Privacy is a very important issue. It can be how you manage to keep parts of your life separate. It can be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be how you respect someone else's trust. It can be a matter of your safety, even your life. At the heart of all these things, is control over your own information. In particular, control over who gets to know what.
Understanding who you can trust to maintain your privacy, who you shouldn't trust, how difficult it is to overcome your privacy protections and who can do it effectively, they those are all important things that people understand when they are trying to do it. achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most amazing records I've ever seen in honestly communicating these facts to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I'm sure anyone new to the space is well aware of the years-long conflict between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offered centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. Samourai's developers were caught in an insane and baseless oversight of trying to apply protective financial regulations to a project they just cared about, and Wasabi fired their coordinator for fear of a similar lawsuit.
This is a terrible state of things, but the truth is that the state of things has always been terrible. The last few years leading up to Samourai's arrest and Wasabi's suspension were a complete mess.
Both teams have reduced the risks of their own services, while aggressively attacking the other team. Both teams have had privacy or security issues that they have not disclosed to users. Both teams went around and hid from the simple truth of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices, or implementation flaws, both projects depended on trusting the coordinator without depend on their users.
Many people would probably still have used both projects knowing that, but the truth is that they made that choice while those projects were active for the majority without information. A final secret is about patterns in our behavior that reveal things about what we do, and the risk you take when you hide something is that there hasn't been enough effort to keep it. private no matter what you did, it could appear.
People who have published their actions can be affected. It can ruin someone's social life, it could create legal consequences if he breaks some law. In the worst outcomes, it can literally cost someone their life.
That's not really respected by many people who make privacy tools, and certainly not by the teams at Wasabi and Samourai. That needs to change. We no longer need marketing slogans and troll campaigns.
We need realistic and objective definitions of threat models. We need a real mathematical analysis of the given privacy. We need to explain the costs of money and resources required to undermine that privacy. We need a rational scientific effort, not PR campaigns and slogans.
Without that, privacy for Bitcoin is not going anywhere.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
