Re: The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs
[I know a guy who was called to his local tax office and asked why he hasn't payed his taxes for certain types of services he offered in the past. They had proof of his transactions dating back 2-3 years. They told him he would get fined and maybe incarcerated (depending on the total amount he owes). The dude got so scared that he admitted he did it longer than the period they had proof for. Someone else would have just laughed at the accusations and made up a plausible explanation.
Selling yourself out is one thing. Selling out thousands of users who use your service is another altogether. If Wasabi were actually being sanctioned, then the correct thing to do would be as I explained above - warn people it is going to happen, explain how they should mitigate it, and maybe shut down their centralized coordinator altogether to encourage the proliferation of decentralized ones which won't censor transactions. But doing that would mean less money for them, so obviously much better to sell out their users than affect their profits.My personal take: if they created Wasabi for the privacy they promised and truly had the intentions and ideas they mentioned they had, they would have been prepared for this moment. And if they were prepared for this moment, they would have fought and Wasabi would have at least yet not been censored. At least, not by their own choice of doing so.
Agree 100%. The fact that they capitulated with absolutely zero fight and of their own free will months or even years before they would actually be forced to makes me question their real motives entirely. Because honestly, their behavior is pretty indistinguishable from a honeypot; set up a privacy enhancing service, get lots of people to use it, then in one fell swoop start censoring transactions and cooperating with blockchain analysis companies.Since you mentioned Fluffypony, I'll share a slide from a presentation he gave:
