Goal for this week is to put out a blog post with a summary of my thoughts on Samourai, Wasabi, and JoinMarket.
The idea is to be as open and honest about tradeoffs of each as I can, but I admittedly have very little experience with JM so that will be only a short section.
Any specific points of interest you'd like to see covered for any of those three?
Any core comparisons that would be helpful for you all?
1. Curious which of these uses Chain Analysis (just Wasabi, or others too)?
2. Curious how these txns appear on-chain — how easy are they to spot as being collaborative txns? Do they all look the same on-chain or not?
Tools where you can verify that the coordinator's code is running vs tools where you cannot verify that the coordinator's code is running
Untrusted vs trusted
Assuming the most generous take for wasabi, that being you can allegedly run your own coordinator or that there are alternative non censoring ones available, how true is this, how much liquidity is there really outside of ZK.
Also highlighting the defaults presented to the user, including ease of running or understanding what running your own dojo/electrs means for privacy as described by the software. For wasabi, what are defaults and how easy are they to change. If you need to modify a config file to escape censors, that’s not good enough. If they’re serious about their defense, the software should be very upfront on coordinator choice and tradeoffs and make it easy to choose.
Also of note, testnet whirlpool has very low liquidity and doesn’t offer a great experience to actually trial using the tools, could be easily rectified with a few more people remixing testnet coins (in each pool!).
Also, not super clear to me what risks are introduced by whirlpool coordinator being centralized and/or how they plan to address it with the decentralized things being built, they don’t seem too good at/interested in explaining things to non dev types.
https://twitter.com/SamouraiDev/status/1647250191999746048?s=20
Current understanding is there’s a risk they could know who the other utxos in a mix belong to because people use their node, so it introduces a similar problem like wasabi has if not reaaaaaally knowing how many rounds of mixing is enough to truly guarantee privacy even from them. #[2]
Some additional clarifications:
- I *will* be commenting on aspects of Samourai Wallet's approach that I don't like or view as less than ideal.
- I *will* be commenting on aspects of Wasabi Wallet I like or appreciate.
- I *will not* be going into depth on JoinMarket as I don't have a deep grasp on its approach. I'll only cover the basics I know and leave it at that, and likely publish follow up work with more in-depth thoughts.
fee comparison, average duration of entire “coinjoin” from start to finish, integrations or additional apps/programs that facilitate coinjoins, ease-of-use for any newbies we may encourage to begin coinjoining, and whether the large/fixed numbers of inputs/outputs really matters for forward-looking privacy
also why they constant snipe each other :)
JM is also great, but takes patience and serious study of the docs
Use joinmarket more & make it more than a samurai shill piece 🤙
I think you stand little to win here. Don't think any person from one side works even consider the other side. You will spend a lot of reputational capital, but I'm afraid your comparison will not really lead to an aggregate of more genuine insight amongst the population of Bitcoiners, sadly. Not your fault, just the sad state of things.
My 50 sats
*would even consider
More would be writing for those who don't have a side, rather than trying to win over the hardcore Samourai/Wasabi crowd either way.
But definitely agree, need to think deeply on if the inevitable pushback from all sides is worth the potential benefits.
Thanks for chiming in 🙂
I am not very technical but there are many people i respect that don't like wasabi or don't like samourai. Why samourai and wasabi are so controversial?
How timely for me 😎
I assume you will hit on all of the obvious points?
- privacy claims/guarantees
- privacy from coordinator
- requirements
- difficulty
- fees
- compatibility
- future censorship risk (ie platforms might not accept post mix utxos)
nostr:note1xshqm4vsug20s675h9qeam0tjrwdwqp6ttrfdyjk2uh5kzhhzewqdx5ysh
Payjoin.
