ㅤ

[DrBeer]

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOnfXVAtMFw&ab_channel=WasabiWallet

Pay attention to the 47th second, this is the reaction of the Wasabi guys to the questions presented by n0nce. 

 

• Guys, below are the answers to 24 questions that n0nce formulated on behalf of the public.

These answers are 100% coming from the decision maker (I was asked who should answer the questions, I said I expect a response directly from the CEO). I also hope that these answers can shed some light on some of the nuances, and cool the discussion (or make it even hotter).  
.....

A wonderful set of answers that should cover all paranoia and "conspiracy theories"!

Loved the explanation of the difference between confidentiality and privacy!
How many times have I said "to those who are very worried about confidential privacy" - study at least dictionary entries that explain the essence of what is called "confidentiality" and "privacy" But I'm not sure that they will calm down after that ... After all, suddenly someone's slaves brew beer, and he doesn't want to put up webcams and show it to everyone 

[1714612507]

1714612507

[boyptc]

It took me nearly 2 years until I downloaded the newest version. Honestly, I like the older version because it automatically shows and computes the fee that I have to pay and how long it will take, it doesn't need to

There's still the speed that it shows on the newer version but I like more the older version when it's about showing the tx fee and how long it will take automatically by just moving and setting the adjustment button.

I guess this is just me that's still try to look at the newer version but otherwise, I've always liked wasabi wallet.

[Wind_FURY]

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

[witcher_sense]

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

A few moments later...

It should be noted that this news article is four months old.

Collaborating with chain surveillance companies and using sophisticated tools aimed at prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing didn't save them from being sanctioned by the US government.

[ABCbits]

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

Just wondering, what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?

[NotATether]

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

A few moments later...

It should be noted that this news article is four months old.

Now I'm starting to think that it's sheer hypocrisy if the same service that willingly compied with OFAC is suddenly blaclisted by it, and the same dev who voluntarily made it OFAC-compliant was the one arrested by the Dutch authorities.

[dkbit98]

I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

I wouldn't compare Wasabi wallet with services like tornado.cash, first because they are not used for improving privacy for same coin, and second because coinjoin in not illegal anywhere.
Wasabi wallet didn't start blacklisting anything, unlike ethereum wallets like Metamask that uses Infura, and other fake dex exchanges like uniswamp, dydx, and others that are confirmed blacklisting and freezing coins.
 

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

Maybe they started to kiss their asses to late  
I think it's much easier to ban anything built for ethereum because it's already much more centralized infrastructure.

[n0nce]

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

Maybe they started to kiss their asses to late  
I think it's much easier to ban anything built for ethereum because it's already much more centralized infrastructure.

I disagree. How is CoinJoin in its current form, as used by Wasabi and Samourai, less centralized? There is one server that can be shut down.
Even worse, if adding blockchain analysis is not enough to keep an operator from going to jail, maybe next step to remain in business is to let authorities backdoor the server and link inputs / outputs? Who knows?

[pooya87]

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

Maybe they started to kiss their asses to late 
I think it's much easier to ban anything built for ethereum because it's already much more centralized infrastructure.

I disagree. How is CoinJoin in its current form, as used by Wasabi and Samourai, less centralized? There is one server that can be shut down.
Even worse, if adding blockchain analysis is not enough to keep an operator from going to jail, maybe next step to remain in business is to let authorities backdoor the server and link inputs / outputs? Who knows?

They are both centralized in their own ways. The Tornado thing by design and because of the platform, and the CoinJoin implementations because of the way they are implemented (the server thing). Who knows maybe they were all pressured to cooperate and the Tornado guys didn't agree so the ban hammer came down on them hard while the CoinJoin implementations were quick to cooperate (we know Wasabi did for sure).

[Wind_FURY]

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

Good luck with that: Tornado Cash Adds Chainalysis Tool for Blocking OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets From Dapp

The blockade only applies to the Tornado Cash front end, not the underlying smart contract, one of the protocol's founders later tweeted.

But is the blocking of "OFAC-Sanctioned Wallets" also just for the front end in WasabiWallet? I believe it's not, nopara37 has made the decision to block all UTXOs used for "illegal transactions" to enter Wasabi's actual pool.

I just heard the news about Tornado Cash, the sanction, and the arrest of a suspected Tornado Cash developer. It made the point of my debate in the topic. I believe nopara37 knew something like this would happen, and therefore accepted the trade-off of blocking UTXOs from illegal activities. From his point of view, he probably thinks that he made the right decision to protect himself, Wasabi, and its users.

Just wondering, what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?

For those providing liquidity, it protects their Bitcoins. For users, it's the assurance than none of the UTXOs are "tainted", whatever that means for the government. It's trade off if you want to use Wasabi, or if you don't, you can use ChipMixer.

[ABCbits]

Just wondering, what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?

For those providing liquidity, it protects their Bitcoins. For users, it's the assurance than none of the UTXOs are "tainted", whatever that means for the government. It's trade off if you want to use Wasabi, or if you don't, you can use ChipMixer.

I disagree for following reason.
1. Each government/exchange/analysis have different way to determine whether an UTXO is tainted or not.
2. It's unlikely UTXO from Wasabi CJ not treated suspiciously after blacklist is activated. AFAIK Wasabi team say it's not activated yet.
3. Regardless of existence of blacklist, liquidator's Bitcoin still safe unless there are bug on Wasabi Wallet or WabiSabi protocol which allow liquidator's Bitcoin to be stolen/unspendable.

[o_e_l_e_o]

1. Each government/exchange/analysis have different way to determine whether an UTXO is tainted or not.
2. It's unlikely UTXO from Wasabi CJ not treated suspiciously after blacklist is activated. AFAIK Wasabi team say it's not activated yet.

Further to this, we have seen absolutely no evidence or even suggestion from anywhere other than Wasabi themselves (who obviously cannot be trusted) that their blacklisting coinjoin will produce outputs which centralized exchanges consider less tainted than any other coinjoin. And given that we know different exchanges use different but secret metrics for deciding on taint, there is no way that Wasabi could possibly satisfy all of them, short of censoring every input which isn't from a coinbase (not the exchange) transaction.

[dkbit98]

I disagree. How is CoinJoin in its current form, as used by Wasabi and Samourai, less centralized? There is one server that can be shut down.
Even worse, if adding blockchain analysis is not enough to keep an operator from going to jail, maybe next step to remain in business is to let authorities backdoor the server and link inputs / outputs? Who knows?

You know Wasabi or Samourai wallet devs didn't invent Coinjoin right?
I think Greg Maxwell (who is still active in forum) was one of the first people who made proposal for using something like Coinjoin, so you should tell him if you think Coinjoin is centralized.
Difference between Coinjoin and TornadoTrash is that anyone can be coordinator for Coinjoin, and sure there is a better decentralized option for Bitcoin called Joinmarket.

PS
When I said centralized infrastructure I meant Ethereum blockchain that has most of their nodes on VPS.
You shut down one of VPS providers and most of eth nodes are down, and that already happened before, so I am not speculating about that.

[BlackHatCoiner]

For those providing liquidity, it protects their Bitcoins. For users, it's the assurance than none of the UTXOs are "tainted", whatever that means for the government.

None of the UTXOs may be tainted according to zkSNACKs, which since their pro-censorship "upgrade", they listen to a chain analysis company (and not only that, but they even pay for that censorship). However, there's nothing stopping the rest chain analysis companies from treating these UTXOs as tainted. There isn't only one that's governing the space. There's Chainalysis, Elliptic, CipherTrace, Elementus, CoinMetrics etc.

You shut down one of VPS providers and most of eth nodes are down, and that already happened before, so I am not speculating about that.

Not only centralization on a technical level. They've had an unfair coin minting from the beginning (70% the current supply straight up to Vitalik's and his buddies' pockets!), undecided monetary policy, which means developers (can) act accordingly to theirs and the big sharks' benefit, and now they're launching the "Merge" (which is ironically the "Split") moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake* with the corresponded consequences.

*or as I call it, from neutral consensus mechanism to feudalism-based mechanism that doesn't produce consensus.

[ABCbits]

PS
When I said centralized infrastructure I meant Ethereum blockchain that has most of their nodes on VPS.
You shut down one of VPS providers and most of eth nodes are down, and that already happened before, so I am not speculating about that.

Could you provide proof for that statement (most of ETH node hosted on single provider)? Here's example for Bitcoin which shows  Amazon as popular ASN (but not majority of all node), https://bitnodes.io/nodes/all/asns/.

[pooya87]

PS
When I said centralized infrastructure I meant Ethereum blockchain that has most of their nodes on VPS.
You shut down one of VPS providers and most of eth nodes are down, and that already happened before, so I am not speculating about that.

Could you provide proof for that statement (most of ETH node hosted on single provider)? Here's example for Bitcoin which shows  Amazon as popular ASN (but not majority of all node), https://bitnodes.io/nodes/all/asns/.

According to https://ethernodes.org/ out of 4885 ETH nodes, 65% are on "hostings" (remote servers or VPS) and out of those nodes 54% are hosted on Amazon servers.





Centralization of Ethereum runs a lot deeper than the nodes and their distribution. The fact that they have been easily pushing multiple forks and even a roll back that killed immutability of ethereum blockchain, is the most obvious evidence of the centralization.

Another interesting thing I just noticed was the new "upgrade" which the site claims 98% of the nodes have upgraded only in 2 months! Compare that with bitcoin, because of decentralization it takes a long time for nodes to upgrade to new versions. Core v23 released 4 months ago only has 29% share.

[n0nce]

I disagree. How is CoinJoin in its current form, as used by Wasabi and Samourai, less centralized? There is one server that can be shut down.
Even worse, if adding blockchain analysis is not enough to keep an operator from going to jail, maybe next step to remain in business is to let authorities backdoor the server and link inputs / outputs? Who knows?

You know Wasabi or Samourai wallet devs didn't invent Coinjoin right?
I think Greg Maxwell (who is still active in forum) was one of the first people who made proposal for using something like Coinjoin, so you should tell him if you think Coinjoin is centralized.

I do know that, and why should I tell him this? I'm sure he knows it himself. By the way, he never portrayed CoinJoin as an 'uLtImAtE pRiVaCy SoLuTiOn' like the companies profiting from his idea are doing now.
It was more of a curiosity and idea to 'disrupt taint analysis' (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0) in 'Bitcoin Discussion', even, at the very beginning.

Anyhow;

Difference between Coinjoin and TornadoTrash is that anyone can be coordinator for Coinjoin, and sure there is a better decentralized option for Bitcoin called Joinmarket.

This doesn't change that the coordinator is very much centralized, and that's a fact every child can spot if you draw them a picture of the popular CoinJoin implementations.

[Wind_FURY]

Just wondering, what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?

For those providing liquidity, it protects their Bitcoins. For users, it's the assurance than none of the UTXOs are "tainted", whatever that means for the government. It's trade off if you want to use Wasabi, or if you don't, you can use ChipMixer.

I disagree for following reason.
1. Each government/exchange/analysis have different way to determine whether an UTXO is tainted or not.

2. It's unlikely UTXO from Wasabi CJ not treated suspiciously after blacklist is activated. AFAIK Wasabi team say it's not activated yet.

3. Regardless of existence of blacklist, liquidator's Bitcoin still safe unless there are bug on Wasabi Wallet or WabiSabi protocol which allow liquidator's Bitcoin to be stolen/unspendable.

But that's not the point, and I'm not debating whether the "taint" is even real or not. The fact is, with the Tornado sanction, the government showed that it WILL sanction a non-person entity, a program for mixing outputs, if they see that it is mixing "tainted" outputs. I believe WasabiWallet's trade off, is merely trying to avoid a sanction by blocking "tainted" outputs. "Taint" as defined by "them", they invented it. Taint doesn't actually exist in the blockchain.

[ABCbits]

--snip--

But that's not the point, and I'm not debating whether the "taint" is even real or not. The fact is, with the Tornado sanction, the government showed that it WILL sanction a non-person entity, a program for mixing outputs, if they see that it is mixing "tainted" outputs. I believe WasabiWallet's trade off, is merely trying to avoid a sanction by blocking "tainted" outputs. "Taint" as defined by "them", they invented it. Taint doesn't actually exist in the blockchain.

You're going off-topic. What i asked was "what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?". But your response is about protection zkSNACKs/Wasabi team could get.

[Wind_FURY]

--snip--

But that's not the point, and I'm not debating whether the "taint" is even real or not. The fact is, with the Tornado sanction, the government showed that it WILL sanction a non-person entity, a program for mixing outputs, if they see that it is mixing "tainted" outputs. I believe WasabiWallet's trade off, is merely trying to avoid a sanction by blocking "tainted" outputs. "Taint" as defined by "them", they invented it. Taint doesn't actually exist in the blockchain.

You're going off-topic. What i asked was "what kind of protection user get from blacklist during CoinJoin?". But your response is about protection zkSNACKs/Wasabi team could get.

Off-topic? Do we actually need to establish the fact that WasabiWallet's pool = also its users? I'm sorry, I thought you already understood that, and that we're on the same page in that matter. But anyway, whether right or wrong, whether you agree or disagree, the point is nopara37 accepted the trade off, and the users also have a choice if they want to accept the trade off. Because anyone can use another mixer that doesn't blacklist outputs, or another team can run another coordinator that doesn't blacklist outputs.