Topic: Whirlpool surge cycles (Samourai/Sparrow) - page 2. (Read 549 times)

I am not sure how that is going to work. I assume you are talking about lightning, liquid or a similar protocol. You are still going to need to make an on-chain transaction to join that second-layer mixing protocol and a second transaction to get back full control of your coins and record the changes on the blockchain. Unless you mix regularly, you aren't going to have open channels and routes to whatever nodes you need to connect to perform your off-chain mixing. People who don't mix on a regular basis won't save anything if they don't maintain their LN channels.

It won't change the fees at all.

The way Whirlpool coinjoins work(ed) is that they would always pick 2 fresh inputs from Tx0s, and 3 already mixed inputs from previous coinjoins. The 2 inputs from Tx0 were the ones which paid the fees. Every input which was already mixed gets unlimited free remixes. If you look at the 0.05 pool transaction I linked to above (https://mempool.space/tx/f4fd5cad5d4db3716fe2081d1bc20f0beb33a417adf22c8fcca131cb6249adb6), you'll see one input of 0.05014520 BTC and one of 0.05006037 BTC, and the others all of 0.05 BTC exactly. These two new inputs are created from an initial transaction called Tx0 which splits the amount of be coinjoined in to the needed denominations to join the chosen pool, along with a few extra sats in to each input to pay the fee for that first coinjoin transaction. This is obviously an estimate at the time given the current mempool conditions. None of this has changed.

When it comes around to actually joining a coinjoin, before it would always be 5 inputs and 5 outputs, and any extra sats on these two fresh inputs were simply paid as a higher transaction fee to miners. Now if this is the case, the protocol will add in one or more additional inputs/outputs in order to bring the transaction fee down to a more appropriate level.

Nothing changes for the users, except some of their coinjoins now benefit from larger anonymity sets.

If we had another "ordinals tsunami", might it not have happened already? The transaction fee is not quite where we want it but the mempool congestions have stabilized. I have no idea what the developers have been planning in the last few days since I am not up to speed but what is the possibility that the Bitcoin NFT hype has cooled down for good?

Last I read, the devs were planning on introducing a runtime option to delete or invalidate all non-standard taproot transactions? Sounded like a plan to me. If I were to guess I would say thats exactly the reason why the hype has been dying out in the last few days. Now nobody wants to board the near-future trainwreck which are ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, now that they are on the cancel list...

Wouldn't this in theory also increase fees a lot for coinjoins?
If we have another ''ordinals tsunami'' like we did recently I doubt this will be usable for most people, except maybe for big whales, but they would also experience big delays.
I am more interested in mixing and privacy in second-layer and I heard about one interesting project is coming out soon, or even better to introduce privacy on protocol level for bitcoin (but that probably won't happen any time soon).

Over the last few days, I've noticed a few of my Whirlpool coinjoins no longer being the usual 5-input-5-output transactions, and instead having more inputs and outputs. Turns out Samourai have implemented what they are calling "surge cycles": https://nitter.net/SamouraiDev/status/1658020576491978752

Essentially, if the total fee is more than is needed after selecting the two fee paying pre-mix inputs in order to perform a coinjoin, instead of enrolling three post-mix inputs as usual the coordinator will now enroll additional post-mix inputs. This makes the coinjoin transactions larger and therefore even harder to break, as well as increasing the throughput of remixes meaning everyone gets more free remixes faster, all for no additional cost to the users.

Here are a few such coinjoins from the last couple of hours, each with 8 inputs and 8 outputs instead of the usual 5:

0.001 pool - https://mempool.space/tx/d66520a1e4a38bbca788e70bce95803d62850441eab6ddee7645f6addbc25c48
0.01 pool - https://mempool.space/tx/7e0814e83270dc7c733b2a71308985419625a612d756852027d81a4c5490314d
0.05 pool - https://mempool.space/tx/f4fd5cad5d4db3716fe2081d1bc20f0beb33a417adf22c8fcca131cb6249adb6