Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on Today at 07:35:58 AM

Would there be anything to prevent someone abusing this by just constantly depositing and withdrawing the same coins over and over?

Not unless we'd build a proprietary system to screen incoming transactions and check that the coins are not originating from our multi-sig. We tried to find an alternative to avoid abuse without having to build this system but there is no other way and implementing something like this doesn't seem like a good idea at all. Censorship of any sort is out of question even if it's for a good reason like in this case.

Quote from: LeGaulois on April 28, 2023, 11:52:13 PM

OK, thinking twice about it, your argument is valid and the solution appropriate. I see it differently now and I would even say that the sooner the better. It's just that's it's something we're not used to see in the industry.

We knew our proposal would cause some backlash, and for good reason. As LoyceV mentioned in a previous message if we were planning an exit-scam, this is how it would look like and there is no way for you to know if this is the case or not, nor do we have any way of proving that this is not our intention.

On the other hand as explained in the previous messages Whirlwind needs a strong Anonymity Set in order to function correctly for any amount, and not getting to that point introduces risks for our users as well as for our reputation. In this case from our point of view we are left with the following choices:

-Go ahead with the campaign and risk backlash, but on the bright side if it works we will become by far the best privacy tool that ever existed for Bitcoin. Technically speaking it already is, but in order for this to translate into the real life we need the numbers to back it up.

-Don't go ahead with the campaign to avoid backlash and raising red flags, but be prepared to deal with the fallout in case the Anonymity Set doesn't increase and certain users are deanonymized. We believe if this happens there is a pretty high chance that it would lead Whirlwind to failure, we use a novel mechanism that users don't completely understand and if we start on the wrong foot it's going to be even harder to come back and gain their trust back.

This would also give our competitors reasons to attack our model and for a normal user that doesen't understand how everything works it would seem like they are right, for example:
*a competitor* deposits 20BTC into our 10BTC multi-sig, withdraws it all at once and then proceeds to blast us saying 'look, your solution is useless. it's almost sure where the 20BTC came from'
our response: yeah but you know.. our system needs a strong anonymity set to work well and you will be able to do this in the future but for now we didn't see that much usage yet
competitors response: yeah but why would anyone use you compared to us? send 20BTC to our solution and see what happens

Even though the 20BTC 'mixed' through our competitors could most likely be traced back to their originating address too, it's not as obvious as in our case for a normal user to do because we have the public multi-sig as opposed to just sending other people's coins.

My point here is that it doesen't matter that our system offers exponentially better privacy once we get to a certain Anonymity set figure if we never get to that level.

So do we really have anything to lose if we go ahead with the anonymity campaign? Maybe, maybe not. There may be even more backlash than until now and some may be turned away from our solution for good because they won't trust us at all anymore, but not going ahead may cause way greater issues because of which it's going to be pretty much impossible to recover.

We already took a big risk implementing something new and for some reason we expected to see much more organic usage (this is the reason why we didn't start with the anonymity campaign from the beginning), but seeing that doesn't happen, or at least not as fast as it needs to, we are forced to explore other options and take other risks in order to achieve it. One way or another the Anonymity Set needs to grow to at least a few thousand deposits, otherwise this was all in vain.