'Wasabigeddon' article discussion (it supposedly solves fungibility)

[nullius]

Coin taint and blacklisting are what break Bitcoin’s fungibility.  BTC is an NFT:  A non-fungible token, due to coin taint and blacklisting.  The subset of Bitcoiners who refuse to acknowledge this are either living in a Reality Distortion Field, or still under the influence of the blockchain transparency fetishization with which Mike Hearn, et al. poisoned Bitcoin early on.  I identify a lack of fungibility as the biggest long-term economic threat to Bitcoin.

Fungibility is both necessary and sufficient for privacy—and vice versa.  Attaining one gives the other; neither can be attained without the other.  Some people get this; e.g., in a post from 2013 titled, “Re: Coin Validation misunderstands fungibility and could destroy bitcoin”:

Now in an ideal world how it is supposed to work is the fungibility/anonymity is secure like zerocoin.

Dr. Back, an authentic Cypherpunk, has also given speeches on why fungibility needs to be assured cryptographically.^*  (Transcript of Adam Back on fungibility and privacy.)

Maths, not law.  When coins are anonymous and indistinguishable, then Bitcoin is no longer an NFT.

(* Notable:  Under the heading, “Fungibility? Why would I care?”, ChipMixer’s FAQ quotes from and links to the above-linked transcript.  Their understanding of these issues speaks well of them.)

Wasabi has embraced coin taint and coin blacklisting based on anti-privacy surveillance:  The exact things which destroy BTC fungibility, which thus threaten Bitcoin’s long-term economic viability.  And now, nopara73 claims that Wasabi restores Bitcoin’s fungibility?  That is so audacious a lie, I am mulling whether it’s time to start with the scam tags.

Wasabi also uses inferior technology.  CoinJoin was clever when it was invented; but CJ and any type of coin-mixing scheme have since been made obsolete by advances in the field of cryptography.  I wish not hereby to diverge into a tangent about that; I am intending to raise it elsewhere, as I prepare for my own campaign to get Bitcoin some fungibility.  Suffice it must for now benevolently to scare BTC holders where it hurts:  Vitalik understands fungibility.  While you all aren’t looking, while you are playing nonsense games with coin-mixing schemes, Ethereum has more or less quietly been building up the infrastructure for optimal fungibility (= privacy).  And so has Solana—a prospect which should properly frighten both BTC holders and ETH holders!

Wasabi’s attempt to abuse the fungibility issue for their marketing of a coin-taint service is a bald-faced swindle.

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

Privacy = fungibility.  Fungibility = privacy.  See above.  Dr. Back explained it well in his 2014 talk on the subject.

I repeat: the issue with fungibility is that some exchanges and other services act as if Bitcoin wasn't fungible.

The reality is that Bitcoin isn’t fungible.  It is not fungible, because exchanges and other services (including Wasabi!) can do this.  Although I applaud your efforts to encourage a boycott of these anti-fungibility exchanges and services, ultimately, the only way to stop them is to assure that they cannot do what they are doing.

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'.

Strongly agreed.  But the problem cannot be fixed, if people can say that one coin is not like another.

Cypherpunks write code.  Trust the maths.  Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent.  Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking:  You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.

A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand....  It can be only the last defence of those who have no other weapons.

[tadamichi]

[...]

I get what youre trying to say franky, all im saying is that these services have no business flagging any privacy measure as suspicious in the first place, when they have no proof for anything beforehand. But im also aware this wont ever change in practice by itself.

Strongly agreed.  But the problem cannot be fixed, if people can say that one coin is not like another.

Cypherpunks write code.  Trust the maths.  Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent.  Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking:  You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.

Agree. We still need some preaching tho, to get more people aware and stop using these services, but its more important to have working solutions. Genuine question: lets assume Bitcoin had perfect privacy, would it be possible that these services would introduce taint trough whitelisting?

[nullius]

Genuine question: lets assume Bitcoin had perfect privacy, would it be possible that these services would introduce taint trough whitelisting?

An excellent question.  Dr. Back alluded to identity management in the above-quoted post, where he essentially referred to Zerocoin as how things would work in an “ideal world”.  I suggest reading that old 2013 discussion at length, to avoid retreading talk about problems that remain unsolved after nine years.  People just keep rediscovering the same old problems, while forgetting what has already been long known about potential solutions.

Looking far beyond that old discussion:  It terrifies me that as an ultimate form of whitelisting, it is entirely possible to design an all-KYC, fully permissioned blockchain system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to avoid ever publicly revealing any transactional information whatsoever.  Worse:  Such a system could use zero-knowledge proofs to enforce identity-based permissions in transactions that are fully anonymous between counterparties.  That sounds like a contradiction only to those who don’t understand what zero-knowledge proofs can achieve.  Worst:  There are projects already working on building such systems.

From the perspective of blockchain analytics, such a system would have privacy superior to any Bitcoin mixer system, superior to Monero, and infinitely superior to Wasabi:  The blockchain is totally opaque, with theoretically optimal privacy.  But it would obviously be terrible for privacy in a meaningful sense—and it would be terrible for freedom.  Thinking aloud here, I know that it is possible with today’s technology to construct such a system so that among other interesting features, governments (or banks) could switch off a dissident’s ability to use money.  Now, try obtaining food and shelter when you cannot use money!  The way that he has embraced taint tracing and coin blacklisting, I presume that nopara73 would find this system acceptable.


I am pessimistic about the future.  Such things cannot be fought by “educating the public”:  The majority of people in any society are always stupid, apathetic, and myopic.  And please make no mistake about what I said:  People problems cannot be solved solely by technological solutions.  “Cypherpunks write code” is, in my own opinion, a call to create accomplished facts:  Fait accompli is the most persuasive political argument in the world.

Once upon a time, the sudden existence of PGP derailed then-Senator Joe Biden’s anti-encryption bill.  By the same token (so to speak), Satoshi Nakamoto created something that no modern government would have allowed to exist:  A totally permissionless, uncontrollable, unfreezable, irrevocable, unstoppable new form of money.  “Cypherpunks write code.”  Out of nowhere, this new thing just suddenly existed.  Thirteen years later, those who wish for a cashless dystopia are struggling to put the genie back in the bottle.  Such is the power of accomplished facts!

Alas, Bitcoin also created a transparent global ledger as an accomplished fact.  In the essential sense of permissionlessness, Bitcoin gave us new freedom—but ever since then, anyone who wants privacy has been struggling against accomplished facts.  And I must emphasize this:  Bitcoin has a transparent global ledger, only because Satoshi did not know any other way to create a decentralized system.  He was caught on the horns of a dilemma between DigiCash, a centralized system with theoretically optimal privacy (statistical hiding), and the decentralized, un-private system that he actually made.  He tried to find another way.

OP of a thread in 2010:

As some might have noticed, one of the things that bugs me about bitcoin is that the entire history of transactions is completely public.

Satoshi’s reply:

This is a very interesting topic.  If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible. [...]

It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.

The existence of Bitcoin thereafter motivated a new flurry of cryptographic research.  The initial breakthroughs came in 2013–2014; that generated a brief flurry of interest in the Bitcoin community, including from several prominent Bitcoin Core developers.  Thereafter, the state of the art has rapidly advanced.  Most Bitcoiners today are unfamiliar with this field; but I have followed it closely since 2013.  Only now, as of 2022, I am ready to declare the technology mature for general usage.  Among other criteria:  We now have zero-knowledge privacy systems with no trusted setup—the big breakthrough for that came in 2019, and needed another few years of research and development to reach production quality.

Upon the foregoing, tadamichi, I may properly answer your question:  In Bitcoin, we currently have a system where, as a practical matter, exchanges and other services cannot use whitelists to enforce the purpose of taint tracing.  It would hurt their businesses too much.  That is an accomplished fact.  We have the advantage, but we must defend it.

If Bitcoin were overthrown in the market by a system that is designed from scratch with built-in KYC whitelisting, and which advertises better “privacy” due to an opaque blockchain, then all coins would be under such controls, and a service would suffer no disadvantages by simply going along with the system.  To fight such a possibility, Bitcoin needs to get ahead of events and become permissioness, decentralized money with strong privacy and perfect fungibility.


Bitcoin is freedom.  There is an old proverb that free speech belongs to those who own a printing press.  How much worse is a system in which the financial system can be used to starve anyone deemed undesirable, simply by denying the use of money?  That’s the system that we have today with banks, payment cards, Paypal, and other entities that are notorious for enforcing financial censorship even to prohibit legal expressions—anything from expressions deemed too sexy, to expressions deemed politically incorrect.  Now, I shudder when I learn about how China already has a totally cashless financial system—and some European countries are moving fast in the same direction.  It is a part of a design for the most inescapable tyranny that has ever been conceived to the human mind.

In this aspect, Bitcoin partially, imperfectly restores the default status of the majority of financial transactions throughout all history, until very recently:  Permissionless.  Old-fashioned cash transactions were permissionless—and they were also untraceable.  A Bitcoin upgrade with theoretically optimal zero-knowledge privacy and fungibility, i.e. a new Zerocoin, would restore what we had for millennia until, starting less than a half-century ago, new technologies began to allow for the permissioning and tracing of financial transactions en masse.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Wait a minute; are zkSNACKS and Wasabi really such separate entities? I was under the assumption that they're one and the same thing.

You are correct. zkSNACKs pays for Wasabi development through fees it collects from the coordinator (well, whatever is left over after they fund blockchain analysis companies, of course).

Who do wasabists think they are?

It is quite clear from their blog posts, interviews, social media, etc., that they see themselves as second only to Satoshi in importance when it comes to bitcoin. Without them, bitcoin would fail.

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

You obviously aren't, but mixers are one of the things franky1 hates, along with Lightning, Core, segwit, privacy in general, and a bunch of other stuff, so no amount of logical arguments will change his mind. Everyone arguing with him here is wasting their time and helping him achieve his goal of derailing this thread in to another one filled with his excessive rants.

Let's try to stay on topic here guys.

Upon the foregoing, tadamichi, I may properly answer your question:  In Bitcoin, we currently have a system where, as a practical matter, exchanges and other services cannot use whitelists to enforce the purpose of taint tracing.  It would hurt their businesses too much.  That is an accomplished fact.

I would note that there have been (so far) unsuccessful efforts to try. For example, AOPP was proposed as a solution for centralized exchanges to whitelist users' addresses (i.e. apply KYC to external wallets), and only allow deposits or withdrawals to or from these addresses. It was supported by a bunch of projects and wallets, some of which I really hoped would know better. It was only after community backlash that they all dropped their support and AOPP seems to have a hit a dead end. So while I agree that educating the bulk of users will not and can not solve many issues, if there had been no education on the AOPP issue then it would have proceeded unopposed and would end up in widespread use.

[franky1]

[...]

I get what youre trying to say franky, all im saying is that these services have no business flagging any privacy measure as suspicious in the first place, when they have no proof for anything beforehand. But im also aware this wont ever change in practice by itself.

regulations are not about tracking after crime.
its about prevention of crime. or prevention of services facilitating a possible crime

sooo actually.. due to regulation. it is the job of a exchange to flag any privacy measure as suspicious.
because they have to, repeat HAVE TO submit suspicious activity reports.

i understand your philosophy of 'dont look at me unless a crime has been committed first and you have found the proof of the crime first. and IF there is linkage of me to the crime in this order of events, only then can you look at me '

but the reality is the question 'how are they to find proof, unless they are looking for something first' (prevention)

take other REALITY stuff(stuff that wont change in practice)
you dont have to get in trouble for instance in a murder, simply by not being the murderer. there are actual laws where you have done a criminal act by helping/facilitating a murder. (aid and abet a criminal)
this is why in reality. people do check who their friends are and are suspicious of their friends who act shifty, immoral, unethical before a crime has been committed, and shy away from these types of "friends"
(well moral people do)
EG if you have a daughter. and a neighbour who has not yet touched your daughter, but just looks at her while licking his lips. would you let your daughter near him? would you invite him over to babysit her simply because you have not witnessed him rape a girl yet?.. no, didnt think so

EG if you knew a friend was shifty, and doing suspicious things. and one day he hands you a box and says. 'dont look into the box, just deliver it to this address' smart moral people no matter how friendly they are, would refuse to get involved. even if they dont know whats in the box or if their friend is actually a person that has already committed, or about to commit a crime. they just dont want to be involved in the obvious risk

EG imagine there was a murder threat or a terror bomb threat. having the naive mindset of 'yea wait for the death/destruction, just let it happen, dont get involved dont prevent it dont care about it..  and then and only then after the event investigate to find the suspect" is not how moral real world people that want to keep people safe think. moral people want to prevent crime, prevent death, keep themselves and others safe. BEFORE the harm is done.
moral people want to prevent hackers/thieves from stealing.. not wait for a theft and then rely on a court system to punish.

it has nothing to do with having proof that a crime was actually committed first. EG seeing actual taint from a known darkweb criminal site that deals with drugs, porn, weapons, terror.

its about the RISK that the service might end up if they didnt do checks.. be facilitating a criminal presently or in the future! so they need to protect themselves by policing themselves and their users before they become facilitators of crime (and that is never going to change in practice or reality, ever)

imagine it like a point score thing. where users get ranked on suspicion

say i never use a mixer and my coins are fresh coins minted from mining from 10 years ago
my score would be literally 0 suspicion rated

imagine someone else that was using mixers and exchanging not to fiat, but to monero. their score would be near 100

and a little hint to certain people.. it is possible to see tx's that are 'locks' to altnets/sidenets/sidechains. and these too do earn 'suspicion points'(sorry but its true)
(sidenets and altnets that have known privacy tools like confidential transactions, rate as higher suspicion rank)

this is why fully compliant regulated exchanges simply dont trade in monero. some avoid using pegged coins of sidenets/altnets that are promoted as 'privacy' services

for instance coinbase avoids monero and guess what. although coinbase is a sister company of blockstream(liquid/LN) coinbase even avoids using these side/altnets(funny right!)
yep they dont even use their own sister companies designed "privacy" networks for their users..
..because they comply to regulations due to wanting to facilitate fiat exchanging legally, without risk

thus dont want the raised risk of their exchange linked to facilitating a possible future crime

point is. the more private you try to be by using the same tools criminals would use, the more suspicion flag points you earn. and the less you get to fly under the radar, and the more hassle you will have when trying to exit to fiat. due to the regulations of fiat jurisdiction.

and if you are an wallet/service that does use privacy services, then other services raise your suspicion rating.
and if you are an exchange that allows such suspicions services the exchange gets its own suspicious rating that make regulators, sec, and even their own business bank account bank company keeps a closer eye on the exchange.

reality hurts, but if you can understand reality and not the hopes and dreams of personal wish. then you can understand the realities of the world better.

..
i have no problem with people wanting to be private.
i keep my personal information private, i even dont involve my homelife or work life stuff when on this forum.
(i have nothing to hide, so yea i mention that im british and i like to travel, but i dont say where i live or where i travel at the time of being in those places)
 i dont pander to companies or elitists by becoming friends and revealing stuff. on this forum my thoughts are my own and not advertisements of business/services/altnets.

but i am seeing alot of so called 'privacy' guys reveal too much about their personal life, affiliations and loyalties. and these privacy guys are not actually acting like they want privacy, but new idea's how to brutilise bitcoins audit/monetary policy for their own selfish loyalties/affiliations, pretending that its 'for the good of the people' when reality is it actually harms people.

yep promoting that everyone should use mixers is promoting that everyone should earn some suspicion points, all so that these 'privacy' advocates can than do shady crap and abuse good people, by facilitating criminals in getting good clean coins, whilst handing off the dirty coin to good people.
same with altnets.
these certain "privacy people" (they know who they are) want to brutilise bitcoin in multiple ways. and tell good people in their billlions that their value is no good on the bitcoin network, by saying they need to mix, lock and swap on altnets. while then trying to break bitcoins audit/monetary policy, and simple daily use functionality. which then breaks bitcoins function as 'digital cash for the unbanked', just for their own selfish desires.

i just find it strange that these 'privacy advocates' say billions of good people should avoid bitcoin. but then want bitcoin to facilitate suspicious tools and be used by shady people freely.

i got no problem with idiot/shady people playing around on altnets doing their secret crap. but just dont try forcing good people into your schemes, with fake promises, bad security, value risk and shady crap that can affect good people negatively.
and stop trying to break bitcoin by pretending you are suggesting good practices, which actually are the opposite of good practices

in short. mixing is not a good practice it WILL earn you suspicious activity points. (thats reality)

[n0nce]

[...]
But the problem cannot be fixed, if people can say that one coin is not like another.

Cypherpunks write code.  Trust the maths.  Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent.  Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking:  You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.

A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand....  It can be only the last defence of those who have no other weapons.

Thanks for your elaborate reply, nullius!

So you are convinced that it has to be solved on a technical level. I mean; I'm not against having better on-chain privacy, such as in Monero - effectively removing the very ability to distinguish UTXOs, however I'm not sure like you that it is needed.
In fiat world, people accept bank notes without checking their history through its serial number and they aren't checking them for the anecdotal traces of cocaine (could also check for blood, etc.) - every fiat bank note is not the same, but is universally treated as such, around the world. Whenever they aren't, people get very upset, too, however not so in Bitcoin. I don't really understand why.

I'm looking forward to your project / proposal and willing to help if I can!

That talk of Adam Back is new to me, I really appreciate his work in the field in general so I will watch it later.

[buwaytress]

Pretty clear for me to not use Wasabi, but I also wouldn't strongly be against someone else using it, if they understood what they were getting into. Same thing about someone using an exchange or a custodial service -- suits their purpose and their needs.

Unfortunately (or thanks to Bitcoin non-discrimination), we will have people who want or hope for Bitcoin to be used in certain ways we don't agree with, and they will use whatever feature is available to meet their needs.

So agree with nullius here. I don't see the point of hating on exchanges and Wasabi and expecting them to fall in line with ideologies they're legally bound to go against. Well, okay, Wasabi's complicated in a way, they probably only used privacy as a marketing tool while wanting to keep their friendships with old money.

Despite the "caught between a rock and a hard place"  argument, I'll probably never have a shred of sympathy for corporate entities or their leaders/owners. Even less when they try to explain their actions.

[tadamichi]

In fiat world, people accept bank notes without checking their history through its serial number and they aren't checking them for the anecdotal traces of cocaine (could also check for blood, etc.) - every fiat bank note is not the same, but is universally treated as such, around the world. Whenever they aren't, people get very upset, too, however not so in Bitcoin. I don't really understand why.

I think it’s for two reasons:

1. Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live). But when cash is not accepted at all, it’s a lot of people that experience this directly at the same time. Their funds are all blocked at the same time. So there will be more outcry and it can hurt business.

Coin taint and blacklisting are sneakier and psychologically more tricky. Not all users funds will be blocked/ frozen/ stolen at the same time. Most people that didn’t experience it directly won’t care enough or don’t even know it’s happening. They will maybe even buy into the bs reasoning for it, because their weren’t victims of it yet and maybe really believe that this is done for legitimate reasons and to solve a problem. Even tho it’s complete nonsense.

2. Cash has been around for a long time now and it’s acceptability is already widespread. Bitcoin is relatively new, as acceptability and usage grows i also would expect more people to react in similar ways to when it would happen to cash, but it’s still trickier when only a certain % of coins aren’t accepted. Similarly, i never saw an outcry when 500€ bills weren’t accepted somewhere, they only make a tiny percentage of bills in circulation and it didn’t affect enough users directly for people to care.

It would definitely help if Bitcoin can’t be told apart, I’ll definitely look into the possibilities more and study. Cash can simply cheat trough legal tender and always force universal acceptance of bills, if it wants to. Or reduce fungibility if the government wanted to. Code might be the only way to achieve true fungibility, but social acceptance will always play a role regardless. It might be worth trying to advance in both battles at the same time.

[franky1]

it seems its the same group of people meriting the topic creator, are the same group that want to tell billions of unbanked people that bitcoin is not fit for their daily normal use as-is, and the same group want to create fear for everyone else to avoid just using bitcoin as-is, whilst then advertising some other silly lock/service/altnet/membership that takes peoples individual control away by having to rely on some service/lock/altnet/partnership to allow them to spend value after wasting more time to set up this silly advertised service/altnet membership

anyways,
fiat(money) is not fungible
getting fiat from a relative on random occasion in small amount= gift= no tax
getting fiat from a relative after death in large amount= inheritance= inheritance tax
getting fiat from a employer = income tax
getting fiat from customer for a product = sales tax
getting fiat from an investment = capital gains tax
keeping alot of fiat after bills = wealth tax
keeping fiat in a family/corporate trust = capital gains tax
use fiat to buy property/shares = stamp duty
businesses that keep fiat after costs = corporation tax
have a low income or a basic personal account = low ATM withdrawal amount
have a high income or a business account = service charges and subscription fees
using debit/credit card fiat = 'service charges' (sometimes customer pays sometimes merchant pays)
(the list goes on)

yep every day peoples 'money' is treated differently depending on who handled it and how it was passed.

fiat has just been around so long that people dont think about all the differences each allotment is treated depended on how it was received. going to be spent
so in short fiat is not fungible. people just dont think about its treatment

and yes banks do question utility of peoples spending or receipt of fiat
and yes if you tried to buy a house with a suitcase of cash. they will question it
as would trying to pay a court fine in pennies or bank notes with odours of drugs

so dont pretend fiat is fungible to then pretend 'fungibility' is then the good excuse to want to break bitcoins 'taint' (tracking back to its source creation) by bastardising bitcoin by pretending 'taint' is about criminal checks/anti-privacy that need to then remove taint.

the taint actually solves an incredibly needed accounting policy of money. which is about trusting that all coins can be tracked back to its source creation coin reward so that no new coin can be introduced outside of the mining/coin creation process.

coinjoins are not needed. they make the experience of bitcoin delayed/slower due to the time it takes to 'mix' and ends up giving said users a bad 'suspicion rating' just for using it.(defeating the 'privacy' / anti-kyc stuff it pretends to solve when then depositing into exchanges)

if people want privacy i have no issue with those people using such service/locks/altnets. just dont try pandering your silly schemes onto regular people that dont want to have to have more headaches just so suspicious people can get the clean coin at regular peoples loss

so you privacy guys, you lot should go play with altnets and convert your coin to msat/lbtc in some confidential network and mix your crap over there.
instead of wanting to break bitcoin audit rules and spam the network with mix tx spam while telling everyone else to avoid using bitcoin

[NotATether]

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..

From reading the btctalk threads around here, I saw that there was a "zkSNACKs" CEO and a "Wasabi" CEO, obviously a company cannot have two CEOs so I reasoned that they must have become separate entities at some point (one heavily investing into the other).

Soo, in my eyes: zkSNACKs = Wasabi = nopara73. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Now even I am confused. Who was the person who replied to your Open Letter?

[Poker Player]

I have franky1 on ignore, but I have read some of his arguments while logged out and it seems to me that he has some valid points, but I am not going to go into commenting on his walls of text.

It seems to me that in this whole debate, many of you commenting here are like the fish in the water, pretty smart fish, but don't realize that there is a whole world outside the water.

The police can investigate something, but its still up to the justice system to decide. They will need evidence to prove you guilty.

In reality this is not true in 100% of the cases nor in all countries. Especially in tax crimes. If you are the one who cannot prove that your funds are of lawful origin you can end up in jail. It is not the prosecution that has to prove that your funds are of illicit origin. While not exactly what is being discussed here, look at Latvia's NFT artist who faces up to 12 years in jail, despite Latvia's lack of clear regulation.

Even if I was pretty sure I was going to win, I wouldn't want to find myself in front of a judge or jury having to explain large sums of money that have no clear origin due to the moves I have made for my right to privacy. Even less so if you're risking jail time.

I know people who went to trial being sure they were going to win and lost.

Seriously guys, don't gamble having to go to court for your right to privacy with large amounts of money.

You won't see me in court for that reason (and I hope for no other).

[tadamichi]

The police can investigate something, but its still up to the justice system to decide. They will need evidence to prove you guilty.

In reality this is not true in 100% of the cases nor in all countries. Especially in tax crimes. If you are the one who cannot prove that your funds are of lawful origin you can end up in jail. It is not the prosecution that has to prove that your funds are of illicit origin. While not exactly what is being discussed here, look at Latvia's NFT artist who faces up to 12 years in jail, despite Latvia's lack of clear regulation.

Even if I was pretty sure I was going to win, I wouldn't want to find myself in front of a judge or jury having to explain large sums of money that have no clear origin due to the moves I have made for my right to privacy. Even less so if you're risking jail time.

I know people who went to trial being sure they were going to win and lost.

Seriously guys, don't gamble having to go to court for your right to privacy with large amounts of money.

You won't see me in court for that reason (and I hope for no other).

That’s something else. Proving it to a tax authority is standard procedure, you can document everything for that matter. Only taxes and death are certain, i personally wouldn’t play around there just to save some bucks, not worth the headache. A mixer is not a crime and not what would get you in jail or make documentation impossible. I wouldn’t even use these tools for any criminal activity or to try to launder money, they’re not even suited for this and real criminals will realise that the fiat system is much better suited for this.

Giving some private companies a pass to demand proof without any evidence, is a whole different ballgame tho. Now essentially customer support employees, algorithms and some surveillance companies have been given the power to freeze/ steal peoples funds with complete arbitrariness. And they can now hide their actions by just taking AML as an excuse, it will be barely possible to contest this for a regular person. This is completely backwards and no one can tell me that this is smh justified and not a problem.

When a business receives counterfeited bills, its recommended that they inform the police immediately. But a business cant just claim that your legit bills are suspicious and then keep them. Theres no real process that violates peoples rights there, but with coin taint its completely arbitrary and a process thats completely detached from the justice system.

The irony is that real laundering happens inside the same institutions that „just follow regulations“, so in reality laws are imposed again that restrict financial freedom on people who are not even doing the laundering and real criminals can act like theyre fighting crimes and hide behind this. And then its also giving people a false sense of security and the impression that something is done against it.

Heres just one of countless examples.

Global banks defy U.S. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists
The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.

U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.

In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.

JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.

The bank moved more than $1 billion for the fugitive financier behind Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, the records show, and more than $2 million for a young energy mogul’s company that has been accused of cheating Venezuela’s government and helping cause electrical blackouts that crippled large parts of the country.

But lets keep repeating that its the average joe that should make his whole life transparent to anyone to combat „crime“, regulations are there franky but anyone with a right mind would question and contest them when theyre complete bs, no matter if you run a business or not. Otherwise we end up in a clownshow where everyone starts enforcing useless bs on others, because of „regulations“ and no real problems are solved anymore.   

[franky1]

But a business cant just claim that your legit bills are suspicious and then keep them. Theres no real process that violates peoples rights there, but with coin taint its completely arbitrary and a process thats completely detached from the justice system.

first of all regulated exchanges cant and dont just confiscate coins for silly reasons
maybe try to read some stuff before just listening to the buddy group with an agenda

when you get a suspicious flag on your exchange/service account thats not a reason to confiscate.
when that level is raised to a need to file a suspicious activity report with an authority, thats not a reason to confiscate
when the authorities do their own investigations due to receipt of an SAR thats not a reason to confiscate
a business might suspend access to the market order features and only offer you an option of 'withdrawal and close account' but they wont confiscate funds at this point
if any exchange has a policy that does confiscate at any point above.. dont use them, they are thieves


when the authority finds evidence from other sources that links a possible crime to the service customer that meets the court requirement of a court claim. THEN the authority makes a court order with the court to hand to the service, which then forces the service to comply and confiscate value and hand it to the authority.


reality is, REAL privacy guys know what the laws actually are. and know how to move around them. they are not fearing the court system, what they actually just want is to not even get to that level by staying so far under the radar that no trigger is pulled at any of the first suspicion stages,(where their name is tossed around and shared in the first place.)

EG they are ok with telling a business they signed upto willingly their name(else avoid such service/use another) but dont want that business passing/selling that info around, sharing that info with entities the privacy guy doesnt know/didnt authorise

EG people dont mind doing face to face exchanges where the recipient sees their face, they just dont want that person then talking behind their back identifying you with others.

and back to the point
using services which WILL get you noticed by a whole crowd of entities defeats the point of using a service that pretends it helps preserve privacy.

you will be questioned if seen using a mixer. even if you dont end up in court. your info will be shared if using a mixer even if you dont end up in court.

EG
just buying $7 of gum with a $10, and getting $3 change doesnt normally get a second thought. most cashiers wont check the bank note is counterfeit or not
but handing over a $10 bank note and asking for 10x $1, will make the cashier question the purpose and want to check the $10 bank note is not counterfeit

in short:
dont use silly conspiracy anti-gov rhetoric you heard from a buddy as a silly reason to try to make bitcoin sound broken, unfit for use and wanting to destroy bitcoins security just to promote some silly service that pretends to offer privacy, but is infact the very service that will get you noticed more and have your ties to the service listed more, and shared between entities more that gather information of such suspicious tools/services/techniques.
...
instead stick with reality and realise what info YOU are sending out and simply make better decisions to avoid getting noticed by not being so foolish

oh and yea. there are some analytic services that monitor forum usernames for people that are heavy 'privacy' guys and announce they want to hide, which red flags them as possible people to get more interested in and look at their post history for any chatter that seems immoral/unethical/illegal to then assign them a suspicious activity rating against their forum username which is then sold onto other services that monitor their exchange customer usernames to spot a linkage.
so yea be careful
its much like those who attend anti-gov protests end up having their names added to a watchlist.. not because they are criminals but because they announce they are anti-gov.
yep protesting you want privacy is exactly what ends up getting you put on a watchlist

[o_e_l_e_o]

Unfortunately (or thanks to Bitcoin non-discrimination), we will have people who want or hope for Bitcoin to be used in certain ways we don't agree with, and they will use whatever feature is available to meet their needs.

So agree with nullius here. I don't see the point of hating on exchanges and Wasabi and expecting them to fall in line with ideologies they're legally bound to go against.

There will always be services which do not respect privacy in the slightest. Centralized exchanges are the obvious one. All custodial wallets or web wallets are another example. However, these services do not pretend to respect your privacy, and they certainly do not market themselves as privacy enhancing. This is the difference with Wasabi. For Wasabi to market themselves as literally the only solution for bitcoin fungibility and the only wallet which is capable of providing privacy, while actively cooperating with blockchain analysis, is at best utterly dishonest and more likely actively malicious.

Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live).

That's different though. A business which refuses higher bills would quite happily accept that money if you first split your €500 in to 10x €50 bills, whereas (presumably) a business refusing a tainted output would still refuse that same output if you split it in to 10 smaller outputs first. Similarly, a business can refuse cash in the same way a business can refuse bitcoin altogether and I'm not going to complain about fungibility. In these cases the business is discriminating against the money itself, not making certain parts of that money non fungible.

[tadamichi]

first of all mr exaggeration for an agenda king
regulated exchanges cant and dont just confiscate coins for silly reasons

They can, which outside source actually checks the legitimacy of procedures? None, anything can be considered suspicious and anyone can file an SAR for whatever they consider suspicious. There’s no punishment for false flags. And in case they falsely confiscate your funds, good luck proving it and going up against an army of lawyers, for sums that are not even worth this much effort.

// Edit: if you have a problem with people questioning the actual results and effectiveness of bs procedures and regulations, then idk how to help you. It has nothing to do with an agenda that i question how these things are actually handled. If regulations treat everyone as a potential criminal , demand further restrictions of financial freedom and produce no crime reducing results, then i dont see how they shouldnt be contested.

reality is, REAL privacy guys know what the laws actually are. and know how to move around them. they are not fearing the court system, what they actually just want is to not even get to that level by staying so far under the radar that no trigger is pulled at any of the first suspicion stages,(where their name is tossed around and shared in the first place.)

So people under mass surveillance are private when they just go along with it, even tho each of their steps is tracked, archived and can be questioned at any time?

Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live).

That's different though. A business which refuses higher bills would quite happily accept that money if you first split your €500 in to 10x €50 bills, whereas (presumably) a business refusing a tainted output would still refuse that same output if you split it in to 10 smaller outputs first. Similarly, a business can refuse cash in the same way a business can refuse bitcoin altogether and I'm not going to complain about fungibility. In these cases the business is discriminating against the money itself, not making certain parts of that money non fungible.

True.

[DaveF]

...
anyways,
fiat(money) is not fungible
getting fiat from a relative on random occasion in small amount= gift= no tax
getting fiat from a relative after death in large amount= inheritance= inheritance tax
getting fiat from a employer = income tax
getting fiat from customer for a product = sales tax
getting fiat from an investment = capital gains tax
keeping alot of fiat after bills = wealth tax
keeping fiat in a family/corporate trust = capital gains tax
use fiat to buy property/shares = stamp duty
businesses that keep fiat after costs = corporation tax
have a low income or a basic personal account = low ATM withdrawal amount
have a high income or a business account = service charges and subscription fees
using debit/credit card fiat = 'service charges' (sometimes customer pays sometimes merchant pays)
(the list goes on)
...

https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/28/news/economy/illegal-income-tax/index.html

Old but still relevant to this.
Makes you wonder how much work by the government is really going into tracing crypo for 'getting criminals' vs 'getting out (tax) cut from transactions'
Sales tax, income tax, and so on. Yes, not paying taxes is a crime, but that's not the point I'm making here.

As for this Wasabi mess. Like many other things, some people will still use them because they don't care. And if that works for them fine.
Some people will stop using them. And that's fine. Others never knew wasabi existed and will continue no to know that it exists. And that's fine too.

There have been and still are ways to bury / mix coins depending on what services are available where you are depending on the amounts and time you want to put into it.
Also, there are different things different people want to do with coins, and you know what that's fine too.

Wasabi made, in what a lot of think is a crap decision, and are now using crap reasons to justify it.
Time will tell if it works for them or not.

Going back to what I said when n0nce posted the 24 questions thread:

Is anyone really surprised at the answers? They did what they did and now are forced to defend their actions.

We can spend hours picking apart what was said but in my view it comes down to "This is what we are doing, if you don't like it let me show you the door [points] there is the door"

If you really want the coordinator code is out there and open source. Set one up and put your money where your mouth is as start running a better funded one.

If not, lets discuss other ways of doing this and stop complaining about one that for whatever reason does not want to anymore.

Sorry if this comes off a bit testy.

-Dave

[o_e_l_e_o]

If you really want the coordinator code is out there and open source. Set one up and put your money where your mouth is as start running a better funded one.

As I've said before, why waste time, effort, and money on trying to mitigate the flaws of a bad design when there already exist coinjoin implementations which do not have these flaws at all (e.g. JoinMarket, which does not have a centralized coordinator).

If not, lets discuss other ways of doing this and stop complaining about one that for whatever reason does not want to anymore.

I appreciate your point, but I won't. If Wasabi change their branding from a "Privacy Wallet" to "OFAC Compliant Blacklisting Wallet" or something similar, then sure. But as long as Wasabi keep lying to the community and advertising themselves as something they aren't, then I will continue to call them out. If people want to continue to use Wasabi despite all this, then that's fine. The beauty of bitcoin is that anyone can use it in any way they want to. But they at least deserve to make an informed choice, and if we all stopped complaining then the likelihood is that no one would ever know about Wasabi's censorship until it affected them personally.

[n0nce]

...
anyways,
fiat(money) is not fungible
getting fiat from a relative on random occasion in small amount= gift= no tax
getting fiat from a relative after death in large amount= inheritance= inheritance tax
getting fiat from a employer = income tax
getting fiat from customer for a product = sales tax
getting fiat from an investment = capital gains tax
keeping alot of fiat after bills = wealth tax
keeping fiat in a family/corporate trust = capital gains tax
use fiat to buy property/shares = stamp duty
businesses that keep fiat after costs = corporation tax
have a low income or a basic personal account = low ATM withdrawal amount
have a high income or a business account = service charges and subscription fees
using debit/credit card fiat = 'service charges' (sometimes customer pays sometimes merchant pays)
(the list goes on)
...

https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/28/news/economy/illegal-income-tax/index.html

Old but still relevant to this.
Makes you wonder how much work by the government is really going into tracing crypo for 'getting criminals' vs 'getting out (tax) cut from transactions'
Sales tax, income tax, and so on. Yes, not paying taxes is a crime, but that's not the point I'm making here.

Franky's understanding of fungibility is totally broken. Whether and which taxes I have to pay as a customer and / or a business, is an accounting topic; I don't look at the difference between paper notes to determine which tax I have to pay. Neither does their history have an influence over what taxes I have to pay.
I can't fathom how anyone can honestly believe that the fact you have to pay taxes on certain fiat transfers means it's not fungible.

I'm not fully done watching Adam Back's talk about fungibility, but he's explained it quite well in the beginning in case anyone needs a reminder.

[DaveF]

If not, lets discuss other ways of doing this and stop complaining about one that for whatever reason does not want to anymore.

I appreciate your point, but I won't. If Wasabi change their branding from a "Privacy Wallet" to "OFAC Compliant Blacklisting Wallet" or something similar, then sure. But as long as Wasabi keep lying to the community and advertising themselves as something they aren't, then I will continue to call them out. If people want to continue to use Wasabi despite all this, then that's fine. The beauty of bitcoin is that anyone can use it in any way they want to. But they at least deserve to make an informed choice, and if we all stopped complaining then the likelihood is that no one would ever know about Wasabi's censorship until it affected them personally.

I appreciate the sentiment but if you are going to go after every wallet / service in BTC that is making false claims you are going to have to look into cloning yourself to get it done.   

I *know* privacy is a hot button issue for you and I understand why you are doing this. But, I think it would be better to push one of the joinmarket implementations then spending time pointing out the many flaws of Wasabi and what they are doing. Keeping the knowledge of what they are doing alive and up front is good.

More of the fix the problem not the blame theory.

-Dave

[franky1]

I'm not fully done watching Adam Back's talk about fungibility, but he's explained it quite well in the beginning in case anyone needs a reminder.

ha. couldnt have predicted it any better. you are using a blockstream ceo as your source of your mindset.
i am not shocked at all

my point is that people think that fiat is open and free where everyone is treated equally and every bank note, digital bank account balance is all treated equally. because its 'common money' which they think bitcoin needs to become
my example of taxes is not the sole example. its just the example even idiots can see as being a example that not all money is treated the same. where people need to act and react to payments differently depending on what or how they are using money.

but hey, yea if you only want to listen to the same known group of this topics favourite godlike influencer. you go right ahead
funny how the same people show how obvious who their influencers are. and what roadmap they want to follow.

just wondering:
have you ever tried to have an independent thought outside the group mindset?
(you follow and merit the exact same group with the altnet mantra, privacy mantra, defi mantra, pruned node mantra)