Post
Topic
Board Wallet software
Re: The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs
by
PrimeNumber7
on 20/03/2022, 18:51:14 UTC
If they are willing to ban certain inputs, then it won't be long before they are willing to cooperate with blockchain analysis and de-anonymize transactions altogether. Yet another good entity which has sold out its principles and its users. What a shame.

Still, it seems that Wasabi has never been as safe as we all think:
Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges.
As you note, it appears that Wasabi transactions can already be tracked by blockchain analysis companies. Most likely, Chainanalysis did not need information from Wasabi to trace their transactions -- they only needed to use the service to see how it works.

This will push more people to centralized mixing services.
Ehh, probably not. A centralized mixing service can do the same thing.

Pardon my ignorance — but how hard is it to run such coordinators in a private manner? At the very least private enough for the authorities to have a very hard time in finding you if it's the case that you didn't comply.
Probably very difficult, if not impossible. Even if you are running a tor hidden service, the authorities will attempt to find ways to get your hidden service to leak information about the "real" IP address of your server. Pretty much every darknet site has been shut down this way.

Obviously running a coordinator is not the same as running a darknet site, so law enforcement may not put as much effort into finding the person behind it. But you never know.