I just read many posts I have missed and I have to say one thing. If you claim you strongly support privacy and your user base is mostly composed of privacy geeks, if you turn your back to all the things you claimed and suddenly agree to work with whoever to debunk transactions then your goals are definitely not strongly supporting privacy and offering your users a way to be more private on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
If I was nopara, I would have let Wasabi die. I would have let everyone down or whatever but never would I have agreed to apply procedures and collaborate with parties that are against the ideas Wasabi began from. I see this situation closely resembling Google's sudden action of changing their 'Don't Do Evil' motto. No matter how silent that change of motto was, it spoke and still speaks VERY loudly.
I understand there is a reputation at stake. I understand they would become the enemy of the Government, and that probably nopara and the other developers have been so far living off Wasabi. But as I previously said, if my intention was to offer users privacy, no way in hell would I accept to collaborate with the entity they are trying to cover themselves up from. I thought by creating Wasabi there were some risks nopara and everyone else had to assume. One of them is the Government conspiring against them.
Sure, information about my transaction is public. There is probably a TON of data that can be used to determine with a pretty high accuracy certain information about my transaction such as origin, even after a Coin Join. But only by denying these regulations and invasive procedures can we at least try to put an end to all of it. If I stop using Binance as an Exchange, Electrum as a Wallet, Ledger as a Closed Source Hardware Wallet, Windows as an Operating System, now Wasabi as a privacy focused Exchange et cetera, the amount of information collected about us becomes much, much lower. And without enough information, there is no point in doing Blockchain Analysis. And if Blockchain Analysis companies do not have collaborators, their existence is once again worthless.
Jesus, this whole thread reminds me why I don't use Reddit. Snippets from the upvoted comments include
Then one comment pointing out that centralized exchanges are antithetical to many of the fundamentals of bitcoin is downvoted until it isn't visible any more.
What an echo chamber of stupid.
That is not just Reddit. I am convinced it is the general mindset of humans. Not sure what they are smoking or how and when the hell did privacy become a crime but things have been going wrong for years now.
Maybe we should start thinking about making our own list of Blacklisted Centralized Exchanges that are known for confiscating coins from their customers if they notice connection with mixers or coinjoins
A list of Whitelisted Centralized Exchanges would be a perfect addition to your proposed list. It is nowadays rare to find a Centralized Exchange that still at least partially allows you to stay more private than most of the top Exchanges do.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next step from them would be sending all customer information with ''evidence'' to government and starting some dystopian legal process against people.
Very plausible and something I have been thinking about for a while. They keep trying to attack from various angles to check where the weakest spot is, and the weakest spot seems to be right now our own mind. By cunningly teaching us privacy is worthless and useless, they now have a big load of people who are willingly giving any kind of proof and documentation just to reach to that one free Dollar.
I already accepted this fate. I accept there is a not negligible possibility that years from now I will be judged and persecuted for using Cryptocurrencies and trying to stay private. At that point in time, you will probably have more freedom in jail than you will at home. But I still prefer to rather stay positive and believe this is just a dystopian script we will not have to live through.
-
Regards,
PrivacyG