Why? So that their service could operate smoothly. It seemed like a reasonable deal: making a minimal gesture to the authorities in exchange for a greater "public good."
Picture this: You're a company that aims to improve Bitcoin privacy. To me, this means combating surveillance resulting from blockchain analysis. The enemy, among every blockchain spectator out there, is primarily blockchain surveillance firms, as they hold vast amounts of data, ranging from the light wallet servers they operate to the numerous data points they buy and sell with third parties, such as KYC data, IP addresses, etc.
What would you think of this company's integrity if it suddenly announced that it would be funding the enemy? That's essentially what happened, as far as the public is aware. Of course, they didn't say, "we will be funding blockchain surveillance", but something like "we will buy information about the inputs". But in reality, they were only making these firms more powerful by buying into this harmful notion. Here's another strange and suspicious aspect of this situation: why purchase from these firms when you
openly acknowledge that their analysis is based on false positives?
And even we justify all that; justify zkSNACKs for preemptively starting funding blockchain analysis and blacklisting, and blame it on the authorities for potentially pressuring them in the future. How on Earth can one justify that their input registration was
permitted by the blockchain analysis firm? This is like making your software insecure and fragile, on purpose. People with the greatest incentive to break coinjoins suddenly had the power over who is allowed to join a coinjoin. This is nuts.
If you're asking me, this is
way too much gesture to the authorities, and ultimately for no reason. zkSNACKs had similar confrontation by the US government, as Samourai did, despite the fact that they (zk) sold out their users.
And these were just two of the practices employed by Wasabi; there are countless other red flags that make it impossible for me to trust them with my privacy, even if the client software is open-source.
Those participating in the signature campaigns couldn’t have known that one day all mixer services, even the oldest ChipMixer, would shut down.
We knew. No centralized service can survive over the long term; that's the reason Bitcoin was created.
We certainly weren't "scamming" anyone, as there was often a warning that using the X mixer required you to trust it with your coins. Calling this practice a scam is as baseless as claiming that those who directed you to FTX were scamming, simply because they might have foreseen its shutdown, given the numerous examples of other CEXs that had been hacked or gone bankrupt.
Why is there this pettiness? You, the "old-timers" here, labeled Kruw a scammer for months, accusing him of collaborating with the government.
To clarify my position: I don't believe Kruw is a scammer (and if I ever referred to him as such, I publicly apologize). Whether or not constantly evading arguments is considered fraudulent is open to debate. But, I have actually defended him against people who labeled him a scammer due to this recent bug. I do, however, find him untrustworthy for the reasons I've outlined in
here.
Why can't we draw a line and look to the future?
Well, we
have to. Without privacy solutions like coinjoins, Bitcoin becomes the wet dream of blockchain surveillance. It's just that the solutions currently available, in my view, are insufficient. At least comparably to privacy technologies employed by Monero. (It's been a while since I paid with Bitcoin last time.)
Perhaps the line we need to draw is against
maximalism, where anything that cannot be implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is dismissed as "unnecessary shitcoin features".
