A new tweet from Wassabi Wallet regarding refusing certain UTXOs from registering to CoinJoin has resulted in many discussions in the market. The latest one is from Samourai Wallet.
The original tweet says:
The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins. pic.twitter.com/X3kBuQwieO
— Wasabi Wallet (@wasabiwallet) March 13, 2022
“The zkSNACKs coordinator will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coinjoins.”
Samourai Wallet discussed the matter in a thread. It talks about the privileges and duties of various services regarding users’ data. The thread starts saying:
CoinJoin coordinators are simply message passers. This is true of Wasabi & Whirlpool. They are not money transmitters, they are not facilitators they simply pass data packets to connected clients. Clients never surrender custody to any 3rd party. Clients collaborate w/ each other
— Samourai Wallet (@SamouraiWallet) March 14, 2022
“CoinJoin coordinators are simply message passers. This is true of Wasabi & Whirlpool. They are not money transmitters, they are not facilitators they simply pass data packets to connected clients. Clients never surrender custody to any 3rd party. Clients collaborate w/ each other.”
What’s It All About?
The talk continues with a few case studies. If you go to a website, your Internet service provider (ISP) is not liable for the content of the website, even though they give you the data packets that made your visit possible. Additionally, when you illegally download a torrent, your VPN is not responsible for any copyright violation that occurs.
To be able to freely share data, whether it is in the form of books, artworks, media, thoughts, and ideas, or the state of a UTXO, is essential for a free society and is fundamental to human nature. In recent years, there has been an alarming increase in the extreme incursion of the state into the lives of ordinary law-abiding citizens.
Samourai continues to debate regulatory approaches, too, saying in choosing to bend the knee to regulatory overreach rather than vigorously fighting it, especially when you have the resources to do so effectively, you are tacitly accepting and endorsing that overreach as well as the next one. If you give them an inch, they’ll go many miles to get it.
Blacklists are an affront to everything that is supposed to distinguish Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, improvements in protocol level privacy stagnated by 2015, rendering the censorship resistance of Bitcoin dependent on the social layer and the application layer.
Blacklists are an affront to everything that is meant to make Bitcoin exceptional. Unfortunately, research in protocol level privacy has come to a halt by 2015, leaving censorship resistance in Bitcoin to rely on the social layer and the application layer rather than the protocol layer.
The discussion ends with talks about privacy. The application layer is the last layer to be discussed. This is the location of Samourai, the tweet says. Most of the content in this space either ignores or despises privacy, at the very least. Privacy technology is always a niche, usually a passion project undertaken by small teams, and largely ignored by the general public until it isn’t anymore.
