'Wasabigeddon' article discussion (it supposedly solves fungibility)

[n0nce]

After o_e_l_e_o brought to my attention the following article, I started reading it and would like to hear what you guys think about some statements being made in the preface of the article.
https://nopara73.medium.com/wasabigeddon-9c63de88c1a1
It is written by nopara73, Wasabi CEO, who is also a member of this forum, so he may even answer himself, which would be optimal.

The notion that Bitcoin is the most valued cryptocurrency in existence means the free market is predicting it’ll be the next reserve currency in the world.

No matter how much I love Bitcoin, isn't it a bit of a leap making this conclusion?

The most important thing one can choose to work on is Bitcoin’s fungibility.

I'd agree that Bitcoin fungibility is essential, and one thing we can do to ensure / maintain it is something like:
[Blacklist] of unreliable, 'taint proclaiming' Bitcoin services / exchanges

Refusing to give money to companies that don't accept Bitcoin's fungibility, just like we would refuse to keep going to a grocery store that doesn't let us pay with cash if the serial number on it starts with a zero or if it has traces of drugs on it. Especially if that store not only refused to do business with us, but actually confiscated such bank notes and kept them for itself.

Wasabi Wallet 2.0 will be launched two weeks from now, on June 15, 2022. It is the state-of-the-art Bitcoin fungibility solution.

That's odd. I thought Wasabi Wallet was a Bitcoin privacy solution. Has anyone here heard before that Wasabi's main goal is actually fungibility, instead? Because I haven't. In fact, the whole front page (https://wasabiwallet.io/) has no single mention of fungibility and mainly talks about privacy and surveillance.

Wasabi Wallet 2.0 is an attempt to abstract its comprehensive privacy tooling to the background, letting the users deal with other important things happening in their lives. This makes Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin: it solves its fungibility

Besides the fact that a single company honestly believing their product single-handedly fills Bitcoin's 'missing piece' is hilarious, it's also alarming. It means they might believe Bitcoin has 'missing pieces' in general that can be filled by very centralized, for-profit businesses. If that's what the state of Bitcoin actually was, I'd be the first to call it doomed. It would have no chance to survive for decades if there were business with such key roles, such that 'without them, it would fail' or something like that.

Anyhow: Does someone understand how making a privacy tool more intuitive to use, increases fungibility?
I repeat: the issue with fungibility is that some exchanges and other services act as if Bitcoin wasn't fungible. They pay other companies to tell them which coins are 'good' and which are 'bad'. These guesstimate (at best) if a coin may have passed a criminal's hands in the past and if so, flag it as blacklisted. Then the exchange / service will confiscate it. However, the crime may have happened months earlier, and the sender may just have received that coin from another exchange or another legitimate person on the internet, since it has passed hands already a lot of times. Furthermore, the coin is neither destroyed or returned to the supposed crime victim, but is thrown together with all other deposits and even sent out to customers who withdraw Bitcoin from the exchange.

Now my question is how this mess is improved by users having an easier time of using Wasabi. If anything, it has been observed in the past that sending coins from a CoinJoin or a mixer to an exchange, has a rather high chance of getting coins confiscated.


The rest of the article is irrelevant for me.
I would like to highlight that despite these big claims like 'state-of-the-art Bitcoin fungibility solution.', Wasabi unfortunately is one of the businesses that, as I mentioned above, hurts Bitcoin fungibility by allowing themselves to blacklist certain UTXOs, which in my book is the exact definition of the Bitcoin fungibility problem.

Wasabi is actually what prompted me to create and thus is also featured on: [Blacklist] of unreliable, 'taint proclaiming' Bitcoin services / exchanges.

|

Wasabi 2.0 Mixer

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Blacklists UTXOs by working with Chainalysis

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Source: https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/zksnacks-blacklisting-update/

|

If you missed it, we have a whole thread about it here:
The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs

And I created a kind of 'open letter' with 24 questions, which they replied to; discussion page about it is here:
Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread


PSA: 'Taint' is basically the opposite of 'fungibility'. Saying that one coin is not like another is what we consider calling it 'tainted', and 'non-fungible'.

[1714791316]

1714791316

[1714791316]

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[o_e_l_e_o]

As I mentioned in the other thread, although I take many issues with this article, this is what bothers me the most:

This makes Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin: it solves its fungibility, as far as English speaker, hot desktop wallet users are concerned.

This is simply a lie, and there is no debating that this is a lie. You cannot state you have solved the issue of some bitcoin being discriminated against while you are actively discriminating against some bitcoin.

Bitcoin fungibility is only an issue in the first place because centralized blockchain analysis companies have succeed in convincing a bunch of people that some coins are tainted based on completely arbitrary and provably false assumptions. For Wasabi to claim they have solved this issue, when they are complicit in the very existence of it, is laughable. They would do far more to help bitcoin fungibility by not directly paying blockchain analysis companies to label your coins as tainted in the first place.

In my mind, Wasabi and their team are rapidly moving from "hopelessly misguided" to "actively malicious".

[tadamichi]

Anyhow: Does someone understand how making a privacy tool more intuitive to use, increases fungibility?

Nah man, your analysis is already on point. And thanks for raising awareness to this issue about wasabi, as i think i first read it from your thread. There’s nothing to understand here and no excuses or justifications.

Companies should grow some courage again and maybe work in favour of their customers, instead of harming their customers again and again. It has already been shown that Bitcoin is barely used by criminals and doing so, would just leave a lot of evidence for the police forever. So what’s the point of all these measures. We don’t need blacklists or anything else, as we have law enforcement already and we don’t need private companies overreaching their responsibilities. They’re basically introducing „solutions“ that should solve some 0.1% probability scenarios, but affect 99.9% of users negatively in the process. Also when did we switch from innocent until proven guilty, to guilty until proven innocent? With all these new measures private institutions are introducing, where the customer needs to prove they’re innocent to a non-judiciary institution?

Bitcoin is already perfectly fungible, as each unit is the same as the other. The problem are private companies that start to differentiate between sats. So they’re the ones hurting the fungibility artificially. And are also violating censorship resistance. It’s just obvious and no reality-denying marketing talk will change that. Only thing we can do is stop using these services now, because it’s not really a fungibility problem. It’s a private companies overreaching their responsibilities problem and a fungibility problem only exists on their services, after introducing them themselves.

They can simply ask their customers if they want these things to be introduced, instead of guessing and pushing things down people throats and then selling it as some revolutionary solution. Things are really not that complicated.

[PrivacyG]

Thank you for yet another great thread, n0nce.  Happy to see this being discussed in the Bitcoin Discussion sub-board, although it seems like not too many on this side of the forum are interested in the issue.

I think Wasabi is slowly becoming a honeypot of some sort.  The scariest part is them using doublethought as a tactic to make us think their actions are for our well being.  To them, this is how it is.  Fungible is non-fungible.  Discriminating is fair.  Spying is the solution to privacy.

Creepy as hell if you ask me.

Making a privacy tool more intuitive to use does not make it more private and does not enhance someone's privacy in my eyes.  If anything, I have lately ran away from anything promising to be more 'intuitive' and 'convenient' because there is always a huge downside I may be missing.  See everything used in households nowadays that are 'Smart'.  I think we could say Wasabi is turning 'Smart' as well, as to me anything called that way is automatically a threat to privacy.

It is now evident that Wasabi has turned to the enemy boat and left ours.  Not only that, but they are actively hitting our boat and calling themselves the saviors.  The fact that they are calling their new blacklisting 'solution' the only way Bitcoin can stay fungible makes them the villain and there is no way anyone could tell me they are taking part in revolutionizing what Bitcoin is and providing us the only solution to something that did not even need a solution in the first place, until Blockchain Analysis companies appeared and the artificial term 'taint' was pushed forward heavily by Exchanges and, probably, Governments.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[DaveF]

More and more I think wallets that provide services beyond just being wallets should be avoided.
Not just the Wasabi mixing but with 'in app trading' or just about anything else. Because now they become more interested in protecting that which generates income instead of just being a wallet.
Which, can and will bring up conflicts of interest as they want to do "A" but to make a profit on the service they have to do "B" and the lawyers / management are worried about "C".

-Dave

[NotATether]

Eh, at least he was (mostly, see o_e_l_e_o's post) honest in the blog post. I certainly have a good understanding of that kind of "developer hell".

That still doesn't excuse the blacklisting decision though - not that Wasabi can do anything about it, the ball is firmly in zkSNACKs' park.

I'm slowly starting to believe that nopara73 is becoming more and more of "the man in the hot-seat", not because of anything he's doing though [indeed, there is *not much* he can do about this anyway], it's more like a label being put on him. He's being treated as a boogeyman of sorts.

[stompix]

Bitcoin fungibility is only an issue in the first place because centralized blockchain analysis companies have succeed in convincing a bunch of people that some coins are tainted based on completely arbitrary and provably false assumptions. For Wasabi to claim they have solved this issue, when they are complicit in the very existence of it, is laughable. They would do far more to help bitcoin fungibility by not directly paying blockchain analysis companies to label your coins as tainted in the first place.

Dollar or euro or yen bills are fungible by definition, bitcoin is also fungible, as you mentioned there is no problem here to be fixed, if somebody is refusing to acknowledge that your one dollar bill is a one dollar bill that's not the problem of the bill itself and it can't be solved unless you slap the guy till it stops seeing traces of cocaine on your bill.

If the fungibility of coins would be a problem, Wasabi is technically not "solving" it, all it does is circumvent it.
Also, I don't understand why they are mixing in this article a lot the notions of privacy and fungibility..

If I were to exchange coins with o_e_l_e_o we (probably! ) wouldn't care much about the history of those coins nor would we demand KYC from each other, thus our privacy is safe, and the fungibility is not a problem, besides we can safely use a mixer to erase the links between our coins and wallets. If you deal with CEX then your privacy is gone so what is left of it?

The rest of the article is irrelevant for me.
I would like to highlight that despite these big claims like 'state-of-the-art Bitcoin fungibility solution.', Wasabi unfortunately is one of the businesses that, as I mentioned above, hurts Bitcoin fungibility by allowing themselves to blacklist certain UTXOs, which in my book is the exact definition of the Bitcoin fungibility problem.

I liked nopara73 take on that, he basically sad that only coins coming out are nonfungible, so their coins are better than your coins, but that's a fungibility issue, it's something they are "fixing". Again, you still have your privacy, or how he put it, but you don't have the fungibility, which by all standards, it's quite useless.

[PrivacyG]

Eh, at least he was (mostly, see o_e_l_e_o's post) honest in the blog post.

I disagree.  Would at this point not trust anything they say, because their answers have been conflicting and evasive many times before and continue to be that way.  They seem so full of themselves and now seem to think of themselves as 'saviors' of Bitcoin.  BS.  And if I was nopara, as soon as I realized they wanted me kneeling to whatever the authorities were putting pressure on him with I would have backed off or fought against it.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[DooMAD]

I'm definitely late to the party on this one.  It's almost as though Wasabi is fuelled on some weird combination of hypocrisy and saviour complex.  It's hard to make sense of.  The way I'm reading it is something along the lines of:

"Government censorship is bad.  Our censorship will help us stay in the government's good books.  This will allow us to help others avoid government censorship, which is worse than our censorship."

Am I close?  Or does that sound even more stupid than what they're actually saying? 

[n0nce]

...
That still doesn't excuse the blacklisting decision though - not that Wasabi can do anything about it, the ball is firmly in zkSNACKs' park.
I'm slowly starting to believe that nopara73 is becoming more and more of "the man in the hot-seat", not because of anything he's doing though [indeed, there is *not much* he can do about this anyway], it's more like a label being put on him. He's being treated as a boogeyman of sorts.

Wait a minute; are zkSNACKS and Wasabi really such separate entities? I was under the assumption that they're one and the same thing. zkSNACKS is just the company behind Wasabi, no? And nopara73 is zkSNACKS' CEO - so I don't think it's wrong calling him the 'boogeyman', if he's literally the head of all this. Edit: It's all pretty unclear and not openly available, but I just read that since June 2022, one of their developers @HillebrandMax became CEO. It doesn't change that Wasabi seems to be nopara73's idea, and he's still heavily influencial in both Wasabi as a project and skSNACKs as a company. I wouldn't call them separate entities..

They could definitely be more transparent about the project / company structure, but https://zksnacks.com/ uses Wasabi's logo as favicon, and it says 'zkSNACKs' flagship product is a privacy oriented Bitcoin wallet, called Wasabi Wallet.'
Soo, in my eyes: zkSNACKs = Wasabi = nopara73. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Here some proof:

2015 - YEARS OF RESEARCH
Ádám Ficsór, aka nopara73, and Lucas Ontivero conducted extensive research on Joinmarket, Zerolink, Tor and Bitcoin Programming in their quest to create a privacy-oriented bitcoin wallet of their own.
[...]
2018 - zkSNACKs Ltd. IS FORMED
Ádám collaborated with Gergely Hajdú and Bálint Harmat to create zkSNACKs, a for-profit organization that sponsors the development of Wasabi Wallet, previously called Hidden Wallet.

Also, the WalletWasabi project is clearly in possession of the GitHub organization zkSNACKs, whose only member is Max Hillebrand.



In the odd case that poor nopara73's 'pet project' was ripped from him by the hands of the evil members of zkSNACKs (which he himself helped form, though), and is now the scapegoat, while in reality being against all this recent nonsense, why doesn't he distance himself from zkSNACKs, find new friends, continue working on Wasabi 1.x and spin up his own coordinator? Instead he protected them again and again...

I liked nopara73 take on that, he basically sad that only coins coming out are nonfungible, so their coins are better than your coins, but that's a fungibility issue, it's something they are "fixing". Again, you still have your privacy, or how he put it, but you don't have the fungibility, which by all standards, it's quite useless.

Good point: by creating 'fungible / private / [whatever] Wasabi coins' that are somehow different from all other coins, they are actually introducing non-fungibility and firmly plant this idea in their users' heads (which is the only location taint exists).

I'm definitely late to the party on this one.  It's almost as though Wasabi is fuelled on some weird combination of hypocrisy and saviour complex.  It's hard to make sense of.  The way I'm reading it is something along the lines of:

"Government censorship is bad.  Our censorship will help us stay in the government's good books.  This will allow us to help others avoid government censorship, which is worse than our censorship."

Am I close?  Or does that sound even more stupid than what they're actually saying? 

Thanks for chiming in! I always appreciate someone joining into a topic and giving their take / understanding - no matter if late or not; especially since this article left me a bit puzzled. But yes, you put it very nicely. That's exactly how it sounds like... The issue is that they don't achieve this goal, due to their blacklist not matching with governments' or exchanges' blacklists; potentially giving you coins that are only 'clean' in Wasabi's eyes, but not in everyone else's. That's one of the issues of the whole taint concept itself; that there is no central, universally accepted database, auditable and accessible by everyone.

[franky1]

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

[goldkingcoiner]

As I mentioned in the other thread, although I take many issues with this article, this is what bothers me the most:

This makes Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin: it solves its fungibility, as far as English speaker, hot desktop wallet users are concerned.

[/b]
This is simply a lie, and there is no debating that this is a lie.

In my mind, Wasabi and their team are rapidly moving from "hopelessly misguided" to "actively malicious".

Wow. Now thats what I call an ego. "Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin". Even for marketing PR thats a bit too rich for my taste. Who do wasabists think they are? First they claim to filter out the "shady" transactions now they are turning their wallet into the shitcoin version of wallets. All hype, hyperbole and hyperego.

I was not impressed by wasabi wallet since the day I found out about it. It had way too much hyped-up marketing, especially on Bitcointalk. When something goes from barely noticeable to on every second page, thats when I know its a desperate marketing tactic.

Wasabi wallet is trying to undermine everything Bitcoin stands for as if the SEC were paying them personally. Im not buying into their BS.

[PrivacyG]

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

Mind explaining how by mixing my fully legitimate coins I am actually laundering my money?  I thought laundering was legitimizing dirty money by making it appear clean.  Does using Chip Mixer and Coin Join for the coins I purchased using my legally earned Fiat make me a criminal?  What dirty money am I washing, or am I getting the definition of 'laundering' wrong?

I think we need to make a clear, bold border line between laundering and the will of having privacy.  My Bitcoins have a history attached to them that I do not want this entire forum to see or a Blockchain Analysis company to process.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[tadamichi]

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

Mind explaining how by mixing my fully legitimate coins I am actually laundering my money?  I thought laundering was legitimizing dirty money by making it appear clean.  Does using Chip Mixer and Coin Join for the coins I purchased using my legally earned Fiat make me a criminal?  What dirty money am I washing, or am I getting the definition of 'laundering' wrong?

I think we need to make a clear, bold border line between laundering and the will of having privacy.  My Bitcoins have a history attached to them that I do not want this entire forum to see or a Blockchain Analysis company to process.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

Let’s also add that some people that were part of introducing AML legislations are money launderers or law breakers themselves. Just because justice systems worldwide operate under double standards, doesn’t mean that high tier individuals have clean records, even when they go unpunished. They demand the average citizen to become completely transparent with every single thing they do in their life, but can’t live up to it themselves.

People should come back to their senses again and not comply with every privacy violating legislation there is. We should ask ourselves first, who is actually demanding all this information about us? We’re the ones keeping the world running, not them. If they’re cheating and keeping their activity opaque, we should for sure not give these people all of our information on a golden plate. They’re not our friends and they also don’t introduce these measures to protect us from anything. If so, they failed hard and these legislations don’t achieve anything. Except damaging the people they’re trying to protect. Too many people still fall for false senses of security.

[franky1]

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

Mind explaining how by mixing my fully legitimate coins I am actually laundering my money?

its not about YOU being the criminal. its about you using a mixing service with criminals where your LEGIT coins are passed to the criminal. thus indirectly linking you to a crime.

its not about you having performed a crime before the mixing. its about you using a tool criminals use that then puts you on the same radar of suspicion as a criminal even if your coins were clean.
you can only then explain and prove your legitimate use.. AFTER being suspected.

meaning you caught yourself up in a suspected investigation of possible crime for doing things that are suspicious
many innocent people get called into police stations and investigated and interviewed and then let go/set free once you proved your innocence. but here is the think. your trapping yourself into being flagged up and "watched" by doing suspicious things(mixing)



same as "would you mind explaining why instead of just walking down the road, you are instead looking around seeing who might be looking at you."
is it a crime. not really. but you are acting very suspicious

yep huding behind bushes, coverig your face, looking out for CCTV camera's and sneaking passed via their blind spots. 'all for privacy', ends up getting you noticed more

its not a "crime" but the very act of doing things criminals also do, makes you flag up as suspicious, which triggers KYC (the thing you were trying to avoid)

again these flags are not to say your guilty, but just to flag a suspicion flag that you are using the tools of the trade a criminal uses

EG buying a large butchers knife. some people flag that as suspicious in a knife crime region

EG in america. some say that owning a gun is a "human right" and part of constitution. but in some places in america buying a gun in a region where there are no rifle ranges, hunting lodges and no gun sports for 100 miles. can be seen as suspicious

so by trying to hide "for privacy" actually becomes a question of "what are you trying to hide"
this is not about you being a terrorist. its not a ATL (anti-terror-law) policy its a AML anti-money-laundering policy
no one would be outright upfront calling you a criminal, instead they are interested in flagging anyone using tools that can cause suspicion of possible criminal sourced funds..

oh and one other thing.
mixers dont mix your privacy coins with some fresh mint clean coin..
most of the time legit people dont care about mixing so the majority of coins in a mixer are going to be privacy nuts and criminals. so in many cases you hand over your legit coin but just want privacy. and you end up with sone other criminals coins.

in the end no matter what your story is or your reasons.. your still going to get flagged and investigated, even if the mixed coins were from another legit but 'privacy nut' guy

[n0nce]

oh and one other thing.
mixers dont mix your privacy coins with some fresh mint clean coin..
most of the time legit people dont care about mixing so the majority of coins in a mixer are going to be privacy nuts and criminals. so in many cases you hand over your legit coin but just want privacy. and you end up with sone other criminals coins.

in the end no matter what your story is or your reasons.. your still going to get flagged and investigated, even if the mixed coins were from another legit but 'privacy nut' guy

I'm not sure you understood the purpose of mixing right. It's not about 'exchanging coins for clean coins' but about breaking the link between your various transactions.
If I'm getting a 'criminal's coins by mixing, that's fine for me, since I achieve my goal of unlinking a UTXO from my other UTXOs or payments it may be linked to.

Imagine I have a 0.1BTC UTXO in a wallet, for example earned through mining. Since Bitcoin is pseudonymous, the address and the UTXO are not tied to any identity of mine. I'm fine.

Then I spend 0.04BTC, roughly $1000, on a laptop that I buy in the trading section of this forum. Whatever I am going to do next with the other 0.06BTC, the seller will be able to see, since they can see which UTXO I used to send the payment and can easily trace where the change went.
Then they can monitor the change address and find out what other things I buy or businesses I use (e.g. if 0.03BTC goes to Coinbase). If they wanted to deanonymize me, they could even come up with a reason to demand my real name from Coinbase by having them check whose account that 0.03BTC payment was credited.

Instead, if I had mixed the 0.06BTC change, I would get back roughly 0.06BTC, but with a different history, and no link to the original 0.1BTC, and no link to the 0.04BTC payment to the Bitcointalk laptop seller.

I also don't care if you don't understand what privacy means, why it's important and to some people even necessary for survival. That's a different topic and there's enough information online to read yourself; no need to call people 'privacy nut guys' because they understood privacy and deemed it important for themselves.

[franky1]

I'm not sure you understood the purpose of mixing right. It's not about 'exchanging coins for clean coins' but about breaking the link between your various transactions.

im not sure you understand the purpose of mixing from the prospective of services that have to by regulation have policy to spot possible suspicious things, coin movements that lean towards the suspicious

i understand why or how YOU may use a mixer.
i understand why or how YOU may want a mixer to be seen.

i understand that you may in your mind have morals, ethics and no desire of criminal act.
but being psychic is not a tool exchanges have to know your mind. they can only see what they see.
and if they can only see someone using a tool that is used by criminals. it then makes legitimate people using same said tools linked to the same suspicious acts they have to monitor

EG
from your prospective. you might be, for instance a beef butcher. you have no malice in your heart to harm another human. no intent to stab or murder anyone.. but if you went to a retailer each month buying a few large knifes regularly and there was a lil blood on your jacket from slaughtering a cow..
.. expect them to not know you are a butcher. and instead suspect you might be a serial killer and rather being safe than sorry. investigate you. (whether you know it or not)

same with guns. some americans dont want to kill. they just want their "constitutional right" to open carry.
but yea walking around a town waving a gun around . in your view might feel like its your "right" but to others may be seen as you scaring other pedestrians and passers by, and suspect of threatening behaviour.

yep walk around a town with a gun. even if you have not killed anyone.. expect to have a witness call the cops and then have a cop car approach you asking what are you upto. where they then ask who you are and where you are going and what is your intent and purpose of having the gun. .. even if its your "constitutional right"

[tadamichi]

its not about YOU being the criminal. its about you using a mixing service with criminals where your LEGIT coins are passed to the criminal. thus indirectly linking you to a crime.

its not about you having performed a crime before the mixing. its about you using a tool criminals use that then puts you on the same radar of suspicion as a criminal even if your coins were clean.

Theres not any single proof that you received coins that have been used in a crime. Your coins get frozen automatically on some services for just having used a mixer. General suspicion without any evidence is discrimination. Its not anyones business which privacy services youre using on your own money, if theres not a single evidence beforehand that you have been part of a single crime.

Also i dont think you understand how criminals operate or which tools theyre using, then every single tool in the world is now a tool criminals use. They also dont need mixers to do money laundering, and these ridiculous regulations wont prevent any crime from happening or will even break down on real money launderers.

you can only then explain and prove your legitimate use.. AFTER being suspected.

Bs, many of these coins get stolen afterwards or simply frozen. Its completely dependent on the arbitrariness of a non-judiciary entity.

meaning you caught yourself up in a suspected investigation of possible crime for doing things that are suspicious
many innocent people get called into police stations and investigated and interviewed and then let go/set free once you proved your innocence. but here is the think. your trapping yourself into being flagged up and "watched" by doing suspicious things(mixing)

Bs again. The police can investigate something, but its still up to the justice system to decide. They will need evidence to prove you guilty. With how these services are handling it, you need proof for being innocent, which is completely backwards and unjust. Creating an environment of complete arbitrariness for not criminal users.

same as "would you mind explaining why instead of just walking down the road, you are instead looking around seeing who might be looking at you."
is it a crime. not really. but you are acting very suspicious

yep huding behind bushes, coverig your face, looking out for CCTV camera's and sneaking passed via their blind spots. 'all for privacy', ends up getting you noticed more

its not a "crime" but the very act of doing things criminals also do, makes you flag up as suspicious, which triggers KYC (the thing you were trying to avoid)

Its not what criminals do. If you think you can catch criminals by the way theyre walking on the street, you might have watched too many bad movies.

again these flags are not to say your guilty, but just to flag a suspicion flag that you are using the tools of the trade a criminal uses

They do, they say youre guilty until proven otherwise. If you dont understand why this is important, you would have probably also cheered when people hunted "witches" during the dark ages.

oh and one other thing.
mixers dont mix your privacy coins with some fresh mint clean coin..
most of the time legit people dont care about mixing so the majority of coins in a mixer are going to be privacy nuts and criminals. so in many cases you hand over your legit coin but just want privacy. and you end up with sone other criminals coins.

Any proof on how many criminals use mixers? It also doesnt matter how many use it, because no AML legislation will reduce Money laundering crimes. They will just move somwhere else and now only legit people are completely robbed of their privacy forever for no reason.

[DooMAD]

mixing=laundering
            laundering=AML flag
                              AML flag= KYC

nothing more needs to be said

Mind explaining how by mixing my fully legitimate coins I am actually laundering my money?  I thought laundering was legitimizing dirty money by making it appear clean.  Does using Chip Mixer and Coin Join for the coins I purchased using my legally earned Fiat make me a criminal?  What dirty money am I washing, or am I getting the definition of 'laundering' wrong?

I think we need to make a clear, bold border line between laundering and the will of having privacy.  My Bitcoins have a history attached to them that I do not want this entire forum to see or a Blockchain Analysis company to process.

There are always going to be stark differences of opinion on this matter.  I choose to draw solace from believing that anyone who peddles anti-privacy rhetoric is taking the same side as the mainstream media, billionaires with vested interests and other such enemies of Bitcoin.  I'm glad I'm not one of those people.  Knowingly or unknowingly, people who oppose mixing are one of "them" and not one of us.  They're welcome to their wrong opinions.

[franky1]

..... [misses the point]...........

people that want privacy. are not looking to clear their coins so that if questioned they can say "you have no proof"
people that want privacy. are not looking to clear their coins that if caught. they can after the headaches of being question they can be released..

what they actually want is to be left alone from the start.. where nothing is 'about to happen' where they have to worry about if they being watched, or worrying will they be stopped or will they be questioned..  because what they want is situations where no one is watching them to even get to a stage of even questioning them

but if you are doing things that look suspicious.. you will get watched. thus defeating your goal

its like: not wanting to get seen on a street.. by making yourself obvious by jumping behind cars or running behind bushes. is the opposite of trying to remain private and unnoticed

while you are trying to find 'proof' and 'info' and 'innocence or guilt'... someone that wants privacy wants to not even reach the point of even being questioned or asked to provide info or attend a court to be told they are innocent after a lengthy court process of multiple questions and invasions of private life..

you say 'its upto the judicial system"
seriously. take 5 steps back. a privacy person does not want to even have a cop approach them asking for ID, let alone then getting a court order to attend a court, nor then have to explain self to a judge to prove innocence.

the true privacy guys want to be so far below the radar no one spots them in the first place to even start the snowball rolling of which YOU speak.

the issue is that MIXERS whether its a criminal using it or a legit person. just the fact of using one. is a red flag. that act of using a mixer (FOR ANY REASON LEGIT OR NOT) will start getting people watching your account. watching your coin movements.
so you already lost the privacy game just for using mixers

satoshi did not use mixers.. no one found him
no one stole his coins
i dont use mixers. no one knows me . ive never had my coins questioned.
many users that dont use mixers dont have the same headaches of those that do

but those that do use mixers are finding that their accounts are being put under investigations and demanding KYC and asking to explain source of funding and why they used a mixer.

if you dont want people questioning your life. then dont raise a red flag.

this very topic is a mixers attempt to try its best to separate itself from criminal blacklists because it found itself as a red flag.

if you want to pretend that mixers dont cause flags. then this topic would not exist where wasabi would not be trying to survive against regulation that is making its service less acceptable