He was/is(?) an anti-samourai and anti-monero larper all the time, using those tools to achieve red/black/red market goals.
I'm so aligned with nostr:npub1au23c73cpaq2whtazjf6cdrmvam6nkd4lg928nwmgl78374kn29sq9t53j views about a lot of aspects of bitcoin.
I think that money laundering is beautiful, that the most important feature of bitcoin is to effectively do money laundering (separating money from state IS doing money laundering) and I think that bitcoin is useful for criminals and who dont care to be marked as "criminal" from some randome lawmaker.
I'm also surprised of how much larping and statism there is in the bitcoin community, even in some OG.
I dont understand why you think bitcoin is cool if you think that bitcoin shouldnt be used by criminals or should only "partially" permit money laundering and so on.
Defund the state is not extremism, condoning is blatant larping statism.
If bitcoin would be useful only for some criminals, the good one, bitcoin would be absolutely a useless bullshit.
Discussion
no, they are not good tools for privacy, they are larpers
Utxos with Zero-Link tx graph and resistant to time analysis attacks when it's remixed on the coinjoin pool, Samurai is one of the few wallets that implement proper spending tools.
Monero protocol obfuscates all on-chain mechanics, IRS can't track it.
samourai was a bad actor in the space attacking everyone criticized their (mostly bad) tools. The wallet gave by default the master pubkey to samourai, giving them the possibility to deanonimize most of the coinjoins (even if you were running your own dojo, if you were in a pool full of samourai users you loose your privacy).
The spending tools was bad, for example ricochet txs payed them a fees on a static hardcoded address every three hops, adding a gigantic fingerprint on user transactions instead of giving anonimity.
Some other aspect of the products were good, but nothing that wasnt possible to do 1000x times better with more advanced tools and just a bit of knowledge.
Their community was composed by dishonests and retards, and they were attacking literally everyone touched their god, including nostr:nprofile1qqsw79gu0guq7s98t473fyavx3akwaafmx6l5z4rehd50lrcl2mf4zcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0r3md60
I still sincerely hope the samourai guys will be free soon, and I think the govermemt is by order of magnitude a worst actor then samourai.
Monero is a shitcoin and tend to zero in value, and has been made pretty outdated by lightning and layer2 solutions combined, I cant think a single use case where I would use monero today.
Monero has darknet dominance (ransomware and dnms, soon p2p markets because it's forced to do)... it's the market that's the ultimate judge and no one can track it, only if the users act stupid. I think that's the point of the conversation, how permissionless markets do transactions and not the price of the asset.
The samurai tools is not just ricochet, and I think it depends on whether you make a communication channel with the samurai paynym. That's a good question for LaurenMt.
The xpubkey leak was only on samurai wallet connecting to the samurai node, or how do you connect the addresses if you don't use your own node? Bloom filters are useless in a low bandwidth environment (aka tor network)
LaurenMt, the brain behind the Samurai tools and DojoCoder, spells out the usual fud on Samurai. I trust more on people who are in danger of jail, that people who comply or bash the dark net markets tools.
The tx graph on btc it's really bad, the good thing is that swaps between different networks of btc is pretty easy and spending on lighting is really private
Still pretty noone uses monero, it gained some popularity as a meme for privacy, but, in the end, just a few people uses it and the volumes are ridicously low. It could have some advantages in darknet situations, like be sure that the retarded stoners dont pay the vendor directly from binance. So the tx graph is obfuscated and theres a privacy gain, but this use has made technologically obsolete by lightning, that works better everyday.
I dont trust noone, in particular samourai guys. I usually verify, and I verified that samourai tools was not so great (the fact that has been so easy to stop them is an hint on how most of the the design of the tools was bad and centralized). They was a joke for expert people that can have a better experience with better tools, and they was flawed in many points so to not make them a good solutions for newbies.