ㅤ

[witcher_sense]

It seems Wasabi software doesn't prevent users from merging the outputs that came from the same CoinJoin round, which essentially destroys all privacy gained as a result of a complex transaction.

Let's analyze a bit the first CoinJoin transaction: https://kycp.org/#/d31c2b4d71eb143b23bb87919dda7fdfecee337ffa1468d1c431ece37698f918




In the picture above, we clearly see that some of the outputs have been spent together in four separate transactions:

https://kycp.org/#/3c67a57d35176bb13a7f098295a51ceb7a9abccc9b655cf2582126f0d1a05b0f
https://kycp.org/#/50cbcba0b4d752c658069842202e200c3086d3c7bd2258363103ccf40614866d
https://kycp.org/#/cb5816fa97cf8826548524f9e02290a7764ad2a9857c1abde2fd44c55516ece0
https://kycp.org/#/b0f590341a587fe6140a932d81c238a7a0451ccfde4efec7084f1c5dda8e0561

The second transaction (50cbcba0b4d) is (surprisingly) also the second wasabi 2.0 coinjoin, which was announced here https://twitter.com/HillebrandMax/status/1538181219610918913?s=20&t=qOdxv6VZZyiopkWGbZKwoQ



This particular transaction indicates that some of the outputs of the first coinjoin were used as inputs in the second coinjoin, which is totally fine from the privacy perspective because they may belong to different users.

The third (cb5816fa97c) and the fourth (b0f590341a5) transactions are either consolidations or payments (although without creating any change outputs).

The most interesting transaction (in my opinion) is the first one (3c67a57d351):



The output of this transaction (according to KYCP) belongs to OKEX exchange, which means that all these inputs were sent directly to someone's exchange account and, therefore, can be linked to a particular identity. Wasabi Wallet doesn't utilize any post-mix spending tools, and if part of the users practices bad spending behavior (like spending directly to a centralized exchange), then the other part of the users (more advanced) can potentially be deanonymized in a process of elimination.

[1714186562]

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[dkbit98]

It seems Wasabi software doesn't prevent users from merging the outputs that came from the same CoinJoin round, which essentially destroys all privacy gained as a result of a complex transaction.

There is also some issues currently with Tor that is under DDoS attack (I noticed slow loading times for my other wallets that use Tor) and this could also have negative effect on Wasabi 2.0 coinjoins.
Tor is updated to 4.7.8 few days ago with major bugfixes:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/plain/ChangeLog?h=tor-0.4.7.8

The output of this transaction (according to KYCP) belongs to OKEX exchange, which means that all these inputs were sent directly to someone's exchange account and, therefore, can be linked to a particular identity.

Not necessarily, because I believe that OKEX exchange has no-kyc tiers and that would not automatically connect those addresses with customer identity, unless OKEX stuff demands it from him.

[DireWolfM14]

I don't know; but I know that at roughly 1:57:00, a guy jumped in and asked very specific, technical questions. He seems like a proponent of Monero and he managed to make the Wasabi guys pretty uncomfortable.. It was fun listening to such a group call where someone chimes in, challenging the founders' statements and swiftly replies 'no, that was wrong!' when they explain something incorrectly; I really enjoyed listening to the discussion. Much better than other such calls where there's nothing but self-praise and advertising.

I hadn't made it that far through the conversation, so I just went back and started listening at around 1:53 or so.  Some other guy was asking "wen IOS integration" as if Apple, or Google, or Microsoft is going to buy Wasabi and integrate it into their operating system(s), and one of the Wasabi devs says "no, the strategy is that we're going to buy Microsoft."...

Buahahahaha!  Yeah, delusional of your own grandeur much?

If the average user loses privacy because they can't select specific UTXOs, too bad. If the average user pays additional fees from UTXOs they didn't want to coinjoin being automatically enrolled, too bad. Automatically enrolling everyone's coins in to coinjoins means that institutions will always have a nice pool of liquidity in which to coinjoin, which is exactly what Wasabi want. They don't care if the average user suffers, as has become blatantly clear by them spying on and censoring said users.

Of course, auto-coinjoin also means they can boast about high CoinJoin numbers to investors, even though people don't even use the wallet and let the funds sit in there without user action.

I must say, the poor community support on Twitter and low GitHub download numbers give me the impression their actual real userbase (and thus anonymity set) may be pretty small.

It seems pretty short sighted of them to pursue this business model, in my opinion.  If they have a large amount of liquidity in their coinjoins, but only a handful of large institutional clients anonymity is going to be nearly impossible, and even privacy will become harder and harder to achieve.

For full transparency: icopress contacted me and he kindly offered me to send him a concise list of questions which he'd directly forward to the Wasabi CEO.
I'm partly speculating myself in this thread, but also gave Wasabi the benefit of the doubt in some cases and generally try to be as objective as I can. Therefore I thoroughly read everything you guys are writing and will summarize a list with the 'top questions'..

Kudos to icopress for making the offer, and thank you for compiling the questions.

[PrivacyG]

Wasabi Wallet doesn't utilize any post-mix spending tools, and if part of the users practices bad spending behavior (like spending directly to a centralized exchange), then the other part of the users (more advanced) can potentially be deanonymized in a process of elimination.

This is such a well thought argument that never came to my mind.  So we can pretty much say that even if you take part in an uncensored Coin Join, the more users have bad spending behavior the higher the chances are for your Joined outputs to be de-anonymized?

Not necessarily, because I believe that OKEX exchange has no-kyc tiers and that would not automatically connect those addresses with customer identity, unless OKEX stuff demands it from him.

Unless the customer uses a disposable device and e-mail address and takes extreme care of their own behavior after which they carefully dispose of their device and any other fingerprint, I am pretty sure OKEX does not allow Tor registrations and therefore they would have information to hand out to authorities for identification.  I have a big doubt OKEX or any other larger exchange allows you to seamlessly deposit joined coins from a Tor IP.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[witcher_sense]

This is such a well thought argument that never came to my mind.  So we can pretty much say that even if you take part in an uncensored Coin Join, the more users have bad spending behavior the higher the chances are for your Joined outputs to be de-anonymized?

Imagine you're a criminal who disseminates prohibited literature or wrong thought. Such people are usually considered a serious menace to the government's stability and even the existence thereof, which is why law enforcement is trying to catch you, tirelessly spying on all your transactions. They may know that some UTXOs belong to your wallet (donations, bitcoin ATM withdrawals, etc.), and they will track these specific payments. You obviously can't tolerate such an invasion of your privacy, which is why you want to obfuscate all your transactions using the Wasabi 2.0 Awesome CoinJoin Tool. You send all your "tainted" UTXOs to your Wasabi Wallet to prepare them for a CoinJoin transaction. Please note that you send them carefully, one by one, just because it is a good privacy-preserving practice. Even though law enforcement may already know that those outputs belong to you, you don't want to make their life easier by confirming that once again. The problem with Wasabi Wallet is that it doesn't allow you to manually select outputs for a CoinJoin, which may well result in merging them on the input side. Yes, the zkSNACKs coordinator won't know that these inputs belong to the same user, but law enforcement will confirm their suspicions. The very algorithm according to which the Wasabi Wallet works may ruin your privacy by nullifying all your previous privacy-preserving actions.

But wait, should we really care what happens on the input side if the goal of a CoinJoin transaction is to obfuscate the link between your past and future transactions? Your future is what matters. The problem with CoinJoin is that it does not magically hide the connection between transactions but merely obfuscates it temporarily. Other users with whom you participated in the CoinJoin transactions may not be so careful privacy-wise as you, they may deanonymize themselves gradually by undergoing KYC procedures, for example.

Eventually, all users will be deanonymized because law enforcement has an unlimited amount of time to analyze the transaction. If, however, there are some additional post-mix spending tools in a wallet, which help users further obfuscate the links, the blockchain analysis may take forever. The Wasabi wallet doesn't care what people do after a CoinJoin, but, for some unknown reason, it thinks it knows better than people what to do before a CoinJoin.

[NotATether]

Automatically enrolling everyone's coins in to coinjoins means that institutions will always have a nice pool of liquidity in which to coinjoin, which is exactly what Wasabi want.

And why do the institutions of all people need to use CoinJoin on their assets in the first place? Do they have something to hide too?

It smells like Big Brother in here.

[nc50lc]

The whole concept of bitcoin is to be anonymous so if this can benefit that goal, why not.

Uhm, no, Bitcoin isn't anonymous in the first place, why would it be the concept?

The whole concept is what satoshi titled the Bitcoin Whitepaper, to be decentralized (peer-to-peer):

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

[hZti]

The whole concept of bitcoin is to be anonymous so if this can benefit that goal, why not.

Uhm, no, Bitcoin isn't anonymous in the first place, why would it be the concept?

The whole concept is what satoshi titled the Bitcoin Whitepaper, to be decentralized (peer-to-peer):

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Then read the Bitcoin white paper again, section 10 Privacy. It states:

The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.

A Coin Mixer can benefit this goal, since through exchanges it is possible that you can actually decrypt the owner of a public key. Coin Mixing prevents that.

[witcher_sense]

Then read the Bitcoin white paper again, section 10 Privacy. It states:

The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.

A Coin Mixer can benefit this goal, since through exchanges it is possible that you can actually decrypt the owner of a public key. Coin Mixing prevents that.

"Keeping public keys anonymous" means you never share publicly that you are somehow connected to a certain address. You can use one of your public keys in transactions with your counterparty, but outside observers won't be able to determine who the participants of the transaction are. Undergoing KYC on a centralized exchange is the opposite of keeping your public key anonymous because the exchange will know that particular public keys belong to a particular identity. But you can't use an exchange without revealing the information about yourself and your transactions! When you combine multiple public keys in a single transaction you also reveal the fact that you control them all; it's called a "common ownership heuristic." CoinJoin tries to break this particular heuristic by combining inputs from different users and creating outputs of equal amounts.

[ABCbits]

Then read the Bitcoin white paper again, section 10 Privacy. It states:

The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.

A Coin Mixer can benefit this goal, since through exchanges it is possible that you can actually decrypt the owner of a public key. Coin Mixing prevents that.

What does even "decrypt the owner of a public key" mean? Your public key exposed when you spend your Bitcoin. Besides, Bitcoin was never anonymous to begin with. Bitcoin is only pseudonymous.

[hZti]

Then read the Bitcoin white paper again, section 10 Privacy. It states:

The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.

A Coin Mixer can benefit this goal, since through exchanges it is possible that you can actually decrypt the owner of a public key. Coin Mixing prevents that.

"Keeping public keys anonymous" means you never share publicly that you are somehow connected to a certain address. You can use one of your public keys in transactions with your counterparty, but outside observers won't be able to determine who the participants of the transaction are. Undergoing KYC on a centralized exchange is the opposite of keeping your public key anonymous because the exchange will know that particular public keys belong to a particular identity. But you can't use an exchange without revealing the information about yourself and your transactions! When you combine multiple public keys in a single transaction you also reveal the fact that you control them all; it's called a "common ownership heuristic." CoinJoin tries to break this particular heuristic by combining inputs from different users and creating outputs of equal amounts.

That is what I mean, CoinJoin makes sense since the privacy is lost once an adress is linked to an exchange account. This can be solved by mixing the coins. After mixing your privacy is again there and you can send coins completely anonymous.

Then read the Bitcoin white paper again, section 10 Privacy. It states:

The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.

A Coin Mixer can benefit this goal, since through exchanges it is possible that you can actually decrypt the owner of a public key. Coin Mixing prevents that.

What does even "decrypt the owner of a public key" mean? Your public key exposed when you spend your Bitcoin. Besides, Bitcoin was never anonymous to begin with. Bitcoin is only pseudonymous.

IF i hold coins in my adress nobody knows who I am. If i send only 1 satoshi to an exchange then at least the exchange does know who is the owner of the full balance of the adress and can from this point also track what I do with these coins. The owner is from this point exposed.

If you read the quote I posted (that is from satoshi himself) you can see that he states that the owner of the public key needs to be kept anonymous.

[n0nce]

Automatically enrolling everyone's coins in to coinjoins means that institutions will always have a nice pool of liquidity in which to coinjoin, which is exactly what Wasabi want.

And why do the institutions of all people need to use CoinJoin on their assets in the first place? Do they have something to hide too?

I would generally say that everyone should have a right to privacy; whether they've nothing to hide or nothing to show, whether private or institutional.
On the other hand, large investors often prefer to buy ETFs / keep their coins in the hands of a broker / exchange, so it's still a good questioin. I'll add it to my list. It's actually already done, but I will sneak this one extra point in there.

[...]

Please keep in mind, not to double post.

[Pmalek]

IF i hold coins in my adress nobody knows who I am. If i send only 1 satoshi to an exchange then at least the exchange does know who is the owner of the full balance of the adress and can from this point also track what I do with these coins.

What if you bought that satoshi from me or I deposited it into your exchange address from one of my wallets? What does the exchange know then? Does it believe that you and me are the same person and can they prove it? Maybe we are, maybe we aren't, but that's not the way to prove it. There are still CEXs that don't require KYC up until a certain limit, so the exchange doesn't necessarily know who you are. And if they track me (the person who sent the coins to your account) and manage to discover my identity, they tracked the wrong person. They still need to find out know who you are.   

[BlackHatCoiner]

The whole concept of bitcoin is to be anonymous so if this can benefit that goal, why not.

It's more private in the sense that there's no financial institution to record your transactions, but the concept of bitcoin has nothing to do with this. If you use bitcoin cautiously, then you will preserve privacy, something you couldn't with a Google Pay or PayPal. To quote the founder:

The possibility to be anonymous or pseudonymous relies on you not revealing any identifying information about yourself in connection with the bitcoin addresses you use.  If you post your bitcoin address on the web, then you're associating that address and any transactions with it with the name you posted under.  If you posted under a handle that you haven't associated with your real identity, then you're still pseudonymous.

[hZti]

I feel many people missunderstand what I want to say. I argue that bitcoin is private and not that it is not private. Some users before said a coinjoin makes no sense but to some extend it does make sense or at least it is not in contrast to what bitcoin wants to archive.

[DireWolfM14]

And why do the institutions of all people need to use CoinJoin on their assets in the first place? Do they have something to hide too?

Everyone moving large amounts of money around has something to hide.  It's much better for the security of their clients and security of their own employees to keep things somewhat obfuscated.  I could see CoinJoin making it easier for a Madoff to cheat his investors, but as we know there's nothing preventing a another Madoff from cheating his clients using currently available financial tools to hide fiat transactions.

There may be an opportunity for someone to in the finance industry to abuse CoinJoin, but I'm not a fan of punishing the masses due to the abuses of the few.

As n0nce alluded, privacy is a human right, and legally speaking corporations have been declared to have similar rights being that they are a congregation of people conducting business as a common entity.

[DrBeer]

Hi all !
A few questions for respected forum members, and possibly developers:
1. For Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) will there be assembly or the device does not meet the technical requirements? Installing deb package didn't work...
2. Is the local copy of the blockchain a "cut" version of the blockchain? The size hints at this, but I would like to understand exactly?
3. Wallet localization. Where is she set up?  The installation package contains folders with localization, but I did not find the wallet localization settings in the settings...
4. GeoIP in the tor client - for what purposes? I can only assume - in order to "avoid" TOR nodes in some locations. How about really?
5. Plz give me your wallets from the test network - leaving transactions for testing

[BlackHatCoiner]

1. For Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) will there be assembly or the device does not meet the technical requirements? Installing deb package didn't work...

What package? Wasabi Wallet?

2. Is the local copy of the blockchain a "cut" version of the blockchain?

A local copy of the blockchain? This sounds like the blockchain, since... It's a copy? Where did you see this?

5. Plz give me your wallets from the test network - leaving transactions for testing

What are you trying to accomplish?


Are you sure you're in the correct thread?

[DrBeer]

1. For Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) will there be assembly or the device does not meet the technical requirements? Installing deb package didn't work...

What package? Wasabi Wallet?

2. Is the local copy of the blockchain a "cut" version of the blockchain?

A local copy of the blockchain? This sounds like the blockchain, since... It's a copy? Where did you see this?

5. Plz give me your wallets from the test network - leaving transactions for testing

What are you trying to accomplish?


Are you sure you're in the correct thread?

I'll start with the last question: WasabiWallet.io An open source, no-storage Bitcoin wallet for PC - is that the WasabiWallet wallet thread? All questions were asked about him!
1. What's the package? Wasabi wallet?
- Yes package for installation on RaspberryOS
2. Local copy of the blockchain? It's like a blockchain because... Is it a copy? Where did you see it?
- If in Win10, then along the path C:\Users\_yourname_\AppData\Roaming\WalletWasabi\Client\BitcoinStore\ - there are 2 folders with a copy of the blockchain for the main and test networks
3. What are you trying to achieve?
- I want to send test coins to wallets that are in the test network, check the operation of these mechanisms

[n0nce]

1. For Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) will there be assembly or the device does not meet the technical requirements? Installing deb package didn't work...

If the .deb doesn't work, you will probably need to compile it yourself (or tell us what exactly failed / what the error messages are).

2. Is the local copy of the blockchain a "cut" version of the blockchain? The size hints at this, but I would like to understand exactly?

Yes, installing Wasabi won't download the whole blockchain. It probably uses SPV by default ('light mode').

Now, Wasabi Wallet users have the option of using the built-in Bitcoin Knots full node, connecting to a different full node, or running the wallet in "light" mode.

3. Wallet localization. Where is she set up?  The installation package contains folders with localization, but I did not find the wallet localization settings in the settings...

Localization usually refers to language. It's entirely possible that you can only choose it at install time and not afterwards in settings.

2. Local copy of the blockchain? It's like a blockchain because... Is it a copy? Where did you see it?
- If in Win10, then along the path C:\Users\_yourname_\AppData\Roaming\WalletWasabi\Client\BitcoinStore\ - there are 2 folders with a copy of the blockchain for the main and test networks

This is odd. Raspberry OS is Linux. And what tells you that what's in those folders are copies of the blockchain? Are there .dat files? If those folders are not almost 400GB in size, they're not copies of the blockchain.