Privacy is a very important issue. It may be how you manage to keep parts of your life separate. It may be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It may be how you respect another person’s trust. It may be a question of your safety, even your life. At the heart of all these things is control over your own information. Specifically, control over who is aware of what.
Understanding who you should trust to maintain your privacy, who you shouldn’t trust, how difficult it is to overcome your privacy protections, and who can feasibly achieve this are all important things for people to understand when trying to achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most egregious track records I’ve seen in honestly communicating these realities to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone not new to the space is well aware of the years-long dispute between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offered centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. The samourai developers were arrested in an insane and unfounded overreach in trying to apply escrow financial regulations to a purely self-escrow project, and Wasabi voluntarily deactivated their coordinator for fear of similar legal action.
This is a horrible state of affairs, but the reality is that the state of affairs has always been horrible. The last few years leading up to Samourai’s arrest and Wasabi’s deactivation were a whirlwind of nonsense.
Both teams have minimized and hidden the risks of their own services, while rabidly attacking the other. Both teams have had issues related to privacy or security that they did not disclose to users. Both teams shied away from and hid from the simple reality of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices or implementation flaws, both projects depended on the coordinator being trusted not to anonymize its users.
Many people would likely still have used both projects knowing that, but the reality is that the choice to do so while those projects were active for most people was uninformed. Ultimately, privacy is about patterns in our behavior that reveal things about what we’re doing, and the risk you run by hiding something is that if you haven’t made enough effort to keep it private, whatever’s there. fact can be revealed.
People who reveal their actions can have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, it could have legal consequences if any laws are broken. In the most extreme consequences, it can literally result in someone losing their life.
This isn’t really respected by a lot of people who produce privacy tools, and it definitely wasn’t by the Wasabi and Samourai teams. That needs to change. We don’t need more marketing slogans or troll campaigns.
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 necessary to undermine that privacy. We need a rational scientific effort, not public relations campaigns and slogans.
Without that, Bitcoin privacy is going nowhere.
This article is a Carry. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
