Wasabi earned the coinjoin bounty prior to the existence of its 2.0 version, which far exceeds what was seen in 1.0

xtests unfortunately it's not an option, as it would display negative motives and potentially erase any good that came from this difficult choice

There might come a time when we have to go with one of these "less controversial options," but we should be ready to say goodbye to innovation.  As it stands, Wasabi Wallet ranks just behind Bitcoin Core in terms of development activity for a single project within the open-source Bitcoin ecosystem, if not the entire Bitcoin landscape and these less debatable paths would bring that progress to an abrupt conclusion.

That's bold, coming from someone advertising a traditional Bitcoin mixer in his signature that, unlike Wasabi, can steal its users' money and deanonymize them: https://nopara73.medium.com/traditional-bitcoin-mixers-6a092e59d8c2

Some individuals prefer to forgo privacy entirely rather than make any compromises. This is evident in the case of Seth and his company, Foundation Devices. They were second in line in canceling zkSNACKs. However, when confronted with the legal implications surrounding the Tornado Cash case, they opted to retract their coinjoin implementation plans altogether.

It's easy to be brave from a distance. I'd urge everyone to try to think further ahead, because what we're doing here is no joke. We're leading a revolution that is going to make significant geopolitical impact and going head first into the wall is a nonsense strategy.

The ones who brought them up are the ones who're wrongfully accusing me with a conduct of doxxing.

The interview wasn't the first time they publicly revealed their identity. Your allegation of doxxing is merely pointing to a public company registry where they've also disclosed their identities. By that point, Keonne and Hill had already abandoned their pseudonyms. They revealed this in many places, such as UASF groups, but they made a U-turn after people like me and Mandrik who used to work with them started linking their scammer past to their scammer present. Other than establishing evidence of sockpuppetry you can take, for example, the time when they worked at Blockchain info and seeded the Bitcoin wallet from random.org via HTTP, resulting in many of their users losing money: https://nopara73.medium.com/samouraileaks-part-3-is-random-org-random-enough-35704796ae93

This situation is shameful for multiple reasons:

1. I wasn't doxxing, but they seem to believe that if they shout loudly enough, they can make it appear true.
2. Even in a hypothetical universe where I had accessed private information and published it, if that disclosure had helped expose fraudulent conduct, it would have been justified.
3. In fact, since we're on the subject, my parents' address is being disseminated all over the Internet. One can only guess who is responsible for that.

There's one last thing to address though:

If from tomorrow Craig Wright would want you to start calling him SDevS, would you do so and start shaming everyone else who wouldn't?

Regarding the conversation that's happening in parallel. Let's not pretend the scamourais are in any way pseudonymous. Among other things they were giving interviews with their real identity to CoinDesk, the largest publication of the space: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/06/03/samourai-wallet-raises-first-funding-round-in-fight-against-bitcoin-surveillance/

Without exception, every single feature of Wasabi Wallet is trustless.  
Although, much like any other non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, Wasabi is also permissionless, its coinjoin feature represents an exception to that.

Nobody's supporting mass surveillance here. Quite the opposite in fact. Delivering a Bitcoin privacy solution that's lightyears ahead of the others, is the best testimony to that. zkSNACKs operates with utmost transparency, pushing for a future where privacy is respected and mass surveillance becomes increasingly difficult. The folks at zkSNACKs are dedicated to this cause and tirelessly work on innovative solutions. One of these solutions: Wasabi Wallet, became so successful that the people behind it do not have the luxury to live in lalaland anymore. Working on privacy is risky and it does no good for anybody to go head first into the wall.

Pretty wild theories you got there

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.

zkSNACKs does not only not share sensitive information with anyone, but it cannot even if it wanted to, because users don't share any sensitive information with zkSNACKs in the first place.

That might be a bit too low, but perhaps. There's no disagreement here. If you read what I wrote, I made the same point: "in fact this is the only sybil attack that as far as I know is feasible to do"


There are many patterns you must copy to execute this attack unnoticeably. For example, let's assume a pattern that 10% of all inputs of a coinjoin are coming from the preceding coinjoin. In that case, to copy this pattern, you would have to be 10% of every single coinjoin, which is already far from "a trivial amount of money" and this is just a single pattern example.


Although the main point you're making that coinjoin fees aren't relevant, is correct, you box it into a loaded statement through a second incorrect claim, which is that "all the money is going to a blockchain analysis company." Loaded statements is quite a disturbing pattern I'm noticing in our conversations, so I'd greatly appreciate if you'd stop doing that.


We're not selling anyone out. We wouldn't even have the ability to do so even if we wanted to. Another loaded statement aside, it'd indeed be a problem if the detectability of an attack would rely on trusting the attacker itself. Luckily it's not the case.

I didn't mean to put words into your mouth, sorry. I claimed Samourai is a scam, and explained the reason why: it markets itself as a privacy wallet while it has very bad privacy. People who use it are promised privacy, but they don't get it. Samourai users are the victims of the Samourai scam. In contrast, zkSNACKs is not lying about its blacklisting. No dishonesty there, therefore the definition as a scam does not apply. I'm sorry, if you feel this to be an attack, these are factual statements. The truth about Samouarai is so disturbing that I'm not sure how to put things more mildly.

If you don't believe me or don't get it, you can check out how Gregory Maxwell (inventor of coinjoin) and Chris Belcher (inventor of JoinMarket) put it:

- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg51128834#msg51128834
- https://mobile.twitter.com/chris_belcher_/status/1345176372474425348
- https://mobile.twitter.com/chris_belcher_/status/1345176039874564097

It does not come at the cost of privacy of our users and we do care about them. That's exactly why we introduced blacklisting: so we can continue to operate and users can still have privacy using Bitcoin. If we wouldn't care about our users, then we would not have sacrificed our reputation, just shut down the service and nobody would have got any privacy.

Yes, because it's a scam. No privacy, just marketing. Whirlpool is not on the same level. Unlike Wasabi or JoinMarket, it isn't trustless. Using them you trust a third party with your privacy.

Samourai Wallet by default collects the xpubs of their users (past, present and future financial transactions) thus they provide zero privacy against themselves (and hackers and governments.) For this they say "use dojo" which is a Bitcoin full node that fixes this network level privacy disaster, however you'll still be mixing with other xpub leakers. If you're the only one who uses a full node, then the links between your inputs and outputs in the mix is trivially deanonymized by exclusion. This is a fundamental privacy leak, which just makes the two wallet not even comparable. However the problems did not end here, I think they can be deanonymized by other means, too, but any discussion comparing the two should.

Use JoinMarket, Chaincase or alternative Wasabi coordinators. Samourai is a scam, it's all marketing, zero privacy.

What you are describing is called a targeted sybil attack, which is a known attack vector of all centrally coordinated coinjoins. In fact this is the only sybil attack that as far as I know is feasible to do, although it'd still be noticeable and it's still not a cheap attack. The coordinator has to provide hundreds of inputs and outputs (equivalent to hundreds of normal bitcoin transactions) to deanonymize a single UTXO. In fact double that cost as the attacker must prepare the UTXOs in advance by making transactions. Furthermore, it's also detectable by looking at the remixes in the coinjoin. If the remix ratio is different from other coinjoins then we would know the attack happened. You might think then the attacker should spend more money on fees to pre-mix coins to make the remix ratio perfect. But even then there would be a pattern with the timing of the pre-mixes that would clearly differ from normal coinjoin volume. Executing such attack in an unnoticeable fashion would cost an extraordinary amount of resources since to hide all the patterns the attack would have to keep participating in every single coinjoin with many inputs until the target UTXO would decide to mix so the attack can be cleanly executed.

This has nothing to do with blockchain analysis tho.

It was never supposed to. You claimed that I "don't see the problem with it" so I pointed out that I am well aware of the problems with it.


That assumes you are free to choose.