By which point it will be too late to change anything. We will never be able to go back to before mass surveillance. Once CBDCs are launched, we will never be able to go back to before they existed. And once the government have control of the bitcoin network and can censor at will, we will never be able to go back to it being free. Which is why we need to be discussing solutions now.

Yes, of course, but that assumes that his current set up is inadequate. If he is using a truly cold wallet, set up on a permanently airgapped machine, with a strong passphrase backed up separately, then that is already very secure and moving to a multi-sig provides only very marginal gains.

Well, with multi-sig back ups you should be backing up a subset of your other xpubs alongside each seed phrase, which makes it obvious it's a multi-sig back up.

Ok, that's the bet. But we need to actually do something about it when faced with pools like F2Pool which are enforcing said corruption. Simply expressing out displeasure will achieve nothing. So the question is - what are we going to do? I would favor more privacy on the base layer making this kind of censorship impossible. I am very clearly in the minority here and this is highly unlikely to ever happen. So what other options are there beyond doing nothing and waiting for the day the government controls bitcoin?

This summarizes it perfectly.

The government want bitcoin to be under their control. There is currently a route which we can foresee to the government achieving this (get 51% of the hashrate to comply with their blacklists and censorship). The government are not going to stop kicking down doors until they achieve their goal, unless we do something to stop them. Shaking our fists and hoping for the best is insufficient.

The difference is I can simply refuse to use any CEX as I always have done and there is nothing they can do to my coins or my transactions. I hold no such power when it comes to mining pools deciding to censor me.

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When it comes to other options, I've spoken before about Stratum V2, and with perfect timing I see this news story pop up yesterday: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/demand-launches-worlds-first-stratum-v2-bitcoin-mining-pool

In that case, you don't really have any option other than sending the UTXOs from one wallet to the other and paying the transaction fee each time.

Why do you want to move the coins to a multi-sig wallet? Is your offline wallet no longer secure? Is leaving the coins where they are not an option?

If you do still want to send them across, then you can either wait until fees are lower or just bite the bullet and pay the fees. You will have to spread the transactions out over a period of time so they are not obviously linked together. You could potentially consolidate two or three of the UTXOs together each time to save on fees if you are happy with the privacy implications of doing so.

I'm not sure I follow you. From what OP has said, his outputs are already in Whirlpool:


Given that, and given he wants to move them from Whirlpool to another wallet, then the "mix to external xpub" option is the best option.

To move your Whirlpooled outputs directly to cold storage. Once I have a UTXO which has had 20+ free remixes and I don't intend to spend anytime soon, I gain very little by letting it sit on a hot wallet an accumulate even more free remixes. Using this method I can move this UTXO to a cold storage wallet, increase its security, and also redirect any free remixes to other UTXOs of the same size in that Whirlpool wallet instead.

The fees do not matter given my suggestion above. Whirlpool remixes are free. Mixing to an external xpub is also free, since it is the new entrants to each round which pay the fee. Mixing to an external wallet is exactly the same as just accumulating more free remixes from this point of view.

It's easy enough to space out the process using Sparrow. You can simply enroll one UTXO now and wait for it to land in the new wallet, and then wait as long as you want before starting the process on the next UTXO. You don't have to enroll all your UTXOs in the process at the same time.

You can also freeze individual UTXOs in Sparrow which will pause their enrollment in free remixes for as long as you leave them frozen. Simply unfreeze them again and they will start to be remixed once again.

What's the alternative? We sit around, shake our fists, do nothing, wait for more mining pools to capitulate to government demands, and then lament that bitcoin is under government control?

The correct way to do this is via the "mix to external xpub" feature in either Samourai or Sparrow.

Here's a guide on how to do this with Sparrow: https://sparrowwallet.com/docs/mixing-whirlpool.html#mixing-to-cold-storage. Simply use the xpub of your cold storage wallet to create a watch only version in Sparrow, and then in your Whirlpool wallet select the "Mix to..." button and tell it to mix directly to that cold storage wallet. It will add at least 3 more mixes to each output first, and then mix those outputs directly in to your cold storage wallet at a random time after that. You will therefore not pay any fees (since the fees for each coinjoin are paid by the new entrants), and there will be no consolidation or privacy loss. To an outside observer, the transactions moving these coins from Whirlpool to the cold wallet will be indistinguishable from any other Whirlpool coinjoin.

How long it will take a transaction to be dropped when using Electrum depends entirely on the Electrum servers you are connect to. Some will run with the default of two weeks, some will run with higher limits, and some will run with virtually no limit at all. If you are still seeing your unconfirmed transaction on Electrum after several months, you can try swapping to different servers to see if you can find one which has already dropped it.

Alternatively just make a full RBF replacement.

Why not? Who is going to stop them? They have complete control over the entire BNB network and can do literally anything they like with it, from printing a billion out of thin air to simply shutting the whole thing down with zero warning.

Only as long as Binance keep their promise to keep doing this.

Except it seems that they can. Make 51% of the hashrate comply with their OFAC sanctions as F2Pool have done, and bitcoin is firmly under their control. At that point they can censor any transaction they choose.

Bisq is completely peer to peer in the same way that bitcoin is - you run the software locally and connect directly to other peers (over Tor). You can also run your own Robosats instance, and Robosats is developing processes to make it easier for these instances to talk to each other: https://github.com/RoboSats/robosats/blob/main/federation.md

Would it, though? That'll be the day the likes of us abandon bitcoin, but the masses don't care. They let centralized exchanges act as banks, surveil their every move, hold their coins, and dictate how they can spend them. They use custodial wallets which can stop serving them at any time, like Wallet of Satoshi just did. All they care about is "when moon", and not at all about the whole point of bitcoin in the first place. They cheer for more regulations since it means bitcoin "is going mainstream", and eagerly await institutional investors, ETFs, and the like. Are they going to care about a few transactions belonging to other people are being censored? The fact that this censorship is barely being discussed across this forum/Reddit/Twitter/etc. tells you all you need to know. People don't care.

So a centralized third party to police the other centralized third parties? No thanks. What we need is more privacy by default on the base layer to make this kind of censorship impossible to begin with.

In terms of wallets, I suspect it will be ones owned by other malicious entities such as centralized exchanges. Coinbase wallet, or Trust wallet which is owned by Binance. Those are already terrible wallets, but when they start attacking bitcoin itself as Wasabi does then that becomes yet another reason not to use them.

Almost all centralized exchanges will do this. Some will even lock your coins if you deposit coins from a Wasabi coinjoin, which makes a complete mockery of Wasabi's pro-government and pro-surveillance stance.

And in such a scenario, the pro-censorship majority can simply ignore any blocks which include transactions they dislike. Any blocks mined by the non-censoring pools can just be re-orged out of the chain at will.

As it turns out, bitcoin is not censorship resistant. It simply isn't being censored right now.

So, are we now agreeing that bitcoin is in fact not censorship resistant at all, and depends on trusted third parties (mining pools) in order for anyone to use it?

Don't need to make your own coin, just use Monero. It is impossible to perform this kind of attack on Monero.

For what its worth, I don't think ordinals should be censored either, regardless of how stupid I think they are:


When did free speech and freedom from censorship become the fringe view among the bitcoin community? It's quite disturbing.

Which is why we need to speak out strongly against any entity which promotes the use of taint, such as Wasabi, and warn everyone to stay well away from ever using their products. Taint only exists because of the likes of Wasabi. If everyone stopped using any entity which promotes the use of taint, then the entire concept ceases to exist.

Correct.

If the node has dropped the original transaction, it will accept the replacement.
If the node still has the original transaction, and has full RBF disabled, it will reject the replacement.
If the node still has the original transaction, and has full RBF enabled, it will accept the replacement, provided the replacement meets the fee criteria for RBF replacements.

Bisq is the best option.

As far as I see it, being delisted from KYCed centralized exchanges is a good thing - it proves that Monero works, the government are unable to trace it or deanonymize it like they can do with every other coin, so instead they are resorting to delisting it. Delisting shows that it works. And as I said before, no one who actually uses Monero cares about this since they aren't using KYCed exchanges in the first place.

So is bitcoin. We are seeing mining pools like F2Pool censoring transactions the government tells them to. We are seeing wallets like Wasabi censoring inputs the government tells them to. We are seeing regulations which will ban self custody and mean bitcoin can only be bought, stored, and sold on fully KYCed centralized exchanges. And yet no one seems to care that bitcoin is marching towards a government permissioned network. Bitcoin is being cracked down on by governments even more strongly than Monero is. The difference is they can't do any of these things with Monero, so they are just forcing it to be delisted instead.

This is the exact same reasoning that people were using prior to Celsius going bankrupt, or BlockFi going bankrupt, or FTX going bankrupt, and so on. The fact remains the exchange will always say that everything is fine, that they can easily cover the fines/losses/whatever, that they are complying with all investigations, and so on, because as soon as they don't they trigger a bank run and then they are definitely going bankrupt. Don't trust anything that is being said right now. Get your coins off of Binance.

I don't keep up with just how many centralized tokens Binance can print at will, but off the top of my head BNB, BSC, and BUSD. And don't forget all their fake tokens on top of these centralized chains, like their fake wrapped bitcoin tokens that they trick newbies in to buying instead of real bitcoin. And don't they have a bunch of fake leveraged tokens as well, like BTCUP and BTCDOWN? All of these are 100% centralized and under Binance's control. There are plenty of ways they can fudge the numbers and dump on their customers to magic up a few billion dollars if they need to.

Yes. It is trivially easy to identify coinjoin transactions, regardless of which coinjoin implementation they use. The benefit of coinjoins does not come from obscuring the coinjoin transaction, but obscuring which coins are which.

"Tainted" according to their provably made up bullshit nonsense. As I've said before, I have never once had a problem with any of my well obfuscated coins being accepted anywhere, because I flat out refuse to interact with any person, service, business, or other entity which attacks bitcoin by buying in to the nonsense of "taint".

I do. It's a direct attack on what makes bitcoin bitcoin, and paves the way for government take over.