves that are barking at you to be afraid of something thats not as harmful as the entities telling you to be afraid.
they are telling you to hate and say that secured open farmland is bad. telling you to stay in wolf value and trying to tell you to invite more victims into wolf valley as the only way to save yourself from being bit.

by creating a meaningless problem that was not a problem the DCG corporation can then set up another business/service to get users to buy into.
and you silly lil group of fangirls fell right into it and your loyalty is making them money while trying to cause headaches for normal users that just want to use bitcoin for what it is/was.

so wake up to realise you are being played. or move over to your favoured altnet/service and go play with your friendly influencers.

You’re not looking at the issue holistically. Fungibility includes all Bitcoins in existence, not just the ones your service lets trough. It’s possible to separate between coinjoined and non-conjoined coins. Coinjoins alone dont solve the issue. By introducing Blacklists you’re already starting to take part in the issue by starting to separate between coins yourself. Accepting all coins equally is what is necessary to make a contribution to fungibility. Bitcoin is already fungible, it is services introducing the nonsense and separation. If this childishness doesn’t stop then it might be necessary to make it impossible to separate between coins on a protocol level, which im not entirely a fan of. Humans just can’t handle this responsibility apparently. For Bitcoin to succeed all coins need to be treated equally, i don’t see how it’s a smart business decision to weaken the foundation it’s built on.

First of all, despite our differences of opinion, I really appreciate your reply! It did clear up a few things for me.

Interesting. I think we've heard the argument before ('without us, and without blacklist, there will be no privacy in Bitcoin'), but I still don't get how it's possible to push something through that someone's not philosophically aligned with. However, I guess it's still good to know and I appreciate the honesty on this. Also regarding censorship resistance and rough company structure (i.e. how closely Wasabi and zkSNACKs are tied together).

Two Wasabi-coinjoined coins might be indistinguishable from each other, but are they indistinguishable from non-Wasabi-coinjoined coins? Because if they're not, Wasabi added one more way to distinguish Bitcoin UTXOs.

The fungibility = privacy? question was picked up by nullius earlier and explained rather well, I believe. It does make sense on a theoretical level (for me most simple to understand privacy / anonymity => fungibility, e.g. like how in Monero coins are fungible, because that follows from privacy). I'm just not sold on Wasabi = fungibility, though. Especially since the blacklisting 'idea' (?) - maybe here's a good place to ask whether it will be implemented at all, since a bunch of time has passed and as far as I can tell, it's not there yet.
It is pretty illogical to want to create a fungibility-enhancing tool, but at the same time discriminating between inputs.

I think the problem is that what you're trying to do would need to be done on protocol layer.
In my opinion, there are 2 options:
[1] Everything remains as it is, and we ignore the fact that Bitcoin is not fungible - we mix it to get privacy and deny any notion of taint: just like it is done with fiat paper money. Those bills are non-fungible, but everyone acts as if they were, so in practice, they are.
[2] We implement privacy measures at protocol layer, which automatically give us fungibility, like in Monero.

I don't think you can do option 2 'as a service', because there will always be users who don't use Wasabi, hence their funds will be distinguishable both from other non-Wasabi-users' funds, and also distinguishable from Wasabi-users' funds. Taint can and will also still be enforced, no matter how many times you pass non-encrypted Bitcoin UTXOs through Wasabi.
Further, new users may even be denied usage of Wasabi, since you opt for 'full option 2 (but as a service)' and do not also commit to option 1 as well (accepting any and all funds). I just do not see how this is going to be Bitcoin's ultimate fungibility and privacy solution.

I believe the lying accusations stem from the discrepancy between your 'philosophical alignment' and 'actual actions' which you confirmed; I know that people sometimes (have to?) do things like that, but it can easily come across as a hypocrisy / lie - I think that's easy to understand.

Hi guys, I glanced through this thread. Let me clarify a few things.

On the CEO of zkSNACKs. I did start Wasabi and I did co-found zkSNACKs, the company responsible for the bulk of the development on Wasabi, however I was never the CEO. zkSNACKs had two co-CEOs since its inception until this year when Max took over. That's not to say they are to be blamed for the blacklisting plans, but I am the one who pushed the idea through. It however doesn't mean that I am "advocating for it," quite the contrary, I am not philosophically aligned with it.

On conflating the company with the software project. IMO most of the times it's ok to say things like "CEO of Wasabi" as the separation between the company and the project most of the times isn't relevant. It becomes important to separate the two things when censorship resistance is in question. Wasabi is censorship resistant, zkSNACKs isn't.

On fungibility. I guess the debate here comes down to the question: is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible? AFAIK it is: Fungibility, sometimes called interchangeability or indistinguishability is a property of good money. Two instances of a currency are fungible - interchangeable - with each other if there are no meaningful differences between them: they have no marks, nor history. That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing. Two coinjoined coins are indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't matter which coinjoined coin you have. That's fungibility between two instances of a currency. 

On the question if we're working on fungibility or privacy. Going with our knowledge on fungibility, how does privacy come into the picture at all? And let's throw anonymity into the mix, too, since we're at it, shall we? Privacy is your ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. Anonymity is a mathematical tool which we can utilize to build privacy for the individual, like a privacy Bitcoin wallet. And adoption of a private Bitcoin wallet or a comprehensive Bitcoin privacy technology leads to the fungibility of the money itself. Learn more on this here: https://nopara73.medium.com/privacy-fungibility-anonymity-451d029355f7

Of course I am more than happy to hear thoughts on this topic, but I hope I demonstrated that my fungibility claims aren't pulled out of my ass, in fact they are the result of years of research on the topic, so I'd appreciate not calling me a liar, because of them.

I believe we should try to get back on-topic everyone.

For me, it's still open whether there is a 'Wasabi CEO' (in my understanding, Wasabi is not a company; only zkSNACKs is) and whether the project was 'taken' from nopara73 and he's actually in the 'no blacklisting' fraction of the (company-internal) debate, as alluded to by some, e.g. here.

This question of mine was partly solved by nullius' reply, but I think it only holds true for protocol-level changes. What do you think?

As in: fungibility=privacy holds true if you have protocol-level privacy/fungibility.
For instance, I can get mixed - or for the sake of argument, mined funds with absolutely no history.. These are pseudonymous at least, since there is [1] no link to my identity (mining pool needs no KYC) and [2] no link to other transactions.
However, they are not fungible since this mining reward is different from my last block's mining reward (size, date). Therefore they are not actually private. Right?

If we build some technology on top of Bitcoin (be it different upper layers or mixers), can't privacy and fungibility only be ensured 'within' that system?
For example: in Lightning, on a protocol-level it doesn't matter in which channel you 'receive' or 'spend' funds, as your trading partner on the other end of the network will not actually get UTXOs from you, but it will get a channel state update with one of its peers. The network doesn't know where the money is going due to onion routing (of the actual payment), so I believe a Lightning transfer can be called fungible and private.
Similarly, if you stay within a system like Wasabi, with its own blacklist, as long as you only work with people who also use Wasabi and auto-mix all their funds there, your UTXO will be fungible within this system. Maybe it's their vision that everyone is going to use Wasabi and ignore everything happening outside of it. Then in that case we could say they achieved their goal of 'solving Bitcoin fungibility and privacy' - right?
Because without this huge assumption, they are actually creating a way of discerning Wasabi from non-Wasabi funds, increasing non-fungibility overall.

So if you build a 'privacy tool' on top of Bitcoin, it can never fully 'solve fungibility' as long as not everyone is using it, which brings us back to protocol-level changes..

while some people want to divert conversation to "it has to be 'found criminal activity' to then have suspicion" nonsense

people can play all the silly fantasy mind games of wishful desires of not being tracked because they done a good job hiding the source. but they are still being ignorant and naive that its the hiding that infact gets them noticed

people can play all the silly fantasy mind games of redefining the meaning of words, or quote a non lawyer influencer that shares their mindset, to fit their personal need.

but reality is money services businesses have regulatory rules they have to follow that ensure they police themselves and their customers to ensure that they are not facilitating certain activities that could lead the service to get into trouble

i find it funny how instead of quoting the AML policy MSB's follow. people quote their middleman adoring influencer they follow as their "proof" of their confirmation bias

REALITY is NOT
service has to witness a drug deal happening infront of their office window
service has to witness their customer admit to a crime in a conversation with the service

REALITY is
signs of money laundering are:
using accounts with fake ID's
using multiple accounts
moving amounts just beneath the regulated thresholds repeatedly in small timescales
using mixers to hide the source of funds
using certain services that are not illegal themselves but tools that are known to facilitate services criminals use

EG donations to the "freedom convoy" were random donations from the population. yet guess what?(rhetorical).. lots of people and services got in trouble for handling those funds even when the source of funds were 'clean'
even now. those funds have been passed through several recipients (which some naively deem as causing funds to now be 'fungibly clean' of any crime) yet there are court orders still requesting those funds to be handed to the courts no matter whom currently is holding those funds. yep thats reality. those funds whether fiat or crypto are being treated differently than the bank note in my back pocket

bitcoins transparent accounting to prove coins originated from its ruled block creation, is actually the feature that makes bitcoin good money becasue its easy to audit and see no randomly added coin has occured.

the ability to simply pay a destination without a middleman is another feature that makes bitcoin great.

however certain people want to break all that and tell people not to use bitcoin for normal day-to-day activity, but instead use all these silly middlemen services of delay/risk, without understanding the consequence of their adverts of their favoured altnet/service they want everyone else to use

mixing will award you a suspicion rating. and chain analysis companies will highlight users of mixer services as users worthy of potential watchlists. thus defeating the point of using said service advertised as hiding you away from being watched(aka offering privacy)

much like this very topic where wasaibi is getting hit by blacklists which then makes wasabi have to deal with its own blacklists to lessen its own risk

get it yet
get reality?
or will certain people ignore reality and instead try quoting some influencer that shares their mindset(confirmation bias) that dreams up scenarios and uses vague examples of the 17th century court case as their reasoning for their roadmap of breaking bitcoin to fit their silly middleman service offering everyone should use

It appears that almost everybody in the noösphere believes that all mixing is money laundering, regardless of the proportionn of dirty money that is actually laundered through mixers. It makes a good conspiracy theory piece [I could never understand those guys, honestly - even cypherpunks = the NSA to them].

now back to the topic about the "fungibility" stuff
(dont derail this into human defense protection social drama, stay ontopic about BITCOIN function)
a certain influencer pretends fungibility is based on a 17th century scottish case.. as the excuse to want to brutalise bitcoin and push people into using services and altnets because they want to pretend bitcoin is not fit for purpose for general people, by pushing fears that general people sould not use bitcoin as-is and instead enter into silly services/altnets as a 'solution'

sorry but bitcoin does not need to be broken to facilitate some roadmap of offramping users away from just holding their own coin and just doing onchain transactions to their desired destination, without the desires of certain people that want everyone to use some membership, service,altnet middleman(which actually goes against bitcoins purpose)

the problem is that 17th century court case is not the modern day reality of modern day law/policy.

take the donations for that "freedom convoy"
it got confiscated and even though it changed many hands there is still a court order wanting those funds
yep reality of modern day

yep those funds came from random donators(not criminals) and was held by random services(not criminals) it changed hands and different accounts/users held keys. yet the courts still wanted the fiat and bitcoin.
(research: aid abet, accessory)

..
the reality is when bitcoin was treated as a asset(product) where services were treated as merchants and not money service businesses. bitcoin was not concerned with the whims of 'currency' laws
but due to attaining recognition as "currency" the currency laws started applying. which is the bullet that shot people in the foot for wanting the "currency" recognition rather than continuing as an asset of the early days

bitcoin will not change "currency" laws. and pretending that bitcoin is now broke/not fit as money wont undo that.

You failed so miserable at your silly game of trying to pigeonhole others (especially me) into a group, you drastically edited to cover up this post as I was replying to it, to cover up something really embarrassing:


You were the one who started talking about merit here:


Offhand, together with a larger context, I responded to that in my reply to n0nce.  The only two people in this entire thread who have mentioned merit are you, who brought it up, and me, in response to what you said; and you will note that I am not a part of Foxpup’s merit thingie (lol).  Now, you are fixated on merit.

When you claim that you “give zero crap amount merit”, thou doest protest too much, methinks.

Anyway, I think you are clearly not engaging in this discussion in good faith.  I previously disagreed with others who were giving you the troll treatment in this thread, and I never categorically kicked you out of my self-moderated threads; but you have done a good job here of proving me wrong about that.  Please don’t be surprised if you get a lack of response from me in the future.

---

Now, returning to the topic...

i dont even like the guy, never have. and i was calling him out as fake way before you cried
i noticed him as a panellist alongside nick szabo when faktoshi first made his appearence and i called him out on his ballshit

as for your topic you linked where you FAILED at comparing me to him
he was saying that full nodes have no job.. much like YOU and your buddies think fullnodes solve no purpose by saying its fine to prune. and use other networks and not monitor the blockchain..

i have always said that fullnodes do have a purpose. and should also remain as the true fullnode descriptor which includes archiving(unlike your lame group) but where people should not ramp up lots of sybil's just to get fake node count (thats what you cant comprehend!) where lots of sybils just cause propagation delays for the actual user nodes that have actual wallets and funds they want to use inside their fullnode

now go sit back in your cave

as for the talk about merits
i give zero crap amount merit.
i happily throw merit out in the 50's because i find it meaningless to the point of no value so giving out 50 means jack

but i see the group of you lot have your own lil 'foxpop gang' which is a big sign you do care about it

---

EDIT: (re included above the social drama poke that they intended to poke me into to then cry that i meandered into a social drama game (which they triggered first).. )

note to nullius
i was not even talking about you. i simply said the PEOPLE that merited n0nce
i was talking about the cult that are fangirling blockstream products and other services that want to make bitcoin stall, slowdown and give people headaches

it was not even about the merit.. it was highlighting the PEOPLE that merited in the topic post#1 are the same crowd.
heck you are not even in that list at time of this posting. yet you are now on the defense..

seriously chill with the social drama game of protecting people and concentrate on protecting the network and user experience.

they couldnt rebut the realities of real life situations where using mixers and crap services actually does the opposite of being private and under the radar. they couldnt even understand that fiat is not as open and fungible as they pretend it to then pretend bitcoin needs to destroy accounting policy to pretend it then meets some fiat comparison. so they cry the social drama games as their final attack... boring, not new, not original

look at the crew defending each other to try to flip the script pretending they dont have a roadmap, group or plan to try to pretend i am part of a group

boring social drama deception and meander. but they love that game 'play the victim to hide their attack'

meanwhile im not the one advertising crap that breaks bitcoin and makes user experience more delayed, costly and irritating.

goodluck with your fake promises of all the crap services you offer.

this topic is dead because its just a subtle advert for a service that pretends to be one thing but does the complete opposite.. and that was my original point

seriously chill with the social drama game of protecting people and concentrate on protecting the network and user experience

There is no need to justify yourself like that.  Don’t let franky1 put you on the defensive with his reality-inverting mindgame.  To promote his agenda, he is essentially trying to make it politically incorrect to cite or discuss Adam Back on the Bitcoin Forum.  LOL.

His accusation of a “group mindset” in following “influencers”, replete with a jealous remark about merits, is especially ridiculous in any discussion where I am involved—and where I am the one who brought up Dr. Back, and linked to his relevant 2014 conference talk.  I am an independent loose cannon, and I am assuredly the most unpopular person here.  There is a whole thread devoted to smear-attacking me; it is titled with eloquent professionalism by a real pillar of the community, “nullius is a cunt”.  I am merit-boycotted by numerous users, including some merit sources.  I am immune to groupthink; I say what I mean, not what is popular.  Some people appreciate that, but others do not.

Given that franky1 is a n00b, he would not recall the era when Dr. Back first announced on Cypherpunks the Hashcash system that Satoshi cited in footnote 6 of the Bitcoin Whitepaper.  I remember Cypherpunks from first-hand experience.  Better to understand Bitcoin, whence it came, why it exists, and what legacy Wasabi is effectually repudiating, I recommend this 2016 article by Jameson Lopp, a professional Cypherpunk:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2016/04/09/bitcoin-and-the-rise-of-the-cypherpunks/

Lopp therein focuses on privacy.  I generally agree with his conclusions in that article.

---

I am far behind on this thread—only for the reason that some replies here raised such important issues, my responses grew beyond the proper scope of a reply here.  They spawned drafts for the OPs in at least two new threads.  One of them actually gave franky1 some credit for raising a good point (that he promptly ruined), and constructively criticized n0nce’s approach in another thread—well, if franky1 is accuses me of groupthink for citing Adam Back, I should edit that, and ban franky1 from my self-moderated topics.  To be continued...

I do have Franky on ignore and considered moving this thread since he just cannot stay on-topic, but I would like to emphasize (as if it wasn't obvious) that contrary to his opinion (potentially he's projecting something here..) I am not a 'follower' of Adam Back or believing what I believe because he says so; in fact, I was made aware of the talk I linked to, only the other day. (see below)
My views on the topic were set before that (all provable through Bitcointalk posts), and I just thought he explained it well in spoken form. That's also exactly what I've written above.

Quote for 'proof':

And you are using Faketoshi as the source of yours.  You hate freedom.  You hate privacy.  You hate the majority of Bitcoin developers.  But I'm glad about that.  Because if you approved of any of it, then we must have done something badly wrong.  You're a living, breathing litmus test.  If you hate it, then fantastic, we're clearly on the right track. 

ha. couldnt have predicted it any better. you are using a blockstream ceo as your source of your mindset.
i am not shocked at all

my point is that people think that fiat is open and free where everyone is treated equally and every bank note, digital bank account balance is all treated equally. because its 'common money' which they think bitcoin needs to become
my example of taxes is not the sole example. its just the example even idiots can see as being a example that not all money is treated the same. where people need to act and react to payments differently depending on what or how they are using money.

but hey, yea if you only want to listen to the same known group of this topics favourite godlike influencer. you go right ahead
funny how the same people show how obvious who their influencers are. and what roadmap they want to follow.

just wondering:
have you ever tried to have an independent thought outside the group mindset?
(you follow and merit the exact same group with the altnet mantra, privacy mantra, defi mantra, pruned node mantra)

I appreciate the sentiment but if you are going to go after every wallet / service in BTC that is making false claims you are going to have to look into cloning yourself to get it done.   

I *know* privacy is a hot button issue for you and I understand why you are doing this. But, I think it would be better to push one of the joinmarket implementations then spending time pointing out the many flaws of Wasabi and what they are doing. Keeping the knowledge of what they are doing alive and up front is good.

More of the fix the problem not the blame theory.

-Dave

Franky's understanding of fungibility is totally broken. Whether and which taxes I have to pay as a customer and / or a business, is an accounting topic; I don't look at the difference between paper notes to determine which tax I have to pay. Neither does their history have an influence over what taxes I have to pay.
I can't fathom how anyone can honestly believe that the fact you have to pay taxes on certain fiat transfers means it's not fungible.

I'm not fully done watching Adam Back's talk about fungibility, but he's explained it quite well in the beginning in case anyone needs a reminder.

As I've said before, why waste time, effort, and money on trying to mitigate the flaws of a bad design when there already exist coinjoin implementations which do not have these flaws at all (e.g. JoinMarket, which does not have a centralized coordinator).

I appreciate your point, but I won't. If Wasabi change their branding from a "Privacy Wallet" to "OFAC Compliant Blacklisting Wallet" or something similar, then sure. But as long as Wasabi keep lying to the community and advertising themselves as something they aren't, then I will continue to call them out. If people want to continue to use Wasabi despite all this, then that's fine. The beauty of bitcoin is that anyone can use it in any way they want to. But they at least deserve to make an informed choice, and if we all stopped complaining then the likelihood is that no one would ever know about Wasabi's censorship until it affected them personally.

https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/28/news/economy/illegal-income-tax/index.html

Old but still relevant to this.
Makes you wonder how much work by the government is really going into tracing crypo for 'getting criminals' vs 'getting out (tax) cut from transactions'
Sales tax, income tax, and so on. Yes, not paying taxes is a crime, but that's not the point I'm making here.

As for this Wasabi mess. Like many other things, some people will still use them because they don't care. And if that works for them fine.
Some people will stop using them. And that's fine. Others never knew wasabi existed and will continue no to know that it exists. And that's fine too.

There have been and still are ways to bury / mix coins depending on what services are available where you are depending on the amounts and time you want to put into it.
Also, there are different things different people want to do with coins, and you know what that's fine too.

Wasabi made, in what a lot of think is a crap decision, and are now using crap reasons to justify it.
Time will tell if it works for them or not.

Going back to what I said when n0nce posted the 24 questions thread:


If you really want the coordinator code is out there and open source. Set one up and put your money where your mouth is as start running a better funded one.

If not, lets discuss other ways of doing this and stop complaining about one that for whatever reason does not want to anymore.

Sorry if this comes off a bit testy.

-Dave

They can, which outside source actually checks the legitimacy of procedures? None, anything can be considered suspicious and anyone can file an SAR for whatever they consider suspicious. There’s no punishment for false flags. And in case they falsely confiscate your funds, good luck proving it and going up against an army of lawyers, for sums that are not even worth this much effort.

// Edit: if you have a problem with people questioning the actual results and effectiveness of bs procedures and regulations, then idk how to help you. It has nothing to do with an agenda that i question how these things are actually handled. If regulations treat everyone as a potential criminal , demand further restrictions of financial freedom and produce no crime reducing results, then i dont see how they shouldnt be contested.

So people under mass surveillance are private when they just go along with it, even tho each of their steps is tracked, archived and can be questioned at any time?


True.

There will always be services which do not respect privacy in the slightest. Centralized exchanges are the obvious one. All custodial wallets or web wallets are another example. However, these services do not pretend to respect your privacy, and they certainly do not market themselves as privacy enhancing. This is the difference with Wasabi. For Wasabi to market themselves as literally the only solution for bitcoin fungibility and the only wallet which is capable of providing privacy, while actively cooperating with blockchain analysis, is at best utterly dishonest and more likely actively malicious.

That's different though. A business which refuses higher bills would quite happily accept that money if you first split your €500 in to 10x €50 bills, whereas (presumably) a business refusing a tainted output would still refuse that same output if you split it in to 10 smaller outputs first. Similarly, a business can refuse cash in the same way a business can refuse bitcoin altogether and I'm not going to complain about fungibility. In these cases the business is discriminating against the money itself, not making certain parts of that money non fungible.

first of all regulated exchanges cant and dont just confiscate coins for silly reasons
maybe try to read some stuff before just listening to the buddy group with an agenda

when you get a suspicious flag on your exchange/service account thats not a reason to confiscate.
when that level is raised to a need to file a suspicious activity report with an authority, thats not a reason to confiscate
when the authorities do their own investigations due to receipt of an SAR thats not a reason to confiscate
a business might suspend access to the market order features and only offer you an option of 'withdrawal and close account' but they wont confiscate funds at this point
if any exchange has a policy that does confiscate at any point above.. dont use them, they are thieves


when the authority finds evidence from other sources that links a possible crime to the service customer that meets the court requirement of a court claim. THEN the authority makes a court order with the court to hand to the service, which then forces the service to comply and confiscate value and hand it to the authority.


reality is, REAL privacy guys know what the laws actually are. and know how to move around them. they are not fearing the court system, what they actually just want is to not even get to that level by staying so far under the radar that no trigger is pulled at any of the first suspicion stages,(where their name is tossed around and shared in the first place.)

EG they are ok with telling a business they signed upto willingly their name(else avoid such service/use another) but dont want that business passing/selling that info around, sharing that info with entities the privacy guy doesnt know/didnt authorise

EG people dont mind doing face to face exchanges where the recipient sees their face, they just dont want that person then talking behind their back identifying you with others.

and back to the point
using services which WILL get you noticed by a whole crowd of entities defeats the point of using a service that pretends it helps preserve privacy.

you will be questioned if seen using a mixer. even if you dont end up in court. your info will be shared if using a mixer even if you dont end up in court.

EG
just buying $7 of gum with a $10, and getting $3 change doesnt normally get a second thought. most cashiers wont check the bank note is counterfeit or not
but handing over a $10 bank note and asking for 10x $1, will make the cashier question the purpose and want to check the $10 bank note is not counterfeit

in short:
dont use silly conspiracy anti-gov rhetoric you heard from a buddy as a silly reason to try to make bitcoin sound broken, unfit for use and wanting to destroy bitcoins security just to promote some silly service that pretends to offer privacy, but is infact the very service that will get you noticed more and have your ties to the service listed more, and shared between entities more that gather information of such suspicious tools/services/techniques.
...
instead stick with reality and realise what info YOU are sending out and simply make better decisions to avoid getting noticed by not being so foolish

oh and yea. there are some analytic services that monitor forum usernames for people that are heavy 'privacy' guys and announce they want to hide, which red flags them as possible people to get more interested in and look at their post history for any chatter that seems immoral/unethical/illegal to then assign them a suspicious activity rating against their forum username which is then sold onto other services that monitor their exchange customer usernames to spot a linkage.
so yea be careful
its much like those who attend anti-gov protests end up having their names added to a watchlist.. not because they are criminals but because they announce they are anti-gov.
yep protesting you want privacy is exactly what ends up getting you put on a watchlist

That’s something else. Proving it to a tax authority is standard procedure, you can document everything for that matter. Only taxes and death are certain, i personally wouldn’t play around there just to save some bucks, not worth the headache. A mixer is not a crime and not what would get you in jail or make documentation impossible. I wouldn’t even use these tools for any criminal activity or to try to launder money, they’re not even suited for this and real criminals will realise that the fiat system is much better suited for this.

Giving some private companies a pass to demand proof without any evidence, is a whole different ballgame tho. Now essentially customer support employees, algorithms and some surveillance companies have been given the power to freeze/ steal peoples funds with complete arbitrariness. And they can now hide their actions by just taking AML as an excuse, it will be barely possible to contest this for a regular person. This is completely backwards and no one can tell me that this is smh justified and not a problem.

When a business receives counterfeited bills, its recommended that they inform the police immediately. But a business cant just claim that your legit bills are suspicious and then keep them. Theres no real process that violates peoples rights there, but with coin taint its completely arbitrary and a process thats completely detached from the justice system.

---

The irony is that real laundering happens inside the same institutions that „just follow regulations“, so in reality laws are imposed again that restrict financial freedom on people who are not even doing the laundering and real criminals can act like theyre fighting crimes and hide behind this. And then its also giving people a false sense of security and the impression that something is done against it.

Heres just one of countless examples.
But lets keep repeating that its the average joe that should make his whole life transparent to anyone to combat „crime“, regulations are there franky but anyone with a right mind would question and contest them when theyre complete bs, no matter if you run a business or not. Otherwise we end up in a clownshow where everyone starts enforcing useless bs on others, because of „regulations“ and no real problems are solved anymore.   

I have franky1 on ignore, but I have read some of his arguments while logged out and it seems to me that he has some valid points, but I am not going to go into commenting on his walls of text.

It seems to me that in this whole debate, many of you commenting here are like the fish in the water, pretty smart fish, but don't realize that there is a whole world outside the water.


In reality this is not true in 100% of the cases nor in all countries. Especially in tax crimes. If you are the one who cannot prove that your funds are of lawful origin you can end up in jail. It is not the prosecution that has to prove that your funds are of illicit origin. While not exactly what is being discussed here, look at Latvia's NFT artist who faces up to 12 years in jail, despite Latvia's lack of clear regulation.

Even if I was pretty sure I was going to win, I wouldn't want to find myself in front of a judge or jury having to explain large sums of money that have no clear origin due to the moves I have made for my right to privacy. Even less so if you're risking jail time.

I know people who went to trial being sure they were going to win and lost.

Seriously guys, don't gamble having to go to court for your right to privacy with large amounts of money.

You won't see me in court for that reason (and I hope for no other).

From reading the btctalk threads around here, I saw that there was a "zkSNACKs" CEO and a "Wasabi" CEO, obviously a company cannot have two CEOs so I reasoned that they must have become separate entities at some point (one heavily investing into the other).


Now even I am confused. Who was the person who replied to your Open Letter?

it seems its the same group of people meriting the topic creator, are the same group that want to tell billions of unbanked people that bitcoin is not fit for their daily normal use as-is, and the same group want to create fear for everyone else to avoid just using bitcoin as-is, whilst then advertising some other silly lock/service/altnet/membership that takes peoples individual control away by having to rely on some service/lock/altnet/partnership to allow them to spend value after wasting more time to set up this silly advertised service/altnet membership

anyways,
fiat(money) is not fungible
getting fiat from a relative on random occasion in small amount= gift= no tax
getting fiat from a relative after death in large amount= inheritance= inheritance tax
getting fiat from a employer = income tax
getting fiat from customer for a product = sales tax
getting fiat from an investment = capital gains tax
keeping alot of fiat after bills = wealth tax
keeping fiat in a family/corporate trust = capital gains tax
use fiat to buy property/shares = stamp duty
businesses that keep fiat after costs = corporation tax
have a low income or a basic personal account = low ATM withdrawal amount
have a high income or a business account = service charges and subscription fees
using debit/credit card fiat = 'service charges' (sometimes customer pays sometimes merchant pays)
(the list goes on)

yep every day peoples 'money' is treated differently depending on who handled it and how it was passed.

fiat has just been around so long that people dont think about all the differences each allotment is treated depended on how it was received. going to be spent
so in short fiat is not fungible. people just dont think about its treatment

and yes banks do question utility of peoples spending or receipt of fiat
and yes if you tried to buy a house with a suitcase of cash. they will question it
as would trying to pay a court fine in pennies or bank notes with odours of drugs

so dont pretend fiat is fungible to then pretend 'fungibility' is then the good excuse to want to break bitcoins 'taint' (tracking back to its source creation) by bastardising bitcoin by pretending 'taint' is about criminal checks/anti-privacy that need to then remove taint.

the taint actually solves an incredibly needed accounting policy of money. which is about trusting that all coins can be tracked back to its source creation coin reward so that no new coin can be introduced outside of the mining/coin creation process.

coinjoins are not needed. they make the experience of bitcoin delayed/slower due to the time it takes to 'mix' and ends up giving said users a bad 'suspicion rating' just for using it.(defeating the 'privacy' / anti-kyc stuff it pretends to solve when then depositing into exchanges)

if people want privacy i have no issue with those people using such service/locks/altnets. just dont try pandering your silly schemes onto regular people that dont want to have to have more headaches just so suspicious people can get the clean coin at regular peoples loss

so you privacy guys, you lot should go play with altnets and convert your coin to msat/lbtc in some confidential network and mix your crap over there.
instead of wanting to break bitcoin audit rules and spam the network with mix tx spam while telling everyone else to avoid using bitcoin

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.

---

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.

..
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.

---

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.

---

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.

-
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? 

I disagree.  Would at this point not trust anything they say, because their answers have been conflicting and evasive many times before and continue to be that way.  They seem so full of themselves and now seem to think of themselves as 'saviors' of Bitcoin.  BS.  And if I was nopara, as soon as I realized they wanted me kneeling to whatever the authorities were putting pressure on him with I would have backed off or fought against it.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

Dollar or euro or yen bills are fungible by definition, bitcoin is also fungible, as you mentioned there is no problem here to be fixed, if somebody is refusing to acknowledge that your one dollar bill is a one dollar bill that's not the problem of the bill itself and it can't be solved unless you slap the guy till it stops seeing traces of cocaine on your bill.

If the fungibility of coins would be a problem, Wasabi is technically not "solving" it, all it does is circumvent it.
Also, I don't understand why they are mixing in this article a lot the notions of privacy and fungibility..

If I were to exchange coins with o_e_l_e_o we (probably! ) wouldn't care much about the history of those coins nor would we demand KYC from each other, thus our privacy is safe, and the fungibility is not a problem, besides we can safely use a mixer to erase the links between our coins and wallets. If you deal with CEX then your privacy is gone so what is left of it?


I liked nopara73 take on that, he basically sad that only coins coming out are nonfungible, so their coins are better than your coins, but that's a fungibility issue, it's something they are "fixing". Again, you still have your privacy, or how he put it, but you don't have the fungibility, which by all standards, it's quite useless.

Eh, at least he was (mostly, see o_e_l_e_o's post) honest in the blog post. I certainly have a good understanding of that kind of "developer hell".

That still doesn't excuse the blacklisting decision though - not that Wasabi can do anything about it, the ball is firmly in zkSNACKs' park.

I'm slowly starting to believe that nopara73 is becoming more and more of "the man in the hot-seat", not because of anything he's doing though [indeed, there is *not much* he can do about this anyway], it's more like a label being put on him. He's being treated as a boogeyman of sorts.

More and more I think wallets that provide services beyond just being wallets should be avoided.
Not just the Wasabi mixing but with 'in app trading' or just about anything else. Because now they become more interested in protecting that which generates income instead of just being a wallet.
Which, can and will bring up conflicts of interest as they want to do "A" but to make a profit on the service they have to do "B" and the lawyers / management are worried about "C".

-Dave

Thank you for yet another great thread, n0nce.  Happy to see this being discussed in the Bitcoin Discussion sub-board, although it seems like not too many on this side of the forum are interested in the issue.

I think Wasabi is slowly becoming a honeypot of some sort.  The scariest part is them using doublethought as a tactic to make us think their actions are for our well being.  To them, this is how it is.  Fungible is non-fungible.  Discriminating is fair.  Spying is the solution to privacy.

Creepy as hell if you ask me.

Making a privacy tool more intuitive to use does not make it more private and does not enhance someone's privacy in my eyes.  If anything, I have lately ran away from anything promising to be more 'intuitive' and 'convenient' because there is always a huge downside I may be missing.  See everything used in households nowadays that are 'Smart'.  I think we could say Wasabi is turning 'Smart' as well, as to me anything called that way is automatically a threat to privacy.

It is now evident that Wasabi has turned to the enemy boat and left ours.  Not only that, but they are actively hitting our boat and calling themselves the saviors.  The fact that they are calling their new blacklisting 'solution' the only way Bitcoin can stay fungible makes them the villain and there is no way anyone could tell me they are taking part in revolutionizing what Bitcoin is and providing us the only solution to something that did not even need a solution in the first place, until Blockchain Analysis companies appeared and the artificial term 'taint' was pushed forward heavily by Exchanges and, probably, Governments.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

Nah man, your analysis is already on point. And thanks for raising awareness to this issue about wasabi, as i think i first read it from your thread. There’s nothing to understand here and no excuses or justifications.

Companies should grow some courage again and maybe work in favour of their customers, instead of harming their customers again and again. It has already been shown that Bitcoin is barely used by criminals and doing so, would just leave a lot of evidence for the police forever. So what’s the point of all these measures. We don’t need blacklists or anything else, as we have law enforcement already and we don’t need private companies overreaching their responsibilities. They’re basically introducing „solutions“ that should solve some 0.1% probability scenarios, but affect 99.9% of users negatively in the process. Also when did we switch from innocent until proven guilty, to guilty until proven innocent? With all these new measures private institutions are introducing, where the customer needs to prove they’re innocent to a non-judiciary institution?

Bitcoin is already perfectly fungible, as each unit is the same as the other. The problem are private companies that start to differentiate between sats. So they’re the ones hurting the fungibility artificially. And are also violating censorship resistance. It’s just obvious and no reality-denying marketing talk will change that. Only thing we can do is stop using these services now, because it’s not really a fungibility problem. It’s a private companies overreaching their responsibilities problem and a fungibility problem only exists on their services, after introducing them themselves.

They can simply ask their customers if they want these things to be introduced, instead of guessing and pushing things down people throats and then selling it as some revolutionary solution. Things are really not that complicated.

As I mentioned in the other thread, although I take many issues with this article, this is what bothers me the most:

This is simply a lie, and there is no debating that this is a lie. You cannot state you have solved the issue of some bitcoin being discriminated against while you are actively discriminating against some bitcoin.

Bitcoin fungibility is only an issue in the first place because centralized blockchain analysis companies have succeed in convincing a bunch of people that some coins are tainted based on completely arbitrary and provably false assumptions. For Wasabi to claim they have solved this issue, when they are complicit in the very existence of it, is laughable. They would do far more to help bitcoin fungibility by not directly paying blockchain analysis companies to label your coins as tainted in the first place.

In my mind, Wasabi and their team are rapidly moving from "hopelessly misguided" to "actively malicious".

After o_e_l_e_o brought to my attention the following article, I started reading it and would like to hear what you guys think about some statements being made in the preface of the article.
https://nopara73.medium.com/wasabigeddon-9c63de88c1a1
It is written by nopara73, Wasabi CEO, who is also a member of this forum, so he may even answer himself, which would be optimal.


If you missed it, we have a whole thread about it here:
The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs

And I created a kind of 'open letter' with 24 questions, which they replied to; discussion page about it is here:
Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread

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PSA: 'Taint' is basically the opposite of 'fungibility'. Saying that one coin is not like another is what we consider calling it 'tainted', and 'non-fungible'.