All remaining tasks on the backlog were completed. Starting today there won't be any more stability issues and we expect perfect uptime besides occasional very short periods of maintenance which will be announced in advance here on the forum and through a maintenance page shown on both Clearnet and Tor. We made some great progress during these past few weeks and we appreciate all the feedback that we received, it's been very useful.
Now that the updates are finished at least for at least the next weeks and the service is completely free to use we will switch our focus to solving the only remaining 'issue', which is the Anonymity Set being quite low because we only just started.
IMO there are multiple reasons why our service doesen't see that much usage yet and I'll list them below and afterwards reveal our plans to deal with each one of them:
-It's a fact that Whirlwind is a real innovation in the Bitcoin space and it may seem harder to use at first because users are simply not familiarized with our mechanism. This makes it harder to get them to try our service, but there's no doubt in our mind that once they do they won't go back to using something else since there is simply no reason to do that. Obviously this is a biased opinion since it's coming from ourselves, but the numbers and facts are on our side so you don't need to trust us, do your own research and most likely you will come to the same conclusion
-We are a new service so users don't trust us that much for now
-Anonymity set is currently too low
We are planning to solve these issues in the following ways:
1. Create a detailed comparison between Whirlwind and most relevant privacy solutions that currently exist/ existed before and explain mathematically why our implementation is superior in every aspect compared to any of them. Again only verifiable facts
2. Create a twitter account and start discussions about all aspects of our service
3. Start an Anonymity Mining campaign with the goal of growing the Anonymity Set
The details will be finalized in the following hours/days but it will work in a similar fashion to this:
https://docs.tornadoeth.cash/docs/anonymity-miningSince we do not have a Whirlwind token to use for this we will reward users with Bitcoin in the following way (ignore numbers, it's just an example):
Our goal is to grow the Anonymity Set to 10,000 deposits so until that is reached we will offer a reward to everyone using the service. Each month we will allocate 1BTC to distribute between all funded Notes proportionally to their balance. Payments will be made every day and you are free to withdraw your deposit anytime. If the amount allocated for rewards is 1BTC a month that means 1/30 = 0.0333BTC will be distributed every day.
If the multi-sig balance is 10BTC and you have a Note with a 1BTC balance you will automatically receive 10% of 0.0333BTC every day you keep your Note funded, which is 0.0033BTC a day.
Most importantly this campaign should help us achieve a strong Anonymity Set, which as discussed before is the only weak link remaining to be dealt with. At the same time the growing multi-sig balance will also give us a great chance to prove that we're not here to steal anyone's funds so after some time most concerns in this regard should be eliminated. We understand some may still have doubts and if there are any specific questions you want answered do not hesitate to ask.
The 40,000 DAI are still in escrow with minerjones and we are able to send much more than that if the risk of us stealing the funds proves to be the problem, but at a certain point our users would have to trust us regardless until we completely decentralize the service so we are not sure it makes much sense to do that.
Ready to answer any questions or concerns!
Below is the changelog with the latest updates, our ANN thread design and signature will be updated sometimes in the next 48 hours.
Changelog
04.28.2023 01:30:00 AM UTC
-Improved UX
-Implemented alerts for all completed actions/errors
-Updated output size options: 0.001BTC, 0.0025BTC, 0.005BTC, 0.01BTC, 0.025BTC, 0.05BTC, 0.1BTC, 0.25BTC, 0.5BTC, 1BTC, 2.5BTC, 5BTC
-Withdraws are now sent once an hour instead of 2 times an hour
-Cloudflare tweaked and should now be less annoying, our custom encryption works exactly as intended
I think almost everyone would want the option to choose their withdrawal amount. A simple text-notice that privacy is enhanced when the withdrawal amount is not customized is probably sufficient. I don't think there's any need to overthink it by making it something that you have to click on a check-box or in an alert box or anything. There are some great web design tricks to convey something important like this without requiring the user to take excessive, extra steps like clicking a checkbox. And it's counterintuitive, but sometimes we actually gloss over the text associated with a checkbox (think how reflexively we click "I agree to the Terms and Service," probably often without even reading that line). If the checkbox is in the way of a user completing a form, they quite occasionally just click the box without reading it.
We are concerned that if we offer this option most people would use it and it'd be way better for everyone if they don't. We just added some more output size options so it's a bit more convenient, but for a privacy service we believe that security should come first. Besides this you don't need to withdraw the entire Note balance at one time and as said in a previous message you can still withdraw a custom amount, the process is just a bit more complicated. We will wait for more feedback on this and make changes only if they are necessarily needed.