Privacy is a very important issue. It may be how you keep parts of your life separate. It may be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be how you respect someone else’s trust. It can be a question of safety, even of life. At the heart of all of these things is control over your information. Specifically, control over who is informed of what.
Understanding who you should trust to maintain your privacy, who you shouldn’t trust, how difficult it is to overcome your privacy protections, and who can feasibly accomplish it, all of these are important things that people need to understand when trying to achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most atrocious records I’ve ever seen of honestly communicating these realities to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone who isn’t brand new to the space is well aware of the longstanding feud between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offered centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. Samourai’s developers were arrested in a foolish and unfounded attempt to apply custodial financial regulations to a purely self-custodial project, and Wasabi voluntarily deactivated its coordinator for fear of similar lawsuits.
This is a horrible state of affairs, but the reality is that the state of affairs has always been horrible. The final years leading up to Samourai’s arrest and Wasabi’s decommissioning were a whirlwind of nonsense.
Both teams downplayed and hid the risks of their serves, furiously attacking the other. Both teams had privacy or security issues that they did not disclose to users. Both teams sidestepped and hid from the simple reality of both projects: Whether through conscious design choices or implementation flaws, both projects relied on the coordinator’s trust to not anonymize their users.
Many people probably would have used both projects anyway knowing this, but the reality is that the choice to do so while those projects were active was uninformed for most people. Privacy is ultimately about patterns of our behavior that reveal things about what we’re doing, and the risk you run when you hide something is that, if you haven’t made enough effort to keep it private, whatever you’ve done could be revealed.
People who have their actions revealed to them may have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, it could create legal consequences if you break some law. In the most extreme consequences, it can literally result in the loss of someone’s life.
This isn’t really respected by a broad swath of people who make privacy tools, and it certainly hasn’t been respected by the teams at Wasabi and Samourai. This has to change. 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 provided. We must define the monetary and resource costs necessary to undermine such privacy. We need a rational scientific effort, not PR campaigns and slogans.
Without this, Bitcoin privacy won’t go anywhere.
This article is a Take. The opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.