Can what happened to Samourai Wallet happen to Electrum ?

[juhobtc]

I don't believe things will go that far, and the reason they were shut down is that they enhance privacy for BTC users, and we all know the government is targeting any service that enhances privacy, by charging them for allowing money launderers conceal their tx's. So Electrum and some of the services you mentioned do not fall under this category, because they do not enhance privacy or make it hard to track BTC tx's.

Electrum is just a wallet that does not violate any laws that could allow the government to pay attention to it. There are no prohibited functions in it, only the most necessary things to receive and send bitcoins, also can hold there, but for this it is better to use a hardware wallet.

I was thinking about the sparrow, it has some kind of mixing function, although I have never used it enough, so I am well versed in all its capabilities. I just use an Electrum bundle with a hardware wallet and it seems to me that this is enough to safely store my btc.

[Z-tight]

Electrum is just a wallet that does not violate any laws that could allow the government to pay attention to it. There are no prohibited functions in it, only the most necessary things to receive and send bitcoins, also can hold there,

You are right about Electrum, however, both mixers and CoinJoin are not illegal, but how many mixers have been taken down, and now Samouria which is also just a wallet that helps bitcoiners enhance privacy has also been taken down. while Wasabi didn't wait for the government to knock on their doors before they shut down their CoinJoin service.

The point here is that the government has opened the pandora's box and they can ban any service and claim that it enhances privacy for bitcoiners, even if the wallet isn't advertised as such. Personally i do not want things to go that far, but i think we are already heading in that direction.

[shield132]

Hello,

I saw that the founders of Samourai Wallets were arrested and that the website to download the wallet was frozen. I guess this has made users of this wallet unsecured.
Do you think this can happen to other software wallets ? Especially Electrum ?

That can't happen to Electrum. Electrum has existed since 2011 and the number of people and companies that use Electrum must be high. If they seize, block or ban Electrum, too many people will be in trouble, and this can result in protests.
To be fair, I don't know what they have to seize, a code? It's perfectly legal to use Bitcoin and to run your own node, not only legal, but it's necessary for the safety of Bitcoin. If they seize Electrum nodes, we can create our own node and connect Electrum to that one and use the Electrum wallet again. I personally think that what happened to Samourai can't happen to Electrum because these two are very different from each other.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I was thinking about the sparrow, it has some kind of mixing function, although I have never used it enough, so I am well versed in all its capabilities.

Sparrow was using Samourai's whirlpool. Now that Samourai is shut down, the whirlpool server is not working, and if you try to mix with Sparrow, you'll get an error. They removed it in their latest version: https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/releases.

To be fair, I don't know what they have to seize, a code?

People. At first, they were confiscating coins sitting in mixers, and taking control over mixers, scaring people from using mixers. Now they're seizing developers who work on privacy-enhancing software, essentially scaring people from writing code that makes your coins anonymous.

If they don't have a person to seize, they cannot do anything. You can't stop decentralized software. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time, like Bitcoin.

[pooya87]

Do we have any good alternatives to GitHub? A platform that is more like a "decentralized GitHub" that the US Government can not just threaten?

It's called git. 

Git is the protocol and Github is the implementation and the host of that protocol to share code. There is no viable alternative for that host that is not centralized or located in the same jurisdiction. For example some suggest Gitlab but it is pretty much the same as Github, it is centralized and just another US based company (GitLab Inc. with headquarters San Francisco).

[NotATether]

Git is the protocol and Github is the implementation and the host of that protocol to share code. There is no viable alternative for that host that is not centralized or located in the same jurisdiction. For example some suggest Gitlab but it is pretty much the same as Github, it is centralized and just another US based company (GitLab Inc. with headquarters San Francisco).

You can run your own GitLab instance.

(I'm on mobile so won't link to it here, do a Google DuckDuckGo search for it)

[NeuroticFish]

You can run your own GitLab instance.

You can indeed install and run your own git server. But that will be just another centralized server to host the source code.

But for example a much better use of those idiotic inscriptions would be to store a snapshot/zip of bitcoin source code for every tag/release also on the blockchain.
Then seizing GitHub would set back everything only one step back (actually even less, since the devs prolly have their sources locally).

[BlackHatCoiner]

For example some suggest Gitlab but it is pretty much the same as Github, it is centralized and just another US based company (GitLab Inc. with headquarters San Francisco).

Git is the protocol, yes. Github is a centralized platform, yes. Gitlab is like Github, not exactly. Gitlab allows you to use it as cloud service (just like Github), but it also allows you to self-host your own repositories: https://about.gitlab.com/install/.

You can indeed install and run your own git server. But that will be just another centralized server to host the source code.

Yes, but after a few people start working on it, then the site that hosts it stops being a central point of failure. If the authorities shut it down, any contributor can set up an instance of the same repository; they have the repo stored in their computer.

[NeuroticFish]

Yes, but after a few people start working on it, then the site that hosts it stops being a central point of failure. If the authorities shut it down, any contributor can set up an instance of the same repository; they have the repo stored in their computer.

I guess that I'm missing something, since imho we have the same now: any contributor can upload his local files and start a new git. ...Just the change history will be gone.

On the other hand... I was thinking on forks of git where we take advantage of blockchains and... surprise, I've found out that there are already such projects, like GitTorrent where "Git objects are retrieved via the BitTorrent protocol and references are stored in Bitcoin transactions"^[1], or Git-Ssb (using Secure Scuttlebutt), or Mango "which combines Ethereum with IPFS or Swarm as a backend for Git"^[1]

Maybe other options are also there and this can be a next step. However, considering rather unlikely the scenario Bitcoin git ever gets threatened by US govt, I expect the devs will just leave it on GitHub for convenience.


^[1] The info and quotes are from this page, which is not mine, I've got it from a search engine: https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely-decentralised-7aef8bcbcfe6