I believe we should try to get back on-topic everyone.
For me, it's still open whether there is a 'Wasabi CEO' (in my understanding, Wasabi is not a company; only zkSNACKs is) and whether the project was 'taken' from him and he's actually in the 'no blacklisting' fraction of the whole debate, as alluded to by some, e.g. here.
...
That still doesn't excuse the blacklisting decision though - not that Wasabi can do anything about it, the ball is firmly in zkSNACKs' park.
I'm slowly starting to believe that nopara73 is becoming more and more of "the man in the hot-seat", not because of anything he's doing though [indeed, there is *not much* he can do about this anyway], it's more like a label being put on him. He's being treated as a boogeyman of sorts.
Wait a minute; are zkSNACKS and Wasabi really such separate entities? I was under the assumption that they're one and the same thing. zkSNACKS is just the company behind Wasabi, no? And nopara73 is zkSNACKS' CEO - so I don't think it's wrong calling him the 'boogeyman', if he's literally the head of all this.
Edit: It's all pretty unclear and not openly available, but I just read that since June 2022, one of their developers @HillebrandMax became CEO. It doesn't change that Wasabi seems to be nopara73's idea, and he's still heavily influencial in both Wasabi as a project and skSNACKs as a company. I wouldn't call them separate entities..This question of mine was partly solved by nullius' reply, but I think it only holds true for protocol-level changes.
Anyhow: Does someone understand how making a privacy tool more intuitive to use, increases fungibility?
As in: fungibility=privacy holds true if you have protocol-level privacy/fungibility.
For instance, I can get mixed - or for the sake of argument, mined funds with absolutely no history.. These are
pseudonymous at least, since there is [1] no link to my identity (mining pool needs no KYC) and [2] no link to other transactions.
However, they are not fungible since this mining reward is different from my last block's mining reward (size, date). Therefore they are not private. Right?
Fungibility is both necessary and sufficient for privacy—and vice versa. Attaining one gives the other; neither can be attained without the other. Some people get this; e.g., in a post from 2013 titled, “Re: Coin Validation misunderstands fungibility and could destroy bitcoin”:
[...]
Privacy = fungibility. Fungibility = privacy. See above. Dr. Back explained it well in his 2014 talk on the subject.
If we build some technology on top of Bitcoin (be it different upper layers or mixers), can't privacy and fungibility only be ensured 'within' that system?
For example: in Lightning, on a protocol-level it doesn't matter in which channel you 'receive' or 'spend' funds, as your trading partner on the other end of the network will not actually get UTXOs from you, but it will get a channel state update with one of its peers. The network doesn't know where the money is going due to onion routing (of the actual payment), so I believe a Lightning transfer can be called fungible and private.
Similarly, if you stay within a system like Wasabi, with its own blacklist, as long as you only work with people who also use Wasabi and auto-mix all their funds there, your UTXO will be fungible
within this system. Maybe it's their vision that everyone is going to use Wasabi and ignore everything happening outside of it. Then in that case we could say they achieved their goal of 'solving Bitcoin fungibility and privacy' - right?
Because without this huge assumption, they are actually creating a pretty big 'barrier' between Wasabi and non-Wasabi funds,
increasing non-fungibility overall.