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".

Postpone, or abandon? Because postponing achieves nothing. I don't care if they are going to censor me next week or next year - I'm never using any wallet or service which thinks that doing so is an acceptable price to pay.

Their legal documents from 2020 do indeed state Gibraltar: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/blob/master/WalletWasabi/Legal/Assets/LegalDocumentsWw1.txt
While the same document updated for 2022 says Seychelles: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/blob/master/WalletWasabi/Legal/Assets/LegalDocumentsWw2.txt

So it does seem they have moved jurisdiction already. So if that's the case, why haven't they come out and said they are not going to censor their users? And why even announce the censorship in the first place, given that it is yet to be implemented? They could just have moved jurisdictions without saying anything.

I don't believe they have any intentions on reversing their pro-censorship stance, but if they do then I must say they have the stupidest PR department in the world for letting this much fall out go on for so long over something they always planned not to do.

QT was only ever planned to start last month. If you go here, you will see a very slight downtrend over the last few weeks: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm

From a peak of $8.965 trillion in April, the balance sheet is now sitting at $8.899 trillion. So they've clawed back $66 billion in the last two months, which sounds like a lot when reported in isolation, but isn't even 1% of their assets.

If you look back at the last QT starting at the end of 2017, it took them almost a year to ramp up to their maximum rate of around $40-50 billion a month.

So QT has started, and will accelerate over the next few months. Whether it actually continues as planned or they find some other reason to start up the money printers again, who knows.

It shouldn't be up to every single individual user to manually filter out the spam, but sadly, that's what it has come to. We have very clear forum rules as well as very clear signature campaign rules, which are widely ignored and completely unenforced. Here are what they say:



Even the most egregious spammers are not banned and campaign managers are never sanctioned. If we aren't even going to enforce the very forgiving rules that we have, then you are going to have no luck trying to get this new feature implemented I'm afraid.

Here's another suggestion instead:

Use ignore. On the 1st of each month (or some other time frame which suits your needs), go to "Profile" -> "Ignore user options" and copy your entire ignore list in to a spreadsheet. Then clear your ignore list and start again. Repeat. After 3 or 4 months, any user which has been on every one of your historical ignore lists gets added to a permanent ignore list. From the 1st of each month going forward, instead of wiping your entire ignore list you wipe it and replace it with your permanent ignore list. This means that you aren't condemning any user forever based on a single post which you hit ignore on, but repeated shitposts will eventually get filtered out permanently. Going forward you can give a user "Three strikes" or something similar before adding them to your permanent ignore list.

Sure, but they didn't end up with a $1.2 billion hole in the balance sheet overnight and then shut down withdrawals the next day. They have obviously had major liquidity issues for weeks or months, all the while continuing to advertise and attract new users as well as encouraging more deposits from existing users with their obviously unsustainable interest rates of up to 20% a year. They must have known full well for some time that they would be unable to pay out interest to any new deposits coming to their platform, in which case these new deposits were likely only being used to pay interest on older deposits and keep them afloat while they struggled to secure additional sources of funding.

So no, while their business model is not a Ponzi and giving out unsecured loans is not a Ponzi, I think it is highly likely that they were operating like a Ponzi in the weeks leading up to them suspending all accounts.

They get out of it by using deliberately vague and misleading language. Emphasis mine:

Collateral of up to 150% includes anything from 1% to 150%. Or they take no collateral but just assurances that the borrower will repay. Their Terms of Use are obviously far more explicit, as they are legally required to be:


I doubt it very much. They'll say they will on Twitter to placate their users, then once this episode of insolvencies and bankruptcies blows over it will all be forgotten about, and all their users will continue to be at risk as they always have been.

Cross post it to this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5401468.0. Get it added to the list of exchanges to avoid.

Yeah, I think it might be. I tested my theory above by using the private key 0000....0001 on bitaddress, and then using the associated public key on VanitySearch. Out of 10 keys I generated, only 2 of them correctly combined on bitaddress (although obviously all combined correctly on VanitySearch). So obviously it is not related to modulo n, since it would be impossible to have 8 different keys which are all greater than n when added to the private key 0000....0001.

Edit: Poked around the code and found the culprit: https://github.com/JeanLucPons/VanitySearch/blob/c8d48ce5f03f5357c0e87cbdb3e1e93cd50af88b/main.cpp#L314

So when combining partial keys, VanitySearch simply checks all 6 combinations of symmetry and endomorphism and then returns whichever key matches the address in the text file. bitaddress.org obviously doesn't do this and just does a straight addition.

Here is how you would use bitaddress to find the right key:

Vk will be the partial private key generated by VanitySearch, while Bk will be the partial private key generated by the user on bitaddress. L1 and L2 will refer to the values below, as specified here: https://github.com/JeanLucPons/VanitySearch/blob/c8d48ce5f03f5357c0e87cbdb3e1e93cd50af88b/main.cpp#L255


The six combinations that VanitySearch checks are as follows:


You can actually work all this out using a combination of bitaddress's add and multiply functions, as well as knowing how to negate a private key modulo n (which is just n minus your privkey), but it doesn't seem like there would be any easy way to explain this to a user who doesn't really understand what they are doing without huge potential for error. The only other option would be to disable symmetry and endomorphism when searching for a key in VanitySearch.

I wouldn't say all, because there are legitimate uses for creating and using mobile hot wallets for small amounts of funds. But yeah, anything holding serious amounts of money should be a hardware wallet or permanently airgapped. However, we both know full well that the majority of users don't do this. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to stop using absolutely trash wallets like blockchain.com or Trust wallet, let alone use an airgapped device.

So you adapt your storage based on your location. If you are concerned about something like water, fire, or pests, then regardless of if your seed phrase is on paper or in a book then it is at risk. A piece of paper I can put inside a small fireproof and waterproof container and still hide far more easily than I can do so with a book.

Most won't, and they few that have will be replaced dozens of times over by more newbies willing to throw their money away during the next bull run with whatever new shiny product or platform is next.

We saw this repeatedly during the height of ICO craze in 2017/2018. Coins and tokens being released all over the place with no function whatsoever except to grow the value of the company and make the creators some profits at the expense of all their buyers. Then we saw it with IEOs, ITOs, and whatever other nonsense acronyms came next. Then NFTs. Then DeFi and tokens belonging to platforms like Celsius. We will absolutely see it again in the next few years, and lots more users will lose lots more money.

Because there is no shortage of people who are willing to throw their money away on scams with promises of getting rich quick. And so there is no shortage of scammers willing to take advantage of them.

Nope. Bisq uses a 2-of-2 multi-sig escrow between buyer and seller. There is no centralized control whatsoever. LocalCryptos uses a smart contract, again without any centralized control. Neither platform can steal the coins from the escrow and no trusted third party is required.

Which is an inherent problem with the fiat banking system, not with bitcoin. Decentralized exchanges are designed to remove the third party from bitcoin transactions, which they do. They will never remove a third party from fiat transactions because that is not their goal. Thankfully, if you want to trade for fiat without a third party then you can do so easily by using cash.

I have no doubt that different people on the team feel differently about their new anti-privacy and pro-censorship stance, but that's why I made the point in my last point about the two positions being mutually exclusive. It does not matter if some individuals have different values, understandings, ethical dilemmas, moral considerations, and so on. Stating you have solved fungibility while enforcing non-fungibility is an outright lie, regardless of personal opinions.

Also worth pointing out that the article linked was written by nopara73, who has obviously been very vocal in defending their decision to enforce blacklists and censorship.

I don't like this advice, because most people do not know how to create and use these things safely and securely, i.e. created on a clean and airgapped computer, and only ever recovered on a clean and airgapped computer. Most people would create these back ups by writing their seed phrase in a text file, copying it to their external storage, and then deleting the text file, all on their usual every day computer while connected to the internet. I'm sure I don't need to point out to you all the things which could go wrong with such a method, but many newbies will be unaware of the risks involved. Conversely, everyone is able to write down some words on a piece of paper safely and securely. I agree redundancy is mandatory as I mentioned earlier in this thread, but you can achieve redundancy simply by making more than one paper back up and storing them in separate locations.

Don't do this. Don't store anything valuable in an email account, ever. I'm not sure what you mean by storing it in an email account that isn't online, but if you are storing something valuable on an airgapped computer then you should encrypt it, not put it in some email software.

If you aren't locking it in a safe, then it is significantly easier to hide a piece of paper than it is to hide a book. A book is pretty much limited to "hiding in plain sight" - on a book shelf with other books, in a drawer, etc., and simply hope no one opens it and looks in it. A piece of paper can be hidden in more places than you can count. Take a wooden shelf off the wall, drill a small hole in the back of it, roll up your paper and place it inside, and put the shelf back on the wall. The same can be done where two pieces of wood meet in any piece of wooden furniture - chairs, sofas, desks, cabinets, etc. You could even do the same on the top or bottom of a wooden door (with a small piece of tape to make sure it doesn't fall out). Unscrew a light fitting from the roof or an electrical socket from the wall and stuff a piece of paper in there (be sure not to cause a fire hazard). Between a picture and its frame. Inside pretty much anything that can be taken apart. Under carpets or floor boards. Hell, inside your walls if you really wanted. The possibilities are endless. It is entirely possible to hide a piece of paper somewhere in your house that a robber would not find it even if he had free reign to search for an entire week. Books on the other hand are a "classic" hiding place - everyone's seen movies or TV shows where people have cut out the inside pages of a book to create a secret storage compartment.

Well, that's a separate issue which is dealt with by using hidden wallets, passphrases, and plausible deniability.

At least someone on their team must have known and informed them. Which means the only conclusion you can reach is "They don't care". They don't care that they are encouraging their users to download spyware on their devices and potentially link every bitcoin wallet and address on their device with their real identity. What have you got to hide, right!?

I reached this conclusion when they tried to defend asking a blockchain analysis company to spy on their users as somehow good for privacy. This just cements that conclusion.

Which they themselves still claim:

I cannot fathom how someone can write articles claiming they have "solved fungibility" while simultaneously enforcing arbitrary blacklists. Those two positions are mutually exclusive. That is not up for debate; that is a simple fact. You cannot state you have solved the issue of some bitcoin being discriminated against while you are actively discriminating against some bitcoin.

I disagree with these points.

There is a huge difference in trust between using a centralized exchange such as Coinbase or Binance, in which you must trust them completely with all of your data and all of your coins, compared to using a centralized exchange such as LocalCryptos which pairs you with another traded and requires none of your data and never has custody over your coins. And if that is still too much for you, then use Bisq. Centralized third party completely removed.

If you choose to buy or sell your bitcoin via a payment method which has a centralized third party involved, such as PayPal, then that is your choice and has nothing to do with bitcoin nor the decentralized exchange which is removing the need for a centralized third party to hold your bitcoin. And if that is still too much for you, then you can buy or sell your bitcoin with cash in person, cash in mail, cash drop offs, Monero, or some other method which completely removes the centralized third party.

Which would be bad enough on its own, but they guy in the second video is Norbert Lévai, the project manager at zkSNACKs, meaning you can't pass this off as a PR fuck up. The highest level people in Wasabi are promoting Chinese spyware to all their users. And the Wasabi Twitter account has never struck me as being run by some random PR hire, but by the developers themselves.

I honestly can't wrap my ahead around what is going on here. They are either so completely out of touch with all things privacy that they genuinely have no idea TikTok is spyware, or they are aware of this fact but the just don't care at all. Which is worse?

Asking anything about peer to peer trading on Bitcoin Discussion is a pointless exercise, for exactly this reason. You get a bunch of replies from people who have never traded peer to peer and don't actually understand what peer to peer trading is telling you that it's too slow, too risky, too expensive, or other nonsense. People who fall for the marketing gimmicks and think that Binance P2P is a "decentralized" exchange.

I have traded exclusively peer to peer for years. In that time I have read almost every day about someone somewhere losing money on a centralized exchange, from their account being locked for arbitrary reasons to hacks, thefts, scams, and bankruptcy, while I have never so much as lost a single satoshi in a peer to peer trade. In that time I have read about countless data hacks and thefts from centralized exchanges, with KYC documents and selfies being leaked all over the internet and being used for fraud and other criminal activities, while I have never leaked any information because I never shared it in the first place. In that time I've read about centralized exchanges charging 50,000 sats or more for a single withdrawal, while I can complete a trade by making a 1 sat/vbyte transaction and paying ~200 sats.

If you regularly day trade, then sure, you are probably going to have to use some kind of centralized platform. But for the majority of people who don't day trade, then you can get better security and better privacy by avoiding centralized exchanges, as well as protecting the "original Satoshi strategy" as OP calls it - keeping your coins in your control, away from the control of third parties, permissionless, and censorship resistant.

If it was "hidden" so insecurely that someone found it when simply cleaning, then it would easily found by any attacker. You need to find a better place to secure it where it won't be easily found.

Nope.

I have many seed phrases which are simply written on a simple, unlaminated piece of paper. It is a perfectly acceptable solution if you have proper redundancy in your back ups.

Yes, they are flash memory. They have a limited life span and are easily damaged.

No. It is also not safe to use them if you connect them to an offline computer which then goes back online later. They should only be used on a permanently airgapped computer.

A larger raw size, but a smaller weight or virtual size.

This is not accurate. Double spending can happen if an attacker controls far less than 51% of the hash rate, or even without an active attacker at all and just someone taking advantage of a natural chain split and getting lucky.

"The mempool" is not a centralized entity. Each node has its own mempool. Any individual mempool will not store both unconfirmed transactions in such a case, as one of them will be rejected as a potential double spend. Some individual mempools will store one transaction, while other individual mempools will store the other.

I appreciate your point, but there are a few caveats worth pointing out.

Firstly, if you are planning on using Coinbase and don't already have an account there, then you should absolutely change your mind and find a different exchange. They are easily the most immoral and anti-bitcoin exchange in existence, caring only about their profits at the complete expense of all their users.

Secondly, recognize these "learn and earn" activities for what they really are - ways for Coinbase to make profit. You complete the activity and earn a few bucks of a shitcoin. Great. You decide to buy a bit more of that shitcoin - Coinbase profits, and you lose out because the shitcoin loses value against bitcoin long term. You decide to withdraw that shitcoin - Coinbase now links your shitcoin wallet to your real identity and sells that to third parties. You simply hold the shitcoin in your Coinbase wallet - well, you haven't actually earned anything at all.

So, if and only if you already have a fully KYCed Coinbase account and you plan to immediately sell the shitcoin you earn for bitcoin (and of course pay the trading and withdrawal fees), then completing these activities might not be a complete waste of time. For everyone else, they should steer clear.