Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 30 from 14 users
Topic OP
'Wasabigeddon' article discussion
by
n0nce
on 24/07/2022, 15:13:50 UTC
⭐ Merited by o_e_l_e_o (4) ,NotATether (4) ,hugeblack (4) ,vapourminer (3) ,bitmover (3) ,PrivacyG (2) ,stompix (2) ,mikeywith (2) ,tadamichi (1) ,Wiwo (1) ,PowerGlove (1) ,ETFbitcoin (1) ,Poker Player (1) ,DdmrDdmr (1)
After o_e_l_e_o brought my attention to the following article, I started reading it and would like to hear what you guys think about some statements being made in the preface of the article.
https://nopara73.medium.com/wasabigeddon-9c63de88c1a1
It is written by nopara73, Wasabi CEO, who is also a member of this forum, so he may even answer himself, which would be optimal.

Quote
The notion that Bitcoin is the most valued cryptocurrency in existence means the free market is predicting it’ll be the next reserve currency in the world.
No matter how much I love Bitcoin, isn't it a big of a leap making this conclusion?

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The most important thing one can choose to work on is Bitcoin’s fungibility.
I'd agree that Bitcoin fungibility is essential, and one thing we can do to ensure / maintain it is something like:
[Blacklist] of unreliable, 'taint proclaiming' Bitcoin services / exchanges

Refusing to give money to companies that don't accept Bitcoin's fungibility, just like we would refuse to keep going to a grocery store that doesn't let us pay with cash if the serial number on it starts with a zero or if it has traces of drugs on it. Especially if that store not only refused to do business with us, but actually confiscated such bank notes and kept them for itself.

Quote
Wasabi Wallet 2.0 will be launched two weeks from now, on June 15, 2022. It is the state-of-the-art Bitcoin fungibility solution.
That's odd. I thought Wasabi Wallet was a Bitcoin privacy solution. Has anyone here heard before that Wasabi's main goal is actually fungibility, instead? Because I haven't. In fact, the whole front page (https://wasabiwallet.io/) has no single mention of fungibility and mainly talks about privacy and surveillance.

Quote
Wasabi Wallet 2.0 is an attempt to abstract its comprehensive privacy tooling to the background, letting the users deal with other important things happening in their lives. This makes Wasabi Wallet 2.0, the missing piece of Bitcoin: it solves its fungibility
Besides the fact that a single company honestly believing their product single-handedly fills Bitcoin's 'missing piece' is hilarious, it's also alarming. It means they might believe Bitcoin has 'missing pieces' that can be filled by very centralized, for-profit businesses. If that's what the state of Bitcoin actually was, I'd be the first to call it doomed. It would have no chance to survive for decades if there were business with such key roles, such that 'without them, it would fail' or something like that.

Anyhow: Does someone understand how making a privacy tool more intuitive to use, increases fungibility?
I repeat: the issue with fungibility is that some exchanges and other services act as if Bitcoin wasn't fungible. They pay other companies to tell them which coins are 'good' and which are 'bad'. These guesstimate (at best) if a coin may have passed a criminal's hands in the past and if so, flag it as blacklisted. Then the exchange / service will confiscate it. However, the crime may have happened months earlier, and the sender may just have received that coin from another exchange or another legitimate person on the internet, since it has passed hands already a lot of times. Furthermore, the coin is neither destroyed or returned to the supposed crime victim, but is thrown together with all other deposits and even sent out to customers who withdraw Bitcoin.

Now my question is how this mess is improved by users having an easier time of using Wasabi. If anything, it has been observed in the past that sending coins from a CoinJoin or a mixer to an exchange, has a rather high chance of getting coins confiscated.

The rest of the article is irrelevant for me.
I would like to highlight that despite these big claims like 'state-of-the-art Bitcoin fungibility solution.', Wasabi unfortunately is one of the businesses that, as I mentioned above, hurts Bitcoin fungibility by allowing themselves to blacklist certain UTXOs, which in my book is the exact definition of the Bitcoin fungibility problem.

If you missed it, we have a whole thread about it here:
The default Wasabi Wallet coordinator will start censoring "illegal" UTXOs

And I created a kind of 'open letter' with 24 questions, which they replied to; discussion page about it is here:
Wasabi blacklisting update - open letter / 24 questions discussion thread