I assume that SlowMist did not trace anything because otherwise they would have used that case to prove the entire world how good they are with a detailed article, blog post, video or any other ways to bust their reputation. Instead the wrote: "Case of study #2 - Tracing Wasabi coinjoins: we did it, believe us. That's all, folks"

That document doesn't provide any proof of their claim; it is a "just trust me, bro" pamphlet, in my opinion.


You are asking what else could have be done to escape with the stolen money. Are you stupid or what? 

Electrum does generate bip39 seed phrases. So, you can only recover your electrum seed phrase using electrum.

Hi, Wasabi maintainer here.

I think your assumption doesn't match reality. None of the "attacks" that I have read come from Wasabi fans, but from people who also criticize Wasabi. Privacy advocates, freedom fighters, or however you want to call us, have been very cool and welcoming regarding Whirlpool's comeback, and we have rushed to audit the code and report our findings publicly ASAP because at this early stage it is easier and cheaper to fix the app and the protocol (once your user base grows it become almost impossible to do).

These findings are not destructive FUD but real problems for which we also suggest solutions. Look at this one, for example: https://njump.me/nevent1qqsqqqzgvgp66qxznw3mqvw9xsl9c9j6t8warcgvh283n67mlzuucdsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnddakj7qg3waehxw309ahx7um5wgh8w6twv5hsp94pph

Go to Settings and switch the Terminate Tor On Exit.


Tor doesn't prevent you from using internet without Tor at all.

There is not "they". Wasabi is not developed by a company anymore and everybody can run a coordinator, in fact the coordination service is currently provided by independent volunteers (you can become one).


Hahahaha I believed that nobody with an average IQ could ever believe it but it seems I was wrong. This was just another of the Samourai's masterlies targeting idiots.

It seems to work okay but it doesn't get much participants and that means that your anonymity set will be very low in comparison with other coordinators, however that can be okay for many scenarios where you want to gain privacy from non-super-wealthy adversaries, what I imagine is the case for 99% of people.

Wasabi has three different coin selection modes but they are hidden by default because the automatic coin selector does a much better selection than most users do. That's possible because the wallet knows who knows about each of your UTXOs and then it can select automatically UTXOs that are already known by the payee or, if that's not possible, it allows you to decide who can know about the payment transaction. Wasabi also tries to avoid creating change as Bitcoin Core does and suggests different amounts close enough to the attempted payment to avoid it.

However advanced users don't like automatic coin control because most of them believe that they can make smarter selections; what's almost always false. In other cases it is because they need to verify or narrow the selection of coins or, because they have some very special needs and they know exactly what they want, like spending one very specific UTXO as a whole (1-in, 1-out) or a set of specified coins as a whole. In those cases, users are able to select the coins themselves. Wasabi allows you to do that too but it displays who is going to be able to track that transaction and alerts you in case you are mixing private coins together with non-private coins, for example there are cases where the user thinks they can do better than the software and wants to see for themselves the set of coins it will use and change it. This scenario is not absurd; in fact, users feel more internal peace/safety if they select the coins. Wasabi, for example, allows users to select the coins but the software will inform you if your selection can be improved, if it ruins your wallet's privacy, who will be able to track you, and whether change can be avoided or not.

Wasabi will always try to improve your privacy with an smart coin selection like when you have more than one utxo with the same script (you have reused an address) and in that case Wasabi will try to spend those utxos together to stop leaking info about your wallet every time you make a transaction. Manual coin selection risks overriding those automatic decisions. Also, for wallet with tons of utxos with different amounts, scripts, and histories it is hard to believe that a human can solve that kind of knapsack better than the computer. Anyway, three different coin selection methods with expert recommendations is enough.


Wasabi synchronization takes a lot of time only the first time and it is not expected that users resynchronize their wallets again and again. It is slow because Wasabi is a privacy wallet and for that reason it need to compute the balance by itself without sending information to any random server. This means that wasabi has to download all the blocks containing transactions relevant to your wallet.

There are basically three mechanisms light wallets use:

* [FAST - no private] Send your wallet's addresses to random Electrum servers run by who knows what "benevolent" entity
* [FASTEST - privacy nightmare] Send your xpubs to some server that persists them in a database and derive all your addresses (sometimes you need to identify against the server using an API key)
* [SLOWEST - private] Send nothing to anyone and download blocks. <-- This is what Wasabi does.

Wasabi can synchronize pretty fast even if it is the first synchronization using your own bitcoin node with version 2.6.0 only if your node provides compact filters.

That's correct, but in my opinion, it is even worse than that because centralized exchanges try to over-comply with regulations, going much further than any other kind of financial institution by tracking what you do with your bitcoins AFTER you withdraw from them. If they see that you participate in a CoinJoin with bitcoins that you withdrew from them, they request additional information from you under threat of closing your account, which in some cases means they take the money in your account if they don't like your explanations; what creates an incentive to request more information.

If you want to do something impactful you could go to Wasabi Wallet and finish the Silent Payment receiving part which is almost done or implement the UI por payments in coinjoin or implemente the coinpool idea from scratch. There are also less complex things to do like publishing indexers and coordinators behind onion services by default and even trivial tasks as allowing Wasabi to connect a chosen list of trusted bitcoin nodes instead of random ones discovered using the p2p gossip protocol.

Wasabi and Bitcoin Knots

Wasabi used to depend on Bitcoin Knots but since v2.6.0 that's not the case anymore. Bitcoin Knots provided an RPC feature that was not available in Bitcoin Core: GetBlock with previous outputs (verbosity 3), which was necessary to create the Wasabi custom compact filters without needing to keep a UTXO set as it did in previous versions. Additionally, both client and server made use of another exclusive RPC, GetMempoolInfo with fee rate histogram, which allowed Wasabi to estimate the fee rate better.

After Bitcoin Core merged the PR that extended the RPC GetBlock to provide previous outputs and the fee histogram was made optional in Wasabi, there is no more need for Bitcoin Knots. These changes were done long ago, much before the current discussion about OP_RETURN, and the reason behind them is purely technical.

Wasabi also redistributed Bitcoin Knots binaries as part of the Wasabi Wallet installers, something that makes no sense anymore in v2.6.0. Even though Wasabi v2.6.0 installers still come with Bitcoin Knots, why? Well, because the release was done while the OP_RETURN discussion started warming up, and we didn't want users to misinterpret our motives (You can see removing Knots was discussed months ago: https://github.com/orgs/WalletWasabi/discussions/13796).

The next Wasabi release will not redistribute Bitcoin Knots binaries because it is not a required dependency anymore and because Wasabi devs are not the ones to decide on behalf of Wasabi users what Bitcoin node they have to use.

A coinjoin is just a bitcoin transactions as any other bitcoin transaction, the only thing that makes them different is that it is created by many people instead of only one. That means that those people can do whatever they want with their money, they can send it to someone else or send it to themselves. Here you can see that someone decided to donate to El Salvador bitcoin address in a Wasabi coinjoin: https://mempool.space/tx/8c58beccc25acc763c528515b3a23bb92eeb6dc41b519ef681f76dfcc76cc19d#vout=433 Was that the only one making a payment? There is no way to know, however we can assume that most people send the money back to themselves because that's how Wasabi works by default.

Now, it is so obvious that that transaction is a Wasabi coinjoin that someone could decide to reject coins coming from it and in fact that's what many exchanges do: they just rejects those coins.

But the real problem with of this is not technical at all, people who wants privacy and deal with exchanges are not different from those who want a hot icecream. If you use an exchange then do not coijoin and if you coinjoin do not use an exchange because exchanges are the perhaps the main reason why we don't have privacy in bitcoin and coinjoins are one of the fee tools that allow us to have some privacy in bitcoin.

Hey Wasabi Wallet dev here.


You are right, this is the main use of a coinjoin: protect your financial privacy.


There are basically two options currently: Wasabi Wallet and JoinMarket.


That's not so easy. Even one of the biggest and wealthier actors in this industry as ByBit offers chain analysts unbelievable bounties for those who help them to track the stolen funds across coinjoins and it seems they are not having any luck, see by yourself: https://www.lazarusbounty.com


Coinjoins help to protect you and your money from entities that want to track you, absolutely. Can it protects you from a wealthy and powerful organization like a big state intelligence department? I really don't know, it seems it can but I can't bet my hat. Can you --the user-- make a mistake after coinjoining that ruins all your wallet privacy? Yes, absolutely.

I develop Wasabi Wallet and as a general recommendation I would prefer a desktop wallet for anything real usage. Bitcoin Core, Sparrow and Wasabi are good wallets and the final decision depends on what the user want to achieve with them.

What a shameful statement!

In my experience users screw up their privacy precisely **because manual coin control** and that's why IMO manual coin control should be hidden by default.


Separating non-KYC from KYC wallets is a sad solution. It means that your wallet does a poor job managing the knowledge about how hows what and how to minimize it. If your wallet doesn't allow you manage manage that then you will screw it up sooner or later.


This is in most of the cases a very bad idea. It is very unlike that users know exactly all people or entities that can track each of their utxos.

I completely agree with this. Wasabi has three different coin selection modes but they are hidden by default because the automatic coin selector does a much better selection than most users do. That's possible because the wallet knows who knows about each of your UTXOs and then it can select automatically UTXOs that are already known by the payee or, if that's not possible, it allows you to decide who can know about the payment transaction. Wasabi also tries to avoid creating change as Bitcoin Core does and suggests different amounts close enough to the attempted payment to avoid it.

However, there are cases where you know exactly what you want, like spending one very specific UTXO as a whole (1-in, 1-out) or a set of specified coins as a whole. In those cases, the user should be able to select the coins themselves. Wasabi allows you to do that too but it displays who is going to be able to track that transaction and alerts you in case you are mixing private coins together with non-private coins.

Finally, there are other cases where the user thinks they can do better than the software and wants to see for themselves the set of coins it will use and change it. This scenario is not absurd; in fact, users feel more internal peace/safety if they select the coins. Wasabi, for example, allows users to select the coins but the software will inform you if your selection can be improved, if it ruins your wallet's privacy, who will be able to track you, and whether change can be avoided or not.

I was against manual coin selection for a long, long time until I realized that having no control over the coin selection, even if the wallet could do it a million times better than you, creates a disgusting feeling of uncertainty and fear.

Summarizing: Automatic coin selection should be by default. Assisted manual coin selection should be there but hidden. Unassisted manual coin selection should be available too but really hidden.

Exactly. This logic leads us to ban custodial mixers first, then privacy projects like Wasabi. Next would come scalability solutions like Ark and Lightning because those "bypass" the UTXO model and make operations difficult to track. Finally, self-custody wallets would be banned. Of course, the order might be different, and it seems to me that governments worry more about self-custody than Lightning, but they will go step by step, slowly banning (or "regulating") all these things.

However, it is important to know that before doing all these things, governments need to convince most citizens that such technologies are for bad people, enemies of society. That's why it is so critical to fight the linguistic battle. I don't custody my bitcoins myself because I am a criminal; I do it because you and your friends in the banking system are the criminals who want to "custody" the product of my life's work. I don't coinjoin my bitcoins because I am a criminal; I do it because I have to protect my family and my home from being broken into by criminals who know how much I hold.

The narrative that only criminals need privacy must be radically challenged, as it falsely frames basic security measures as suspicious behavior.

Average people with zero technical knowledge could not start their own coordinator and even if they had the skills to do so, they would not keep their service open indefinitely if there was a lack of traffic.
[/quote]

Right now we are delivering the coordinator as part of the Linux packages, which means that Linux users can start a new coordinator just by typing $ ./wcoordinator and pressing enter. In v2.7.0, I will expose it automatically as an onion service and make sure it detects and connects to the Bitcoin node, if any. The idea is to make it trivial for anyone to run a Wasabi coordinator.

We should not assume all coordinators will be public but rather the opposite. Even a company could run its own coordinator for its own use. Just imagine different company departments making payments to different providers or even paying themselves. They would prefer to pay in coinjoins to avoid revealing each department's budget to other departments and providers.

Imagine you receive donations. You don't want all your donors to know how much everybody else has given or how much they own, and you don't want to let donors know how much you are paying to whom. Having your own coordinator has many advantages over huge public coordinators.

Wasabi dev here.

Wasabi development has been focused on guaranteeing the survival of the wallet almost exclusively since zkSNACKs abandoned the project. This means changing an originally centralized, trusted, client-server architecture to a standalone, trustless piece of software with decentralized services run by volunteers. In other words, the goal is to completely redesign Wasabi's architecture to eliminate central points of failure and protect Wasabi users and volunteers.

However, users need a reason to upgrade their Wasabi clients other than a "better architected" wallet; they would upgrade only if Wasabi has something new and better to offer them than their current version. That's THE reason why Wasabi releases include support for receiving Taproot, Silent Payments, manual coin selection to spend, SLIP39, support for new hardware wallets and others alike—things that are not a priority at all but allow the development to move release after release, removing dependencies from centralized services and achieve eventually the biggest goal.

Small and almost insignificant changes like allowing users to choose the provider for the fee rate and USD/BTC exchange rates, removing the concept of coordination fee, separating the coordinator as an independent service that can be run by anyone and allowing users to configure a coordinator and set its parameters, optimizing the coordinator and backend to run on small computers or cheap VPS instead of requiring monstrously big and expensive hardware, allowing the coordinator to run simply with an aggressively-pruned Bitcoin node, removing the client dependency on tens of centralized APIs—these kinds of changes are the ones that really matter for Wasabi's future.

Wasabi innovates by making the wallet more resilient while adding nice features. But resiliency is THE feature anyway, so in the next version we are going to release Shamir Secret Sharing backups but also a mechanism to allow Wasabi to detect new releases, download them and verify them without having to trust on GitHub's goodwill (because we don't trust GitHub or any other centralized big tech service provider—yes, yes, we use Nostr for that). The next version will be the first in which Wasabi will be able to synchronize without having to connect to any central server, just connecting to an RPC node with compact filters. The next version removes the concept of backend; instead, there is only an indexer, a server component that provides Wasabi compact filters and/or standard BIP158 filters. This is a super cheap piece of software that can take standard BIP158 filters from your node, cache them, and provide them to clients in a way that Wasabi clients understand. The next version gets filters from RPC, blocks from RPC, fee rates from RPC, and broadcasts transactions using RPC, which allows users to use Wasabi without needing to use anything from anywhere or anyone.

There are tons of things that have been redone, redesigned, or changed completely just to facilitate the way to the final goal. It's hard to enumerate them all: a complete redesign of the Tor integrations, a complete change in the technology of serialization, a complete redesign of the Bitcoin node integration, a redesign of the Wasabi configuration (WIP), include the backend and the coordinator in the linux release—all while removing more than 25,000 lines of code.

Very few can compete against Wasabi in this regard because Wasabi is an idea, an ideologically-driven commitment of volunteers doing what they think must be done and risking what nobody else wants to risk in order to do good.