On another note, it does seem that the community constantly and repeatedly calling out their censorship is having a significant affect on Wasabi's volume:
https://www.bitcoinkpis.com/privacyFrom 900 BTC a week 2 months ago, has now steadily fallen down to a couple of hundred BTC a week.
That's very interesting! Neither JoinMarket, nor Samourai had such a drop. I'm wondering however if maybe the tool is only picking up Wasabi 1.x CoinJoins?
You don't need an IP address to spy on someone. And Wasabi have already clearly stated that they are/will be paying blockchain analysis companies to analyze your UTXOs and tell them the history of each and every one of them. If that's not spying then I don't know what is.
Fact is they are not blocking anything now, and they never said what is this mysterious analytics company.
Until you show me some proof that someone was blocked and blacklisted for using Wasabi I will consider this to be speculation, and I will be the first to support you.
I will not throw any stones in advance, and I criticized some of Wasabi changes in my review.
Only because we don't know of any cases in which it has already happened doesn't make it any better, for me.
By announcing their blacklist, they are giving themselves the ability to do it whenever they want, and defended that stance over and over, such as in the 24 questions for which I created this thread. They stand by their decision; it's a bit like waiting for a kid who announced a school shooting to actually do it instead of taking it seriously, warning everyone and implementing security measures at that school or moving your children to a different school - analogously, move to a different wallet / privacy solution.
The announcement and answers like these should be 'proof' enough that they have a very different understanding of Bitcoin's future, no? The below statement confirms sufficiently that they believe as long as blacklisting and censoring doesn't come from a government, it shouldn't be called censorship and that it just falls under the category of 'freedom'.
16. We believe that starting censoring some users opens the door to censoring anybody and everybody. Would you agree with this?
Again: Bitcoin is either censorship resistant, or it isn't. You cannot pick and choose who it is censorship resistant for. If you, like Wasabi, start censoring some users, then you open the door to censoring anybody and everybody
Luckily we are not making changes to Bitcoin protocol but to our very own server. Every Bitcoin node has the right to choose which transactions it includes in its mempool or relays. Every node has blacklists for nodes that behave badly for one reason or another. ZkSNACKs coordinator has always banned the coins of misbehaving users, as that’s part of the DoS protection. None of these are censorship, as only a government can do such a thing. Everything else is personal preference under the freedom of association.
7. Your website still says:
The aim of bitcoin is to be a decentralized digital currency, but if all users are eventually required to consult centralized blacklists before accepting bitcoin, then its decentralization will be destroyed.
This stands in direct contrast to your blacklisting update. Has your opinion on blacklists changed or how is this view compatible with providing a Bitcoin anonymity service that only allows certain UTXOs to use it?
Hopefully all users, wallets and services won't have to “consult a centralized blacklist before accepting bitcoin”. But it’s their choice if they want to discriminate against a certain coin, user or service. That’s part of the freedom of association if it's their decision. If this would be mandated by authority, it would be bad. But that’s not the case in our blacklisting, like I explained in the first answer.
We are implementing our own blacklist, as we dont care to become martyrs by serving thieves. We want to keep building the best privacy tools for bitcoiners to take advantage of. Instead of social justice warrioring on behalf of politicians, shitcoiners and other thieves, people should be grateful for the tools that zkSNACKs has built and take advantage of the situation by capturing the market. Instead of all the whining we’re hearing.
Of course, everyone is free to do business with whomever they want, but if I have good money, I can indeed spend it everywhere and get it anywhere. If in Bitcoin, it will become normal practice to
spy (I will get to this later) on your customers before they can do business with you, Bitcoin loses its main value proposition (usability as money, anywhere, anytime, anyone). So my answer would be something like: sure, you're free to do that; you're also free to destroy other projects that are important for the world, or e.g. deliberately accelerate climate change by leaving your car running all day and night. Or just buying a lot of gasoline every day and burning it for fun. You are free to do so - but I don't think you should do it if you care about what you're harming (Bitcoin / environment).
In most countries, you are also
free to just kill your pets with a pocket knife or even more cruel ways without punishment; this
freedom is not really a good reason to actually do it in my opinion.
Regarding the
spying: Sure, they might not collect IP addresses, fingerprints or other PII and not link it to UTXOs; they might not even link UTXOs together and do everything with zero-knowledge cryptography. However, let's think about fiat world:
Imagine you enter my restaurant and before I decide if you're allowed to get food, I am going to call the central bank and pass them the serial numbers of your bank notes. If they say they were used in a crime, I will send you back home as long as you don't bring me new bank notes.
Note how (1) You would most certainly call this a form of spying (into what I do with my money; what I may have done with it in the past and from whom I may have received it), and (2) you can just come back with other bank notes and sit down. How does this make sense? I thought they don't want to do business with criminals. But if the criminals come back with 'non-tainted' UTXOs, they will do business with them? Or is your account suspended when you submit one 'criminal tainted' UTXO? But there are no accounts.. So are they going to block your IP? No, they don't track IPs...
(3) You will not be prosecuted, even though apparently being an official criminal, and (4) the money is not returned to the legitimate owner from whom you have supposedly officially stolen it.
So either they track, to make sure not to do business with criminals or even pedophiles (more later), or they genuinely don't track and don't know anything about their users, which means after someone sends one of their 'tainted pedo UTXOs' and they got denied, they can just swap them with someone else or try other UTXOs and Wasabi will accept them; effectively still having made business with the pedophile.
1. Who is your target audience / target user demographic? Due to the recent changes, we must assume it's people who are interested in mixing coins, while at the same time not having a problem with the mixer discriminating between UTXOs. Mixing with a blacklist seems like an oxymoron to us and we struggle to see the use case.
Answer: Our target audience is Bitcoiners.
[...]
We are exercising our right as a company to choose not to serve those people who could get us in trouble and the ones whom we wouldn’t want to support for ethical reasons. This includes known thieves like politicians.
Ostracization is, in our opinion, a libertarian way to react to the problems that have occured because of these high profile users. We are still not collecting data about our users nor are we revealing anything new to chain analysis companies. The blacklisting has no effect on users' privacy. If you knew a pedophile/murderer was eating at your restaurant, would you serve him? Especially if serving him gets you in trouble? Basically, are you willing to sacrifice yourself and your restaurant for him?
Their very first answer states that as restaurant owners, they wouldn't want to serve a pedophile. Besides the fact that this argument is borderline an 'argumentum ad passiones' (appeal to emotion) and I'd obviously hate doing business with anyone who has such thoughts and ideas, here's a newsflash: pedophiles are dining at restaurants and shopping in malls every single day, since they have well-working money (cash) that is
untraceable not traced to e.g. their purchases of whatever fucked up media they might be buying online.
Would you deem it a sensible idea to call
everyone's bank and ask if they have had suspicious activity, such as something hinting at them buying fucked up media online, before allowing them to eat at your restaurant? Or if the money has merely
passed hands of a known pedophile? I don't think people will be excited being suspected of doing such atrocities just because they wanted to have dinner.
The reason blacklisting is wrong is a similar reason mass surveillance is wrong. It's not a new debate. You can't just label everyone guilty until proven wrong.
