Exactly. They only removed it when it became clear it might hurt their profits. They should never have considered implementing it in the first place, for the moral reasons of not helping centralized exchanges spy on their users.

No one is going to come forward and say "Here is my UTXO which was censored". And even if they didn't censor a single UTXO, the fees they collect are still being used to directly fund blockchain analysis, which damages privacy for every single bitcoin user, advances the nonsense concept of taint, and works against fungibility.

Doesn't matter to me in the slightest anymore. I don't care if Trezor release the greatest hardware wallet the world has ever seen (or you know, even fix the critical seed extraction vulnerability ). I will never purchase another Trezor device as long as they fund blockchain analysis.

Last commit December 10, 2018.

Software which is almost 5 years out of date is meaningless. Trust wallet is closed source.

Which is absolutely irrelevant. If there is no up to date source code then you have no idea what the wallet is actually doing, what bugs exist, what vulnerabilities could be exploited, or what malicious code might be there.

Hardware - Passport
Software - Electrum or Sparrow

Or depending on which government provides them with the most money.

That's not quite right. Coinjoin is a protocol for mixing your coins. Trezor have decided to implement a version of coinjoin which censors its users.

None at all provided you stay well away from it. If you use it, then you better be happy having blockchain analysis spy on you and censor you.

Correct. It is completely contrary to the whole ethos of bitcoin.

This one?

https://rawcdn.githack.com/nlitsme/bitcoinexplainer/aa50e86e8c72c04a7986f5f7c43bc2f98df94107/ecdsacrack.html

Just to answer this question specifically: Anyone can work on the code and propose changes, but there are (currently) only five people who have the permissions needed to merge any new changes or proposals in to the main codebase after these changes have been reviewed and agreed upon by the community. These people are known as Maintainers. The current list of Bitcoin Core Maintainers is as follows:

MarcoFalke
fanquake
hebasto
achow101
glozow

No.

If you only want to move your own coins and your own coins only, then they can be endlessly tracked. It doesn't matter how many times you split them up and then recombine them or across how many transactions you do that - if there are no new coins coming in then a blockchain analysis company can endless track them.

Any kind of mixing or coinjoining will combine your inputs with the inputs of third parties to obfuscate which outputs are yours. That's the whole point.

What are you talking about? Centralized exchanges lock accounts, freeze coins, or just straight up scam/go bankrupt all the time. You are handing complete control of your coins over to a third party, who can (and often do) do anything they like with them. With a good decentralized exchange like Bisq, the coins stay under your control until the trade is complete. There is no possibility for them to steal your coins since they never have them in the first place. A good DEX is exponentially safer than a CEX.


I mean, literally the first page of the Whitepaper:

A centralized exchange is a "trusted" third party. I use quotation marks here because I wouldn't trust any centralized exchange with a single satoshi of my money.

It's possible, but there are two big weaknesses to your proposal over a multi-sig one.

Firstly, you are accepting far reduced security. If someone steals one share of your multi-sig, then they would still have a hurdle of 2¹²⁸ to overcome to brute force another share. In your system, if someone finds Vault 1 your security is reduced to 2⁶² bits, and if they find Vault 2 your security is reduced to 2⁶⁶ bits (the difference being that 4 bits from word 12 are checksum). If someone steals Vault 3, then your security could be anything at all, depending on your passphrase. Unfortunately, few people choose strong and random passphrases, and instead pick passphrases like they pick passwords - short, predictable, and easily brute forced. You could potentially be down to a very low amount of security.

Secondly, you introduce a single point of failure. To spend from such a wallet, you need to bring the seed phrase and a passphrase together on a single device. If that device is compromised, then you lose everything. With multi-sig, your seed phrases can stay on separate devices, therefore protecting you against this vulnerability.

Obviously most people use single sig wallets perfectly safely, but if you are looking for the best security for long term cold storage or similar, then multi-sig remains the better choice here.

FTX literally scammed millions of users. Their behavior cannot be called anything other than nasty and scammy - giving users' funds to their friends and family, directly stealing users' funds to buy personal items and even property, keeping zero accounts, and so on. And yet, millions of customers.

BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager, all the same. Millions of users, billions in funds, handing it out to random third parties with no due diligence, no safety controls, no collateral, and no protection. Utterly awful behavior, and yet, millions of customers.

As John Abraham has pointed out above, Binance literally scam their users. And never mind their failed proof of reserves, their printing coins out of thin air, their stablecoin which has been shutdown by the government, all the lawsuits they are currently being targeted with, their scamming newbies in to using their centralized shitcoins instead of bitcoin, buying ranking sites and putting themselves top, the list is endless. Their reputation is atrocious. And yet, millions of customers.

Reputation and previous scammy behavior account for nothing in this space. There is an endless stream of newbies who will sign up to literally any old shit platform and hand their data and their coins to literal scammers on the promise of 10 bucks of shitcoins or some obviously unsustainable ROI.

No it isn't. Trust Wallet is closed source, and ran by a company (Binance) which makes money from gathering data on its users and selling that data to blockchain analysis. It is one of the worst possible wallets you can use.

Yes. This really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that CZ is quite happy to lie about literally anything in order to promote Binance and make more profit.

See my previous post that un_rank linked to above. You can also see the Wallet Scrutiny report here: https://walletscrutiny.com/android/com.wallet.crypto.trustapp/. "No source for current release found".

So by doing this, you have lost all the security of the multi-sig.

By typing the seed phrase from your phone in to your laptop, the wallet on your laptop now contains two seed phrases - the one the laptop generated, and the one you entered from your phone. This means it has all the information needed to spend your coins on its own, without requiring any input from the wallet on your phone. Although you still have a multi-sig wallet, the compromise of a single wallet (the one on your laptop) will let an attacker steal your coins.

You'll need to start again from scratch and make sure the seeds phrases stay completely isolated to the devices which generated them. The only thing you should be transferring between devices are your master public keys.

Probably something along the lines of "I don't care about morals, as long as I get paid."

You know it is anti-privacy, I know it is anti-privacy, anyone who can read knows it is anti-privacy. The Wasabi guys are also fully aware it is anti-privacy, but they have decided that sacrificing their morals, selling out their users, implementing censorship, handing your UTXOs directly to blockchain analysis companies, and generally being anti-bitcoin is an acceptable price to pay as long as they get to keep make profits for themselves.

This tweet pretty much sums it up: https://nitter.it/dammkewl/status/1648575580927930371

There is a simple way around this. For any m-of-n multi-sig, then you only need to back up n minus m number of xpubs alongside each seed phrase (provided you pick the correct ones) and still have full redundancy and yet also protect your privacy.

For example, using your 2-of-3 system, then you back up 3-2 = 1 xpub alongside each seed phrase, and your 3 back ups would look like this:

Back up 1: Seed A, xpub B
Back up 2: Seed B, xpub C
Back up 3: Seed C, xpub A

As you can see, the compromise of any one back up is insufficient for an attacker to spy on your wallet, while you still only need to recover any 2 back ups to have all the information needed to restore your wallet.

If their ultimate goal was actually providing privacy, then they could have partnered with a coinjoin implementation which A) actually works and B) doesn't directly fund mass surveillance. Their ultimate goal is profit, and they don't give a crap about selling out their morals and their users to get there.

And don't believe the lie about "serious criminal activities". The Wasabi Terms of Service clearly state that you can be censored for any reason whatsoever and Wasabi won't tell you why.

Goes right back to my point about: Laziness and greed.

When the likes of Voyager and Celsius were offering 80% interest or whatever ridiculous, obviously unsustainable percent they were offering, people signed up and threw their bitcoin at them without a second thought. Even when I posted repeatedly about how these platforms' Terms of Service clearly said that they would be lending and spending your coins without any kind of protection, collateral, safety nets, etc., people in those threads didn't care. And then when these platforms went bankrupt, almost everyone who used them was surprised to learn what was going on behind the scenes, despite it being clearly spelt out in their Terms right from day one.

People don't care until it is too late.

If a centralized service such a CEX is discriminating against your coins for any reason, least of all simply because you used a mixer or a coinjoin in order to protect your privacy, then I would suggest never using that CEX. I would actually suggest never using any CEX, and instead buy and sell your bitcoin peer to peer using a high quality DEX: https://kycnot.me/

If Wasabi have censored your coins because they violate one of their secret criteria, there is a good chance that any centralized exchange will take similar issue with the same coins. But of course there are plenty of other privacy tools out there which don't spy on their users and enforce blacklists which you can use to bypass any such "taint" nonsense.

Passport is currently the best on the market in my opinion.

Have you tried coinjoining them?

If you already have a Trezor, then you are safe to keep using it provided you don't go anywhere near the coinjoin function. But when the time comes to replace or upgrade your hardware wallet, don't buy another Trezor.

Centralized exchanges are, by far, the least safe and the most risky place to send your coins.

You cannot be anonymous when using a centralized exchange. Even if you don't complete KYC, they log absolutely everything you do, everything about your computer, device, IP, location, etc., and use blockchain analysis to look in to the history of your deposits and withdrawals.

There exist non-custodial exchanges which allow day trading via smart contracts and atomic swaps.

You would undoubtedly have 5+ posts saying "Reserved" show up immediately on every single topic posted in the technical boards.