'Wasabigeddon' article discussion (it supposedly solves fungibility)

[DooMAD]

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

And you are using Faketoshi as the source of yours.  You hate freedom.  You hate privacy.  You hate the majority of Bitcoin developers.  But I'm glad about that.  Because if you approved of any of it, then we must have done something badly wrong.  You're a living, breathing litmus test.  If you hate it, then fantastic, we're clearly on the right track. 

[1714724025]

1714724025

[n0nce]

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.

I do have Franky on ignore and considered moving this thread since he just cannot stay on-topic, but I would like to emphasize (as if it wasn't obvious) that contrary to his opinion (potentially he's projecting something here..) I am not a 'follower' of Adam Back or believing what I believe because he says so; in fact, I was made aware of the talk I linked to, only the other day. (see below)
My views on the topic were set before that (all provable through Bitcointalk posts), and I just thought he explained it well in spoken form. That's also exactly what I've written above.

Quote for 'proof':

[...]
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.

[nullius]

I do have Franky on ignore and considered moving this thread since he just cannot stay on-topic, but I would like to emphasize (as if it wasn't obvious) that contrary to his opinion (potentially he's projecting something here..) I am not a 'follower' of Adam Back or believing what I believe because he says so; in fact, I was made aware of the talk I linked to, only the other day. (see below)
My views on the topic were set before that (all provable through Bitcointalk posts), and I just thought he explained it well in spoken form. That's also exactly what I've written above.

Quote for 'proof': [...]

There is no need to justify yourself like that.  Don’t let franky1 put you on the defensive with his reality-inverting mindgame.  To promote his agenda, he is essentially trying to make it politically incorrect to cite or discuss Adam Back on the Bitcoin Forum.  LOL.

His accusation of a “group mindset” in following “influencers”, replete with a jealous remark about merits, is especially ridiculous in any discussion where I am involved—and where I am the one who brought up Dr. Back, and linked to his relevant 2014 conference talk.  I am an independent loose cannon, and I am assuredly the most unpopular person here.  There is a whole thread devoted to smear-attacking me; it is titled with eloquent professionalism by a real pillar of the community, “nullius is a cunt”.  I am merit-boycotted by numerous users, including some merit sources.  I am immune to groupthink; I say what I mean, not what is popular.  Some people appreciate that, but others do not.

Given that franky1 is a n00b, he would not recall the era when Dr. Back first announced on Cypherpunks the Hashcash system that Satoshi cited in footnote 6 of the Bitcoin Whitepaper.  I remember Cypherpunks from first-hand experience.  Better to understand Bitcoin, whence it came, why it exists, and what legacy Wasabi is effectually repudiating, I recommend this 2016 article by Jameson Lopp, a professional Cypherpunk:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2016/04/09/bitcoin-and-the-rise-of-the-cypherpunks/

Lopp therein focuses on privacy.  I generally agree with his conclusions in that article.

I am far behind on this thread—only for the reason that some replies here raised such important issues, my responses grew beyond the proper scope of a reply here.  They spawned drafts for the OPs in at least two new threads.  One of them actually gave franky1 some credit for raising a good point (that he promptly ruined), and constructively criticized n0nce’s approach in another thread—well, if franky1 is accuses me of groupthink for citing Adam Back, I should edit that, and ban franky1 from my self-moderated topics.  To be continued...

[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

And you are using Faketoshi as the source of yours.  You hate freedom.  You hate privacy.  You hate the majority of Bitcoin developers.  But I'm glad about that.  Because if you approved of any of it, then we must have done something badly wrong.  You're a living, breathing litmus test.  If you hate it, then fantastic, we're clearly on the right track.  

i dont even like the guy, never have. and i was calling him out as fake way before you cried
i noticed him as a panellist alongside nick szabo when faktoshi first made his appearence and i called him out on his ballshit

as for your topic you linked where you FAILED at comparing me to him
he was saying that full nodes have no job.. much like YOU and your buddies think fullnodes solve no purpose by saying its fine to prune. and use other networks and not monitor the blockchain..

i have always said that fullnodes do have a purpose. and should also remain as the true fullnode descriptor which includes archiving(unlike your lame group) but where people should not ramp up lots of sybil's just to get fake node count (thats what you cant comprehend!) where lots of sybils just cause propagation delays for the actual user nodes that have actual wallets and funds they want to use inside their fullnode

now go sit back in your cave

as for the talk about merits
i give zero crap amount merit.
i happily throw merit out in the 50's because i find it meaningless to the point of no value so giving out 50 means jack

but i see the group of you lot have your own lil 'foxpop gang' which is a big sign you do care about it
EDIT: (re included above the social drama poke that they intended to poke me into to then cry that i meandered into a social drama game (which they triggered first).. )

note to nullius
i was not even talking about you. i simply said the PEOPLE that merited n0nce
i was talking about the cult that are fangirling blockstream products and other services that want to make bitcoin stall, slowdown and give people headaches

it was not even about the merit.. it was highlighting the PEOPLE that merited in the topic post#1 are the same crowd.
heck you are not even in that list at time of this posting. yet you are now on the defense..

seriously chill with the social drama game of protecting people and concentrate on protecting the network and user experience.

they couldnt rebut the realities of real life situations where using mixers and crap services actually does the opposite of being private and under the radar. they couldnt even understand that fiat is not as open and fungible as they pretend it to then pretend bitcoin needs to destroy accounting policy to pretend it then meets some fiat comparison. so they cry the social drama games as their final attack... boring, not new, not original

look at the crew defending each other to try to flip the script pretending they dont have a roadmap, group or plan to try to pretend i am part of a group

boring social drama deception and meander. but they love that game 'play the victim to hide their attack'

meanwhile im not the one advertising crap that breaks bitcoin and makes user experience more delayed, costly and irritating.

goodluck with your fake promises of all the crap services you offer.

this topic is dead because its just a subtle advert for a service that pretends to be one thing but does the complete opposite.. and that was my original point

seriously chill with the social drama game of protecting people and concentrate on protecting the network and user experience

[nullius]

so you failed at your silly little association games of trying to pigeon hole me into a group

You failed so miserable at your silly game of trying to pigeonhole others (especially me) into a group, you drastically edited to cover up this post as I was replying to it, to cover up something really embarrassing:

as for the talk about merits
i give zero crap amount merit.
i happily throw merit out in the 50's because i find it meaningless to the point of no value so giving out 50 means jack

but i see the group of you lot have your own lil 'foxpop gang' which is a big sign you do care about it

You were the one who started talking about merit here:

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)

Offhand, together with a larger context, I responded to that in my reply to n0nce.  The only two people in this entire thread who have mentioned merit are you, who brought it up, and me, in response to what you said; and you will note that I am not a part of Foxpup’s merit thingie (lol).  Now, you are fixated on merit.

When you claim that you “give zero crap amount merit”, thou doest protest too much, methinks.

Anyway, I think you are clearly not engaging in this discussion in good faith.  I previously disagreed with others who were giving you the troll treatment in this thread, and I never categorically kicked you out of my self-moderated threads; but you have done a good job here of proving me wrong about that.  Please don’t be surprised if you get a lack of response from me in the future.

Now, returning to the topic...

[franky1]

now back to the topic about the "fungibility" stuff
(dont derail this into human defense protection social drama, stay ontopic about BITCOIN function)
a certain influencer pretends fungibility is based on a 17th century scottish case.. as the excuse to want to brutalise bitcoin and push people into using services and altnets because they want to pretend bitcoin is not fit for purpose for general people, by pushing fears that general people sould not use bitcoin as-is and instead enter into silly services/altnets as a 'solution'

sorry but bitcoin does not need to be broken to facilitate some roadmap of offramping users away from just holding their own coin and just doing onchain transactions to their desired destination, without the desires of certain people that want everyone to use some membership, service,altnet middleman(which actually goes against bitcoins purpose)

the problem is that 17th century court case is not the modern day reality of modern day law/policy.

take the donations for that "freedom convoy"
it got confiscated and even though it changed many hands there is still a court order wanting those funds
yep reality of modern day

yep those funds came from random donators(not criminals) and was held by random services(not criminals) it changed hands and different accounts/users held keys. yet the courts still wanted the fiat and bitcoin.
(research: aid abet, accessory)

..
the reality is when bitcoin was treated as a asset(product) where services were treated as merchants and not money service businesses. bitcoin was not concerned with the whims of 'currency' laws
but due to attaining recognition as "currency" the currency laws started applying. which is the bullet that shot people in the foot for wanting the "currency" recognition rather than continuing as an asset of the early days

bitcoin will not change "currency" laws. and pretending that bitcoin is now broke/not fit as money wont undo that.

[NotATether]

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.

It appears that almost everybody in the noösphere believes that all mixing is money laundering, regardless of the proportionn of dirty money that is actually laundered through mixers. It makes a good conspiracy theory piece [I could never understand those guys, honestly - even cypherpunks = the NSA to them].

[franky1]

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.

It appears that almost everybody in the noösphere believes that all mixing is money laundering, regardless of the proportionn of dirty money that is actually laundered through mixers. It makes a good conspiracy theory piece [I could never understand those guys, honestly - even cypherpunks = the NSA to them].

while some people want to divert conversation to "it has to be 'found criminal activity' to then have suspicion" nonsense

people can play all the silly fantasy mind games of wishful desires of not being tracked because they done a good job hiding the source. but they are still being ignorant and naive that its the hiding that infact gets them noticed

people can play all the silly fantasy mind games of redefining the meaning of words, or quote a non lawyer influencer that shares their mindset, to fit their personal need.

but reality is money services businesses have regulatory rules they have to follow that ensure they police themselves and their customers to ensure that they are not facilitating certain activities that could lead the service to get into trouble

i find it funny how instead of quoting the AML policy MSB's follow. people quote their middleman adoring influencer they follow as their "proof" of their confirmation bias

REALITY is NOT
service has to witness a drug deal happening infront of their office window
service has to witness their customer admit to a crime in a conversation with the service

REALITY is
signs of money laundering are:
using accounts with fake ID's
using multiple accounts
moving amounts just beneath the regulated thresholds repeatedly in small timescales
using mixers to hide the source of funds
using certain services that are not illegal themselves but tools that are known to facilitate services criminals use

EG donations to the "freedom convoy" were random donations from the population. yet guess what?(rhetorical).. lots of people and services got in trouble for handling those funds even when the source of funds were 'clean'
even now. those funds have been passed through several recipients (which some naively deem as causing funds to now be 'fungibly clean' of any crime) yet there are court orders still requesting those funds to be handed to the courts no matter whom currently is holding those funds. yep thats reality. those funds whether fiat or crypto are being treated differently than the bank note in my back pocket

bitcoins transparent accounting to prove coins originated from its ruled block creation, is actually the feature that makes bitcoin good money becasue its easy to audit and see no randomly added coin has occured.

the ability to simply pay a destination without a middleman is another feature that makes bitcoin great.

however certain people want to break all that and tell people not to use bitcoin for normal day-to-day activity, but instead use all these silly middlemen services of delay/risk, without understanding the consequence of their adverts of their favoured altnet/service they want everyone else to use

mixing will award you a suspicion rating. and chain analysis companies will highlight users of mixer services as users worthy of potential watchlists. thus defeating the point of using said service advertised as hiding you away from being watched(aka offering privacy)

much like this very topic where wasaibi is getting hit by blacklists which then makes wasabi have to deal with its own blacklists to lessen its own risk

get it yet
get reality?
or will certain people ignore reality and instead try quoting some influencer that shares their mindset(confirmation bias) that dreams up scenarios and uses vague examples of the 17th century court case as their reasoning for their roadmap of breaking bitcoin to fit their silly middleman service offering everyone should use

[n0nce]

I believe we should try to get back on-topic everyone.

For me, it's still open whether there is a 'Wasabi CEO' (in my understanding, Wasabi is not a company; only zkSNACKs is) and whether the project was 'taken' from nopara73 and he's actually in the 'no blacklisting' fraction of the (company-internal) debate, as alluded to by some, e.g. here.

...
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..

This question of mine was partly solved by nullius' reply, but I think it only holds true for protocol-level changes. What do you think?

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

As in: fungibility=privacy holds true if you have protocol-level privacy/fungibility.
For instance, I can get mixed - or for the sake of argument, mined funds with absolutely no history.. These are pseudonymous at least, since there is [1] no link to my identity (mining pool needs no KYC) and [2] no link to other transactions.
However, they are not fungible since this mining reward is different from my last block's mining reward (size, date). Therefore they are not actually private. Right?

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

If we build some technology on top of Bitcoin (be it different upper layers or mixers), can't privacy and fungibility only be ensured 'within' that system?
For example: in Lightning, on a protocol-level it doesn't matter in which channel you 'receive' or 'spend' funds, as your trading partner on the other end of the network will not actually get UTXOs from you, but it will get a channel state update with one of its peers. The network doesn't know where the money is going due to onion routing (of the actual payment), so I believe a Lightning transfer can be called fungible and private.
Similarly, if you stay within a system like Wasabi, with its own blacklist, as long as you only work with people who also use Wasabi and auto-mix all their funds there, your UTXO will be fungible within this system. Maybe it's their vision that everyone is going to use Wasabi and ignore everything happening outside of it. Then in that case we could say they achieved their goal of 'solving Bitcoin fungibility and privacy' - right?
Because without this huge assumption, they are actually creating a way of discerning Wasabi from non-Wasabi funds, increasing non-fungibility overall.

So if you build a 'privacy tool' on top of Bitcoin, it can never fully 'solve fungibility' as long as not everyone is using it, which brings us back to protocol-level changes..

[nopara73]

Hi guys, I glanced through this thread. Let me clarify a few things.

On the CEO of zkSNACKs. I did start Wasabi and I did co-found zkSNACKs, the company responsible for the bulk of the development on Wasabi, however I was never the CEO. zkSNACKs had two co-CEOs since its inception until this year when Max took over. That's not to say they are to be blamed for the blacklisting plans, but I am the one who pushed the idea through. It however doesn't mean that I am "advocating for it," quite the contrary, I am not philosophically aligned with it.

On conflating the company with the software project. IMO most of the times it's ok to say things like "CEO of Wasabi" as the separation between the company and the project most of the times isn't relevant. It becomes important to separate the two things when censorship resistance is in question. Wasabi is censorship resistant, zkSNACKs isn't.

On fungibility. I guess the debate here comes down to the question: is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible? AFAIK it is: Fungibility, sometimes called interchangeability or indistinguishability is a property of good money. Two instances of a currency are fungible - interchangeable - with each other if there are no meaningful differences between them: they have no marks, nor history. That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing. Two coinjoined coins are indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't matter which coinjoined coin you have. That's fungibility between two instances of a currency. 

On the question if we're working on fungibility or privacy. Going with our knowledge on fungibility, how does privacy come into the picture at all? And let's throw anonymity into the mix, too, since we're at it, shall we? Privacy is your ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. Anonymity is a mathematical tool which we can utilize to build privacy for the individual, like a privacy Bitcoin wallet. And adoption of a private Bitcoin wallet or a comprehensive Bitcoin privacy technology leads to the fungibility of the money itself. Learn more on this here: https://nopara73.medium.com/privacy-fungibility-anonymity-451d029355f7

Of course I am more than happy to hear thoughts on this topic, but I hope I demonstrated that my fungibility claims aren't pulled out of my ass, in fact they are the result of years of research on the topic, so I'd appreciate not calling me a liar, because of them.

[n0nce]

Hi guys, I glanced through this thread. Let me clarify a few things.

First of all, despite our differences of opinion, I really appreciate your reply! It did clear up a few things for me.

On the CEO of zkSNACKs. I did start Wasabi and I did co-found zkSNACKs, the company responsible for the bulk of the development on Wasabi, however I was never the CEO. zkSNACKs had two co-CEOs since its inception until this year when Max took over. That's not to say they are to be blamed for the blacklisting plans, but I am the one who pushed the idea through. It however doesn't mean that I am "advocating for it," quite the contrary, I am not philosophically aligned with it.

On conflating the company with the software project. IMO most of the times it's ok to say things like "CEO of Wasabi" as the separation between the company and the project most of the times isn't relevant. It becomes important to separate the two things when censorship resistance is in question. Wasabi is censorship resistant, zkSNACKs isn't.

Interesting. I think we've heard the argument before ('without us, and without blacklist, there will be no privacy in Bitcoin'), but I still don't get how it's possible to push something through that someone's not philosophically aligned with. However, I guess it's still good to know and I appreciate the honesty on this. Also regarding censorship resistance and rough company structure (i.e. how closely Wasabi and zkSNACKs are tied together).

On fungibility. I guess the debate here comes down to the question: is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible? AFAIK it is: Fungibility, sometimes called interchangeability or indistinguishability is a property of good money. Two instances of a currency are fungible - interchangeable - with each other if there are no meaningful differences between them: they have no marks, nor history. That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing. Two coinjoined coins are indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't matter which coinjoined coin you have. That's fungibility between two instances of a currency. 

Two Wasabi-coinjoined coins might be indistinguishable from each other, but are they indistinguishable from non-Wasabi-coinjoined coins? Because if they're not, Wasabi added one more way to distinguish Bitcoin UTXOs.

On the question if we're working on fungibility or privacy. Going with our knowledge on fungibility, how does privacy come into the picture at all? And let's throw anonymity into the mix, too, since we're at it, shall we? Privacy is your ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. Anonymity is a mathematical tool which we can utilize to build privacy for the individual, like a privacy Bitcoin wallet. And adoption of a private Bitcoin wallet or a comprehensive Bitcoin privacy technology leads to the fungibility of the money itself. Learn more on this here: https://nopara73.medium.com/privacy-fungibility-anonymity-451d029355f7

The fungibility = privacy? question was picked up by nullius earlier and explained rather well, I believe. It does make sense on a theoretical level (for me most simple to understand privacy / anonymity => fungibility, e.g. like how in Monero coins are fungible, because that follows from privacy). I'm just not sold on Wasabi = fungibility, though. Especially since the blacklisting 'idea' (?) - maybe here's a good place to ask whether it will be implemented at all, since a bunch of time has passed and as far as I can tell, it's not there yet.
It is pretty illogical to want to create a fungibility-enhancing tool, but at the same time discriminating between inputs.

I think the problem is that what you're trying to do would need to be done on protocol layer.
In my opinion, there are 2 options:
[1] Everything remains as it is, and we ignore the fact that Bitcoin is not fungible - we mix it to get privacy and deny any notion of taint: just like it is done with fiat paper money. Those bills are non-fungible, but everyone acts as if they were, so in practice, they are.
[2] We implement privacy measures at protocol layer, which automatically give us fungibility, like in Monero.

I don't think you can do option 2 'as a service', because there will always be users who don't use Wasabi, hence their funds will be distinguishable both from other non-Wasabi-users' funds, and also distinguishable from Wasabi-users' funds. Taint can and will also still be enforced, no matter how many times you pass non-encrypted Bitcoin UTXOs through Wasabi.
Further, new users may even be denied usage of Wasabi, since you opt for 'full option 2 (but as a service)' and do not also commit to option 1 as well (accepting any and all funds). I just do not see how this is going to be Bitcoin's ultimate fungibility and privacy solution.

Of course I am more than happy to hear thoughts on this topic, but I hope I demonstrated that my fungibility claims aren't pulled out of my ass, in fact they are the result of years of research on the topic, so I'd appreciate not calling me a liar, because of them.

I believe the lying accusations stem from the discrepancy between your 'philosophical alignment' and 'actual actions' which you confirmed; I know that people sometimes (have to?) do things like that, but it can easily come across as a hypocrisy / lie - I think that's easy to understand.

[tadamichi]

On fungibility. I guess the debate here comes down to the question: is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible? AFAIK it is: Fungibility, sometimes called interchangeability or indistinguishability is a property of good money. Two instances of a currency are fungible - interchangeable - with each other if there are no meaningful differences between them: they have no marks, nor history. That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing. Two coinjoined coins are indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't matter which coinjoined coin you have. That's fungibility between two instances of a currency. 

You’re not looking at the issue holistically. Fungibility includes all Bitcoins in existence, not just the ones your service lets trough. It’s possible to separate between coinjoined and non-conjoined coins. Coinjoins alone dont solve the issue. By introducing Blacklists you’re already starting to take part in the issue by starting to separate between coins yourself. Accepting all coins equally is what is necessary to make a contribution to fungibility. Bitcoin is already fungible, it is services introducing the nonsense and separation. If this childishness doesn’t stop then it might be necessary to make it impossible to separate between coins on a protocol level, which im not entirely a fan of. Humans just can’t handle this responsibility apparently. For Bitcoin to succeed all coins need to be treated equally, i don’t see how it’s a smart business decision to weaken the foundation it’s built on.

[franky1]

yet again it must be said
certain people are trying to create a problem. trying to tell everyone that bitcoin is not fit for purpose and that normal people have to use a service/altnet as a solution to the dreamt up problem instigated by the selfish people in the first place.. and then say bitcoin as a whole is broke unless bitcoin as a whole changes to satisfy the problem they dreamt up.

put simply. by wasabi being a mixer makes other businesses treat wasabi as a suspicious service by default. and wasabi is now trying to fight back by saying it will make its own black list to keep criminals out of its service in the "hope" to reduce its own suspicion level with other services.
sorry but other services will still deem it suspicious even if it did only work with 'legit/clean' customers, because other services will still by regulatory policy need and want to identify source of funds and identity of fundee's

and yes i know the ploy. due to the lack of customer use of wasabi when blacklisting criminals. then to keep their business/service active/viable it needs an injection of fresh users.. otherwise wasabi dies.
much like an altnet dies unless it can sway people into using it
yep wasabi's 'rounds' of mixing have become less and more delayed and so it needs more customers to try to remain viable as a business/service.
so it and idiots with selfish motives, pretends bitcoin is broke to then sway clean users to then use such mixer by pretending legit people NEED to use it.
yep emphasis: their agenda is to try to make their service sound like its 'needed' by clean/legit people.. when reality is its not needed.  
these selfish people are only promoting it because they are selfishly not getting to mix their own coins as often so they want to push naive people towards the service so that the selfish people can get what they want. mixed coins from clean people. (similar selfish game with LN too. get naive people into LN so selfish people can syphon fee's off them in routing games)

anyway
fiat money is not fungible and fungibility is not a pre-requisite of "good money"
take the many many confiscation laws, the counterfeit laws, tax laws, income laws. policies of banks that questions their customers utility of funds. etc etc.

so pretending bitcoin fails as money due to not being fungible is wrong on so many levels

bitcoin in fact is GREAT money due to its accountability where people can trace their coin they own back to the original coin reward block it was mined into existence.
this tracking allows people to know that no random coin was just added. counterfeited or bugged into existence.
this accounting show the coins creation was done by a certain level of workload/effort, which helps define its underlying value of the coin.
its the very accountability and transparency of bitcoin that makes it better money than fiat in many many ways.

no matter what ploy these idiots want to employ to break bitcoins accounting/archiving feature, for their selfish whims. actual regulations will find a way to still require users to prove who they are and where/how they acquired their value. and infact will cause regulators to up the pressure on it if people are made to use even more invisible money currencies, thus defeating the privacy promise their scheme started off with.

yep, reality check: a well regulated exchange that actually follows regulation, if it were to accept liquid and monero would have tougher KYC requirements, not less

emphasis:
it then if bitcoin was a privacy coin, actually becomes more of a headache for people. not just by being watched/suspected by default just for using a privacy coin. but then when questioned, having  to prove their usage was all legit and clean. (something they cannot then do easily because they cant just let the exchange follow the taint back, thus force exchanges to have to question the user)
which is now even harder to achieve easily. thus now 2 headaches deep for regular clean legit users to have to perform
and so suspicions are raised due to the lack of easy accounting of their clean funds

if you really think that making everything invisible is going to result in regulators just quitting their jobs and leaving people alone. you lot are really delusional to think you can work around regulators in the hope the regulators back down.
 wake up and grasp reality outside your selfish whims and realise how the real world works outside your dreams and hopes of getting maliciously, unethically rich whilst hoping not to get noticed by the tax man.

emphasis:
making a currency harder to prove, causes such currency to be treated as a tool that regulators do not want to have businesses associated with due to the higher risks of criminal use. its why places like coinbase does not accept liquid or monero and also flags users that use mixers.

yep coinsbase is sister company to Liquid sidechain, but it does not use or accept customer use of its sister company product for the very reason of it going against its regulatory duties as a money service business.

it doesnt matter that other coins like monero/liquid has some special code 'for privacy'. by just having the special code makes money services businesses that follow regulations just avoid using those crypto's OR treat users that do use them as a higher level of suspicion. and thus causes users to be put onto watch lists. thus defeating the privacy ploy the selfish people tried to promote the need for the changes..

do you get it yet

so here is an option
instead you the certain known group of people trying endlessly to say bitcoin is broke and normal people should use other altnets or services and then attempt to break bitcoin to then fit these other altnets/services.
about about you silly group just go play with yourselves on your favoured altnets.

yep the silly mind games of "bitcoin should not be used by normal peoples daily lives" whilst then promoting that it should be bloated up with locks and mixer spam is absolutely stupid game to play.
sorry but bitcoin should reduce the mixer spam and instead just let normal users use bitcoin for normal use

stop trying to break bitcoin. and just go play with your own altnets if you want to mix your 'clean funds' go on. go play around over on your altnet. have fun over there. its your altnet. so go play with it.

stop trying to break bitcoin by pretending its already broke. just to fulfil your selfish silly agenda's

as for you silly group of known people
do you realise that the influencers you adore so much, the ones that you idolise that are offering you these privacy altnets and sidechains and privacy services.. are paid/sponsored by the same corporations that do the chain analysis and have the regulatory exchanges that are the ones that share information and ask users about KYC.

yep you are sheep in a wolf valley being told by wolves to run away from shepherds that have secured land, when you should be running away from the wolves that are barking at you to be afraid of something thats not as harmful as the entities telling you to be afraid.
they are telling you to hate and say that secured open farmland is bad. telling you to stay in wolf value and trying to tell you to invite more victims into wolf valley as the only way to save yourself from being bit.

by creating a meaningless problem that was not a problem the DCG corporation can then set up another business/service to get users to buy into.
and you silly lil group of fangirls fell right into it and your loyalty is making them money while trying to cause headaches for normal users that just want to use bitcoin for what it is/was.

so wake up to realise you are being played. or move over to your favoured altnet/service and go play with your friendly influencers.

[o_e_l_e_o]

is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible?

Maybe you are making some bitcoins fungible, but you are not making Bitcoin fungible. If anything, you are actively working against Bitcoin fungibility by enforcing taint and directly funding blockchain analysis.

That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing.

For carefully selected outputs which are already treated as fungible by your blockchain analysis partners. To paraphrase someone from Twitter: What good is a washing machine which only washes clean clothes?

I still don't get how it's possible to push something through that someone's not philosophically aligned with.

Because profits are more important than philosophies.

[DooMAD]

It becomes important to separate the two things when censorship resistance is in question. Wasabi is censorship resistant, zkSNACKs isn't.

Right, so as a result, you felt the need to encourage blacklisting in a project that isn't censorship resistant in order to avoid blacklisting in the one that is censorship resistant?  I think we need a clearer explanation of how that's supposed to make sense. 

[nullius]

Orwellian “Fungibility”

Of course I am more than happy to hear thoughts on this topic, but I hope I demonstrated that my fungibility claims aren't pulled out of my ass, in fact they are the result of years of research on the topic, so I'd appreciate not calling me a liar, because of them.

It will profit you not to make breathtakingly audacious claims in public, and then get huffy and play the victim about people calling you a liar.

This is an exercise in classic Orwellian doublethink:

• Divide the set of all bitcoins into two distinguishable subsets, “bitcoins accepted by Wasabi CJ” and “bitcoins rejected by Wasabi CJ”, based on vague, arbitrary, centrally decreed secret criteria derived from blockchain spying (“analysis”).  This is a new problem on the input side of a Wasabi mix.  By citing your own 2021 essay, you divert people’s attention with (anyway unsound) arguments on the output side.
• Declare that Wasabi solves Bitcoin’s fungibility problem, because on the output side of a Wasabi mix, coins within the minuscule anonymity set of one Wasabi mix are indistinguishable from each other (see below!).  Perhaps you should better say that it is more or less weakly difficult overall to discriminate between coins in the “bitcoins accepted by Wasabi CJ” subset.  (Your argument, quoted below, is poorly stated; I am sorry to fix it for you.)

Accordingly, I propose a new marketing slogan for Wasabi:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
WASABI SOLVES FUNGIBILITY

Happy to help.  For the marketing consultant fee, my tip address is in my unpaid signature.  Wasabi is a profitable company, currently running a massive paid signature advertising campaign; thus, as I assist them with doubleplusgood truth in advertising, I hope that everyone won’t begrudge me a bit of ruthless mercenary capitalism there.


Misquoting Zooko

Pre-posting edit/insertion:  This is one of the dangers of sloppy research.  Before making my hereby post, I decided properly to source the anonymous quote in the pity epigraph at the top of nopara73’s 24 May 2021 Medium essay:

Even though Bitcoin is the worst privacy system ever, everyone in the community strongly values privacy [src]

In its current revision, the diyhpluswiki does not identify the speaker or the context.  That quote is from Zooko Wilcox, later the founder of Zcash, at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal in 2015.  Zooko thereby discussed three privacy technologies:  Lightning Network with onion routing, Confidential Transactions, and Zerocash with zk-SNARKs—the antecedent to Zcash.

The so-called “transcript” (apparently copypasted from here) is of very poor quality; it is a paraphrase of what Zooko said, or even some condensed notes approximately recording someone’s interpretation thereof.

Here is are Zooko’s exact words:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6PnLSH40lQ&t=2901s

Back up a bit over half a minute, and see the context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6PnLSH40lQ&t=2863s


Zooko worked on Digicash (1996–98), and he now leads Zcash.  At both Digicash and Zcash, Zooko’s standard for privacy was and is:  Statistical hiding.



(Cited version; current version.  Graphic copied from what I had already written below.)

I doubt that he would appreciate his words being used to pump a commercial mixer that it is known Chainalysis can break (use this link from Tor), which is in bed with blockchain spying (“analysis”), which is now promoting an Orwellian doublethink notion of “fungibility”.

Note:  I have been yearning for zero-knowledge proof privacy since 2013; I will accept nothing less!  I am proud that I am a Zcasher since Sprout.  I was pleased to see that Edward Snowden gets it (Tor-friendly link to read Tor-blocking Forbes article).  One of my forthcoming essays, off-topic here, will be about how a nonsensical FUD campaign has deprived Bitcoiners of the privacy that Bitcoin deserves.  Although Zooko may be unhappy with my opinion against POS, I am fully in agreement with him about blockchain privacy:

1. You can’t add privacy.
Build strong security into the foundation.

2. Decoys don’t solve the problem.
Encryption and Zero-Knowledge Proofs do.

3. You can’t add privacy to money in flight.
Privacy comes from shielded money at rest.

Learn more on this here: https://nopara73.medium.com/privacy-fungibility-anonymity-451d029355f7

I hope that you are not mining these discussions for ideas to twist to your audience on Medium, even as you tell people here who have proficiency in the subject to “learn more” from your marketing fluff article that you wrote before Wasabi hopped into bed with blockchain analysis.

Anyway, let’s take a look.  The key quote, the only part that is really relevant here, is this:

All formatting is in the original:

Wasabi users k-anonymize their unique UTXOs such that the result of the coinjoin is ideally 100 distinct, yet k-anonymous, outputs, where k = 100. These k-anonymized UTXOs are indistinguishable from each other. This is how anonymization, a mathematical tool, realizes the indistinguishability — also known as homogeneity or fungibility — property of a currency.

That is an attempt to bedazzle your nontechnical audience with jargon.  An old marketing adage I heard somewhere:  If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em.

Those who think in technically precise terms, and who understand the terminology, will understand that you basically just said you give coins “indistinguishability — also known as homogeneity or fungibility” within a set with size k = 100.  It is unimpressive.

Loth though I am to fix your fungibility argument for you, I should point out that all coins within the “Wasabi CoinJoin” set have a much weaker sort of practical indistinguishability.  I will not hereby reach any attempt rigorously to characterize that.  The point here is that you break fungibility between coins accepted to a Wasabi CoinJoin, versus coins refused by a Wasabi CoinJoin.  As aforementioned:  You now break fungibility on the input side, not the output side, then link to your old 2021 essay to confuse the issues for people who have fuzzy thinking.

Furthermore, all of this appiles only if coins are not traced through a CoinJoin.

Overselling Coinjoin

Your marketing pretends that CoinJoin provides excellent state-of-the-art privacy.  This is not true; and your hyped-up overselling of CoinJoin makes me suspicious, when you are working with blockchain analysis.

CoinJoin is a clever workaround for what I have previously called Bitcoin’s “fatal flaw”.  I think it was ingenious, when Greg Maxwell invented it in 2013—an invention which, I must add, followed Maxwell’s attempt to confuse early “coin taint” analysis.  But I tell you, it is only a workaround.  It does not fix the problem.

And this is especially problematic when you assure your too-trusting users that they are safe when you collaborate with blockchain spying, because their privacy is assured by Wasabi’s technology.  I find it most worrisome that Wasabi announced it was working with blockchain analysis, just around the time that Chainalysis disclosed they have some secret method to unmix Wasabi CJ:

[2022-02-22] [Tor-friendly link]

Jumping off from the Coinfirm analysis, blockchain analytics company Chainalysis saw the presumed attacker had sent 50 BTC to a Wasabi Wallet, a private desktop Bitcoin wallet that aims to anonymize transactions by mixing several together in a so-called CoinJoin. Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges.

(Note for the sake of correctness:  I am not one of the people who assumed that Wasabi was working with Chainalysis itself.  All of my posts have consistently described Wasabi as being in bed with unspecified blockchain spying (“analysis”).  I was quite careful about this.)

But the vulnerability of CoinJoin in practice is not news.  For one of many potential problems with CoinJoin, here is an except of one of my “Newbie” posts (a few days after I started active posting!), illustrated with a figure from [Goldfeder, et al. 2017]:

I guess they could identify you only once you cashed out. Other than that, your identity is safe (unless you have verified your identify in an online wallet, of course);

WRONG.  For but one of a hundred other ways your identities could be linked, even if you mix with CoinJoin, check out this pretty picture from a research paper I referenced in my earlier post on this thread:

Stop giving dangerously bad advice!

I doubt that blockchain analysis companies ever fully disclose their current capabilities to the public.  Never mind state-level threats, such as the NSA’s mass-surveillance program against Bitcoiners.  The academic literature has years-old attacks for unwinding CoinJoins in realistic scenarios.

For example, if the victim employs 3 rounds of CoinJoin and the adversary observes two of the victim’s payments, he can link them back to her wallet (despite mixing) with 98% accuracy.  Multiple rounds of mixing increase privacy, but those gains are quickly stripped away if the adversary observes more than 2 payments.

is it fair to say that Wasabi is making bitcoins fungible?

Maybe you are making some bitcoins fungible, but you are not making Bitcoin fungible. If anything, you are actively working against Bitcoin fungibility by enforcing taint and directly funding blockchain analysis.

Well said.  It is merely Orwellian doublethink—or perhaps, a marketing sleight-of-hand to pull the wool over the eyes of nontechnical users who do not think in such precise terms.


On dirty language:

That's exactly what Wasabi Wallet coinjoins are doing.

For carefully selected outputs which are already treated as fungible by your blockchain analysis partners. To paraphrase someone from Twitter: What good is a washing machine which only washes clean clothes?

I strongly disagree with that use of terminology.  I intended to address that in some drafts that didn’t get done because my time was eaten up by some drama last week.  I hadn’t seen that at the time; I found it shortly after I had fixed something in the Bitcoin Wiki that really horrified me (another WIP):

Revision as of 04:55, 31 July 2022

Nullius

(Axe ridiculously wrong, foolish, and repulsive description of Zerocoin as “laundering” coins—including an express description of Zerocoin as a “money laundering pool”.  WTF?  This whole thing needs to be rewritten.)

That wording was in place for eight years.  When I was done vomiting, I changed “money laundering pool” to “shielded value pool”, the terminology that Zcash uses.  I then began to write a very long forum post prospectively entitled, “This is why we can’t have good things!”  Not yet done due to distractions.  It touches on that Twitter question to Wasabi.  Here is a rough excerpt:

That question [“What's the point of a washing machine that only washes clean laundry?”] is logically isomorphic to the “nothing to hide” argument against privacy:  Why do you want privacy, if you have nothing to hide?  And it dovetails with the mindset that everyone is guilty till proved innocent:  Only those with dirty laundry need falsely to prove their innocence, while innocent people with clean laundry can just let themselves be watched, tapped, tracked, traced.

Innocent people need not fear being imprisoned in a global panopticon of perpetual mass-surveillance.  Only guilty people don’t want to be imprisoned under the watchful eye of unseen wardens.

Of course, that argument is ridiculous. [...]

What is adequate privacy?

Note:  I had intended to cut this down to a briefer summary before posting, because it seemed to diverge too far off-topic.  But since nopara73 was kind enough to misquote Zooko without attribution, I will take the liberty of slightly extending this section instead.

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

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!

Thanks.  Pending whatever other topics I create on these subjects, I should note in brief two things:

Fiat cash is no longer so private—not “untraceable”.  The automated scanning and logging of serial numbers has been sort of privacy-lore passed about in privacy circles for some time; and I have seen Snowden mention it as a major problem nowadays.  But I did not know of any specific, citable information about this.  Thus, I spent some hours researching systems that are available on the market today, and presumably in common use.  This will be the subject of a new thread.

You have mentioned Monero a few times.  Thus although I don’t want to diverge too much into a topic I intend to address in other threads, I want to make it clear for the record that I do not consider Monero adequate.

My own analogy:  Any sort of mixer scheme (including Monero mixins) is like stabbing yourself with a rusty fork, and then putting on a bandage.  Such schemes leak information onto the blockchain, and try to generate noise covering up the information that is leaked.  The true transaction graph is still there, hidden in the noise.  This information can sometimes be sussed out with probabilistic attacks, or used for confirmation attacks, or cross-correlated with other information—and it is a rule in security, attacks only improve.

Ultimately, I only deem adequate a technology that leaks no information at all.  Instead of stabbing yourself and bandaging the wound, don’t stab yourself.

Digicash (1996–98) had perfect unlinkability—statistical hiding.  However, it was unavoidably centralized.  The blind bearer note system that I almost built a few years ago would have similar properties (with quite different cryptography).  I have remarked before that Satoshi was caught on the horns of a dilemma between privacy and decentralization.

This is both perfectly unlinkable, decentralized—and now, fully trustless [paper now linked above]:



That is not k-anonymity.  Rather, statistical zero knowledge provides what Jameson Lopp (2014) properly called “infinite anonymity”.  To understand it requires an entirely different mindset.  Few people get it; even in the Zcash community, I am frustrated by a widespread lack of comprehension about what zero knowledge really means in practice.  There are no “anonymity sets” partioning zero-knowledge shielded coins within a shielded value pool.  The concept does not even apply.  And within the shielded pool, a public transaction graph does not exist.

(N.b., I am hereby discussing a privacy technology in itself.  What I have just said applies to transactions that occur fully within a zero-knowledge shielded value pool.  The well-known attacks on the transparent value pool, and on people who have careless opsec at the boundary between pools, are not relevant.  In particular, attempting to use a privacy coin as a Bitcoin pseudo-mixer is a well-known footgun; that has nothing to do with the technology.)

Some people get it.  I was pleased to learn that Snowden secretly participated in the creation of Zcash, under a pseudonym.  In 2021, Snowden declared that “Bitcoin is really failing comprehensively on the privacy angle,” and he called for Bitcoin to be made “private by design”; he made similar remarks in March and in June of 2022.  Although I don’t agree with him about everything, Snowden understands the privacy issue; thus, I am unsurprised that in 2016, he was secretly onboard with the same privacy technology as I have been wanting in Bitcoin since 2013.

Like Snowden, I myself have said that “Bitcoin has a fatal flaw...  an append-only global public ledger [is] an idea which frankly horrified me.”  I now modify what I said there in 2020 about “my proposed solution”.  The solution ultimately needs to be on L1, but I clearly understand the state of zero-knowledge proof technology.  In 2013, applying NIZK proofs to a blockchain was a research idea; and Turing-complete zk-SNARKs were first invented.  In 2016, the first fielded implementation was bleeding-edge new technology.  In 2017–early 2018, I myself suffered some severe problems as an early adopter.  By late 2018, it was basically usable, albeit with some significant remaining problems—worst of all, the trusted setup.  In early 2020, I knew that it was still not yet sufficiently mature for Bitcoin.  Only in 2022, after nine years of R&D and a fully-fielded implementation of refinements of the 2019 research breakthrough that got rid of the trusted setup, I am ready to declare that the technology is mature for widespread general adoption.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Well said.  It is merely Orwellian doublethink—or perhaps, a marketing sleight-of-hand to pull the wool over the eyes of nontechnical users who do not think in such precise terms.

I am fairly certain that most of the people behind Wasabi don't believe many of the things they are saying:

It certainly seems like this is the narrative they are trying to push; that they are the sole arbitrators of what is and is not fungible. As I said previously, as far as I am concerned this viewpoint is actively malicious.

I strongly disagree with that use of terminology.

Just to address this point: So do I. You are well aware that I have argued long and hard against nonsensical statements such as that anyone who has the slightest interest in maintaining some financial privacy must be a criminal, terrorist, money launderer, or what have you.

However, given that nopara73 has consistently and repeatedly failed to answer basic questions as to how he thinks blacklisting and censorship is somehow beneficial to fungibility, has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated that he believes in taint and taint analysis, and is building a product specifically designed to cater only to those good little citizens with "nothing to hide", an answer to a basic question using his own preferred terminology might be more forthcoming.

[nullius]

I strongly disagree with that use of terminology.

Just to address this point: So do I. You are well aware that I have argued long and hard against nonsensical statements such as that anyone who has the slightest interest in maintaining some financial privacy must be a criminal, terrorist, money launderer, or what have you.

Indeed, you have long been one of the most consistent and well-spoken advocates on this forum for the principle of privacy.

My argument was directed not at you personally, but at some widespread and pernicious wrong thinking that I know you have so oft opposed.  It is too bad that many people just don’t or won’t get it.  In the big picture, since last week, I have been discovering and rediscovering just how broken everything is—the subject of a new project which forced me temporarily to set aside something I’ve been working on for zero-knowledge proof privacy.

However, given that nopara73 has consistently and repeatedly failed to answer basic questions as to how he thinks blacklisting and censorship is somehow beneficial to fungibility, has consistently and repeatedly demonstrated that he believes in taint and taint analysis, and is building a product specifically designed to cater only to those good little citizens with "nothing to hide", an answer to a basic question using his own preferred terminology might be more forthcoming.

That is an interesting point.  I didn’t think of it that way.

I am fairly certain that most of the people behind Wasabi don't believe many of the things they are saying:

It certainly seems like this is the narrative they are trying to push; that they are the sole arbitrators of what is and is not fungible. As I said previously, as far as I am concerned this viewpoint is actively malicious.

The evidence indicates as much.  Indeed, if privacy and fungibility are considered valuable, it looks to me like nopara73 and Wasabi are doing something tantamount to an exit scam:  They build up a good reputation, and they are now using it to slip in support for Mike Hearn’s old agenda.

This is one of the oldest debates in Bitcoin.  Most newer users do not realize it.  I will soon place it in its proper context.

[franky1]

taint is not a word invented to find criminal activity

its original meaning in regards to bitcoin was the bitcoin transparent accounting to prove all coins originated from a block mined coin reward.

it has only in recent years become re-defined as the fear and scare tactics of 'anti fungible'

bitcoin does not ask or reveal any info that breaks fungibility.

EG
imagine you received funds from bitpay.
bitcoin does not reveal if those funds are
a. employee wage(income tax implications)
b. merchant funds from sales(corporation tax sales tax implications)
c. customer refund from a product return (no tax implications)

so bitcoin itself does not harm peopls usage of value not tag what peoples use is.
pretending bitcoin reveals KYC and criminal acts is the lie.. the scare tactics people use to promote middle man services and altnet requirements to off board regular users into.

what you find is that its the businesses themselves that categorise things. not bitcoin

and it does not matter what you do with bitcoin to change that.
by brutalising bitcoin as a whole to become like monero. businesses just stop using monero/bad bitcoin.

take things like coinbase, they dont accept it as they deem any funds from monero as a high risk
and yes they also deem ANY funds coming from a mixer as high risk

those mixers are trying desperately to try to survive and pretend they are not a risk
some (like wasabi) are trying to pretend they offer a clean service by blaklisting criminal acts.. but this will fail because no matter how 'clean' they are.. they themselves are still a mixer no matter who their customer is, which is still a suspicion rated level that other services will rate them at.(they cant escape being a risk by being a mixer. because they ARE a mixer)

there is a big difference between a mixer and a exchange. even when at basic level their business is to swap currency. because the PURPOSE of the swap is different
exchanges swap currency for allowing gateways between currencies..
mixers swap currencies to try to evade investigations of sources of funding and links to crime.(laundering)

mixers will always be mixers and always come with a suspicion rating by other services. they cant escape this no matter what they try

some mixers try to vary their coin collation and coin redistribution process to try to not show the pattern, and thus try to hide from appearing as a mixer.
again this wont work, because when users deposit their mixed coins into exchanges, exchanges can question the users and customers if they dont want their coins confiscated/forfeited, would need to explain AND PROVE the origins of funds.

here is the thing idiots dont think about or dont mention when they play the distraction games of fear and scare stories pretending even innocent people need to use mixers, or need to vote for bitcoin to break its accounting system to hide coin origins

The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is a wide ranging statute. One of the principle purposes of the Act is to confiscate the financial proceeds of crime. It can impact not only upon those convicted of crime but also on people connected to a convicted person, to people acquitted of a crime and sometimes even to people who have never been charged with a crime.

At it most straight forward, those convicted of a wide variety of crimes can find themselves the subject of proceedings under this legislation. The law does not confine itself to seizing only the proceeds of the crime a person has been convicted of. The Act allows the prosecutor to take account of a persons financial affairs for up to six years prior to the offence for which they were convicted. If a person cannot prove where their money or property came from there is an assumption that it came from general criminal conduct. It can then be included within the figure known as, The Benefit from General Criminal Conduct.

by not being able to prove origins of funds came from legit transactions. then innocent people get treated as accessories to a crime by facilitating and being part of money laundering.
by having their legit coin transactions swapped out and handed to a criminal and the criminal giving the legit person the criminal related coins makes the innocent person now guilty.

..
the only reason idiots are trying so hard to promote everyone should hide their transactions and break bitcoin accounting rules is out of pure selfish greed and malicious intent by the shady people that want to get away with a crime and allow innocent people to be thrown into the fire.

mixers DO NOT HELP preserve privacy nor create fungibility.
mixers cause exchanges to highlight people as suspicious purely for using mixers.
it gets people noticed and put onto watch lists.
and due to not being able to prove honest good legit transaction value sources. all coins then become suspicious

you cannot win against the regulations by creating a community where by if everyone is treated as suspicious then regulators give up.
that utopian dream will never come true. instead the risk bar is risen where it then becomes even harder for normal people to just use bitcoin

however innocent users can protect themselves by not getting involved in shady propositions that malicious people advertise. dont allow malicious people to ruin bitcoin in the short term gain of their selfish whims. while destroying bitcoins utility for the long term.. instead stay clear of malicious things and enjoy bitcoin as it was intended, open, free transparent good money that has rules that wont allow counterfeitting double spending or injecting random new units outside of the rules. and enjoy using bitcoin without needing to process a transaction or lock a value into a group/partnership through middle men

no currency is fungible, its a myth. people just have become used to the rules of a currency by learning their limits and functions that people learn how to treat different allocations of money in certain ways that its no longer a headache or a task to use money.

EG people dont bother using a $100 bank note to buy a $2 can of pepsi. because they know that the retailer will question it and object to accepting it
people get used to only gettng $500 out of an ATM due to limits of bank policy
people getting funds from their investment portfolio and their employer know how to treat them differently on their tax filings. so much so that they forget that these different treatments are proof that fiat is not fungible
people know if they are handed money from drug dealers they become implicated in proceeds of crime so they to try to do things to hide their involvement

yep even if you have $10k from legit sources. taking it across the border, you can have that money confiscated and forfeited. if you put that $10k into escrow for a mortgage deposit. that can trigger stamp duty taxes and have other KYC stuff done where they check your credit rating and speak to your employers about your income, etc.

no currency is fungible. and if funds are even semi linked to a criminal act. its then the innocent person that has to prove their innocence if they are to have any hope of getting it returned. no matter what the currency is.

these silly scare tactics of pretending bitcoin is broke and people need to use mixers, or bitcoin needs to actually become broken to protect people is wrong and the opposite of fact.

bitcoin should be used by the masses that want to use it. it should not be a testing ground to offboard people into middle men services or altnets for the greedy and malicious groups to syphon and steal from the innocent

if malicious people that want to do shady crap want to continue their lifestyle. so be it. but go play with your own middlemen services and altnets. and stop trying to drag everyone down to your level using fear and scare stories that bitcoin is attacking innocent people. bitcoin is not

[o_e_l_e_o]

It is too bad that many people just don’t or won’t get it.

Indeed. When the average user does not understand the importance of protecting their privacy, it is unfortunate. When a so called privacy wallet does not understand the importance of protecting privacy and advertises themselves on lies and deliberately misleading information, it is a scam.

I unhid franky1's post exactly because I was sure it would prove the point being discussed here, and he did not disappoint:

the only reason idiots are trying so hard to promote everyone should hide their transactions and break bitcoin accounting rules is put of pure selfish and greed and malicious intent by the shady people that want to get away with a crime and allow innocent people to be thrown into the fire.

Perfect example. "If you want privacy, it's clearly because you are trying to get away with a crime." Of course. There is no other reason to want privacy than if you are trying to hide a crime. That's why everyone walks through airports naked. Why would you need clothes unless you are trying to smuggle something across borders? That's why all emails ever sent are publicly published to a central database that anyone can read. Why would you need email privacy unless you are trying to commit a crime? That's why franky1 posts under his real name and address and not a pseudonym, right? Why do you need privacy, franky1? What are you trying to hide?