A lot of your post makes sense, and some of it goes over my head.
I will study. Thatâs a promise.
In the meantime⊠can you ELI5?
Discussion
Easy takeaway is here:
> tl;dr: Keep using Samourai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet for Bitcoin privacy, the holistic toolkit they've built is beyond compare and has a proven track record of efficacy.
Longer form is that Wasabi Wallet has critical issues and should (still) be avoided IMO.
Thanks Seth. I downloaded wasabi very recently but havenât used it yet. Good timing on your post đđ«Ą
How could you possibly reach the conclusion that a Samourai coinjoin would give you more anonymity than a WabiSabi coinjoin? For example, even if you disregarded ALL of the possibilities created from input and output decomposition, there's still 5 inputs and 8 outputs of the 0.05 denomination in this coinjoin compared to a Whirlpool coinjoin that has only 5 inputs and 5 outputs of the 0.05 denomination:
#[4]
I would rather use privacy tools which provide consistent privacy (samourai, sparrow) over a tool which may sometimes provide privacy (wasabi). I think #[3] 's strongest point is that of verifiability. You need to be able to verify the privacy gained by mixes. And it must to be consistent.
A simple guide for verifying the privacy gained from samourai/sparrow mixes would be right up your alley, #[4] right? I have seen the devs post pics of some verification tools on Twitter but I don't think they have made a simple guide for it yet. Would be awesome to be proven wrong.
Your Wasabi analyzes the anonscore of every transaction after it happens.
Wasabi was the Bitcoin wallet that calculates some anonymity level, and it's still by far the most sophisticated.
What Seth is concerned about, is that you cannot PREDICT what outputs and anonscore a future coinjoin will bring you. That's great, because the attacker can't predict it either.
No need to trust my words, here is the code, read it.
I donât have the technical acumen to understand the code in a meaningful way, but I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to witness the reports, discussion, dialogue here, as we all work toward a better system through many iterations.
Grateful for the work you guys are all doing đ
Sparrow does the job and does it well
What I took away from the spaces and my own research is that:
- Wasabi has conflicts of interest by promoting a coordinator that directly funds Chain Analytics. They say it doesnât matter because user can pick the coordinator but this is a false choice when liquidity determines the privacy âguaranteesâ (see below) of the mixing. Other coordinators have less liquidity, youâre hiding in a smaller pond.
- WabiSabi and Wasabi seem to use a fuzzy âanonymity scoreâ system where the user sets this number in the client and their bitcoin mixes until it reaches the threshold. Problem is this number is poorly defined and itâs unclear what threshold you need to achieve privacy, there is no guarantee, itâs all fuzzy and depends on how the rounds turn out (see below)
- WabiSabi mixing is good at aggregating (and decomposing and recomposing amounts of) transactions on the *input* side but outputs still rely on this fuzzy logic anonymity score to âknowâ if your utxo is private enough. Outputs are not all the same amount like Whirlpool, so youâre only not guaranteed anon sets with known numbers of identical value utxos to hide among, instead outputs have variable amounts which can lead to low anon sets. The client would then remix again they say until privacy is achieved⊠this threshold is again poorly defined and makes assumptions about what chain analytics are able to probabilistically compute or not, a big question I have is how future proof are these probabilistic privacy thresholds users are setting today.