Privacy is a very important issue. This may be how you manage to keep certain parts of your life separate. This may be how you maintain your sense of dignity. This may be how you respect someone else’s trust. It could be a matter of your safety, even your life. At the heart of it all, you are in control of your information. In particular, control over who is exposed to what.
Understanding who you have to trust to maintain your privacy, who you don’t have to trust, how difficult it is to overcome your privacy protections and who can possibly accomplish it, all of these things are important for people to understand. There are important things to consider when trying to achieve privacy.
When it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools Bitcoin has the worst track record I have seen in honestly communicating these realities to users. I’m sure anyone who is not new to this field is well aware of the years-long feud between Wasabi and Samurai, two projects that offered centralized CoinJoin coordinators as a service. Samurai Developers was arrested in an insane and baseless overreach in an attempt to enforce custodian financial rules for a purely self-custodian project, and Wasabi voluntarily deactivated its custodian for fear of similar legal action. Had given.
It’s a terrible state of things, but the reality is that the state of things has always been terrible. The last few years before Samurai’s arrest and Wasabi’s deactivation were a whirlwind of nonsense.
Both teams have minimized and hidden the risks of their respective services, while attacking the other vigorously. Both teams had privacy or security issues that they did not disclose to users. Both teams continued to dodge and hide from the simple reality of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices, or due to implementation flaws, both projects relied on coordinators not to anonymize their users.
Many people probably used both projects knowing this, but the reality is that the option to do so was unknown to most people when those projects were active. Privacy is ultimately about the patterns of our behavior that reveal what we are doing, and the risk you run when hiding something is that what you did will be exposed if not enough effort is made to keep it private. Whatever is done it may appear.
Those whose actions are being exposed may have to face consequences. It can ruin one’s social life, and violating any law can lead to legal consequences. In the most extreme consequences, it can literally result in someone losing their life.
It’s not really respected by the vast majority of people making privacy tools, and certainly not by the teams at Wasabi and Samurai. This needs to change. We don’t need marketing slogans and troll campaigns anymore.
We need objective and rational definitions of threat models. We need a real mathematical analysis of the privacy provided. We need to define the monetary and resource costs required to weaken that privacy. We need rational scientific efforts, not public relations campaigns and slogans.
Without this, privacy is going nowhere for Bitcoin.
This article is a TakeThe opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
