Privacy is a very important issue. It may be how you manage to keep parts of your life separate. It may be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be how you respect the trust of others. It can be a matter of your safety, even your life. At the center of all these things is the control over your own information. Concrete control over who is made aware of what.
Understanding who you should trust to maintain your privacy, who you should not trust, how difficult it is to overcome the protection of your privacy, and who can even achieve it, all these are important things for people to understand when they are trying to achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most atrocious track records I have ever seen of honestly communicating these realities to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone not completely new to the space is well aware of the years-long feud between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offered centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. Samourai developers were arrested in a frenzied and baseless crackdown trying to apply financial custodial rules to a purely self-sustaining project, and Wasabi voluntarily disabled their coordinator due to fear of similar legal action.
This is a terrible state of affairs, but the reality is that the state of affairs has always been terrible. The last few years prior to Samourai’s arrest and Wasabi’s deactivation were a whirlwind of nonsense.
Both teams have downplayed and hidden risks in their own services while furiously attacking the other. Both teams have had privacy or security-related issues that they have not disclosed to users. Both teams dodged and hid from the simple reality of both projects: whether due to deliberate design choices or implementation errors, both projects relied on the coordinator to trust them not to de-anonymize their users.
Many people would probably still have used both projects knowing that, but the reality is the choice to do so while these projects were active for most people was uninformed. Privacy is ultimately about patterns in our behavior revealing things about what we do, and the risk you take when you hide something is that if not enough effort was made to keep it private, it could, you did, be exposed.
People who have their actions exposed can have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, it can create legal consequences if you break a law. In the most extreme consequences, it can literally result in someone losing their life.
It’s not really respected by a large number of people who produce privacy tools, and it certainly wasn’t by the teams at Wasabi and Samourai. It must be changed. We no longer need marketing slogans and troll campaigns.
We need objective and rational definitions of threat models. We need a real mathematical analysis of privacy. We need to define the monetary and resource costs required to undermine this privacy. We need a rational scientific effort, not PR campaigns and slogans.
Without it, the privacy of Bitcoin will go nowhere.
This article is one Take. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.