Builder: Yuval Kogman (nothing is
Language (i): rust, c#, go, python
Contribution (S/ED) to: Rust-Payjoin, Wabisabi/Wasabi 2.0, General Privacy Research
Work (S/ED) At: Spiral (currently), Zksnacks (previously)
Yuval had an interest in Bitcoin -related subjects long before it was actually born in the world. A developer of life software and technology enthusiast, as well as a general driver of general use, was interested in cryptographic technology around 2002.
His father participated in an ADI Shamir speech, the famous encryption that co-nicted the RSA signature scheme on Ecash. A father-child conversation later and Yuval was now aware of the connectable ring signatures, the double-cost problem and the concept of Ecash. His journey along the Tana del Riglio had started before the Bitcoin branch had also removed a single land area. He even has a hashcash course on his mail pivot in the early 2000s.
Like many bitcoiners at the time (including myself), Yuval saw the original Bitcoin article on Slashdot in 2010 and promptly rejected the entire silly and not achievable idea. Later in 2013 he realized that Bitcoin was still around, sided and produced a blockade approximately every ten minutes, but Yuval still did not act to be more involved.
In the end in 2015 he took advantage of an offer that someone made to sell him a little, and this made the trick. In reality, owning some bitcoin was the last pushed that he needed to really go down the rabbithole.
Sift the noise
During the beginning of his time in this space Yuval focused a lot on the search for different privacy coins.
When he was asked what has made privacy such an important area for him, he said this: “Making my foolish impulses purchases or the poor choice of the portfolio software was recorded on Chain for everyone to see, and possibly making me an easy goal if Bitcoin would have been put out of the one day”.
Despite all the different approaches and potential progress of the privacy coins at the time, nothing completely convinced him to be a solution despite all the progress they had made in different areas.
“Even if I realized, I really believe only in Bitcoin, the impostor syndrome made me try to know all things. At that point the speed with which new things were invented were orders of magnitude more than I could keep up, but it took me a bit to stop trying,” he said for that period of time.
For a while he simply thought of Reddit and Bitcoin Twitter, immersing himself in what was happening but did not really participate in any measure in addition to research and learning. The first community in which he actively participated was an open vocal chat server called Dragon’s Den that he heard about the Bitcoin Podcast Block Digest (Dissemination: the author operated both the chat server that hosted the podcast in question).
Wabisabi and Wasabi 2.0
Yuval was one of the designers of the Wabisabi protocol implemented in the Walet 2.0 Wasabi. Wabisabi was a protocol designed to facilitate the coinjains of flexible denominations compared to each output that was to be the same identical quantity. It was quick to emphasize that he was simply combining an appearance of reserved transactions with anonymous credentials, something that Jonas Nick highlighted had already been prototyped for an Ecash implementation.
An important thing to clarify is that Wabisabi is simply the mechanism that replaces blind signatures for users to interact with the coordinator and create the construction of a Coinjoin transaction, it is not part of how such Coinjoin transactions are structured or look at Chain. However, it has been designed specifically to allow the structuring of Coinjoin transactions with arbitrary amounts without being a bankruptcy point that could decanonize users who try to create such transactions on the coordination server.
While Wasabi 2.0 implemented the Wabisabi protocol itself, the Zksnacks team has ignored almost the entire research and work that Yuval has carried out on the structure of arbitrary transactions in coins. He did this work in order to ensure that the Wabisabi transactions were coordinated were sufficiently private and did not implement behavior or transaction structures that could cancel users’ privacy after the fact.
“Where went wrong is the death of a thousand cuts, with the main cause of this being that Nopara73 and Molnard have refused to learn something about how to avoid the same mistakes that had already been made to Wasabi [1.0.]”
By expanding on what he said: “All from the selection of the coins, to when the decisions on which output values use, when the Coinjains are made, to how the Tor had used the cut angles and has been implemented on the basis of vibrations without any understanding of the mathematics below. Even the theoretical game the necessary hiring for the concept of imbalance of the service to work in no rigorous way in any rigorous sense. ”
As a specific example of general incompetence to which he witnessed Zksnacks he said, a “fun” correlated fact, even if for the years Zksnacks said he had not kept registers, the useless use of the mainly predefined Nginx configuration to serve the website using the same guest of the coordinator service meant that the registers were actually maintained “.
In the end he left Zksnacks because of his disapproval for the corners that the company was cutting and his reluctance to participate in this.
Yuval’s current opinion on the Wasabi portfolio, in particular given the current environment of several people who perform the Wasabi 2.0 coordinators, is that nobody should use a coordinator server unless they trust that server in order not to exploit the implementation and defects of the protocol to decanate them.
The state of affairs
“Privacy is a human right, but in Bitcoin it is also a personal security problem for more or less anyone in a fairly long time horizon.”
Yuval’s opinion on the current state of Bitcoin privacy is not the most rosé. It has a series of concerns with the general panorama as it is now. In particular, custody exchanges are too zealous in their refusal to interact with users who use privacy tools. He sees nothing about the use of privacy tools that prevent you from selectively reveal information to an exchange when requested.
“There is a difference between the sharing of your information with the exchanges you trust and for the extension regulators and the transmission for the whole world,” he said.
Users’ apathy is another thing that concerns him. Many users do not worry about their privacy, if they also consider it and the use of privacy tools among Bitcoin users is realistically a very small thing. In some social clubs there is also a stigma on privacy. “… apatia aggravates this stigmatization, effectively normalizing the absence of privacy[.] Exchanges do not lose many customers if they refuse to serve customers who use privacy technology, “he said.
It is not very satisfied with the current state of privacy tools.
“[R]The search for “privacy wallets” in showcase experts poisoned the well. Their infestations of cerebral nwormes at zero brought them to spend their time making shit in the Twitter feuds instead of God who forbids to open a textbook or an academic document. This toxic speech has also alienated users, fueling apathy and stigmatization. “
In the end all these concerns are rooted in social issues, how people or businesses act, the way people react to other actions, etc. Here’s how in the end they must be resolved.
“Without a sufficient question for the user for privacy technology and the normalization of its Bitcoin use is a hell of a surveillance tool.”
Spiral
In September 2023 Yuval was hired full -time by Spiral to work full time on Bitcoin’s research and development of privacy. Since many of the problems with the current implementations of Coinjoin derive from their dependence on a centralized coordinator server, Yuval has decided to focus his work on decentralized coinjain.
As such, SPIRAL is working on the decentralization of the coordination of the Coinjoin and to the improvement of the ability to analyze and optimize multi -partying transactions for privacy.
“My long -term goals are seeing through my ideas now more developed for Coinjoin. Privacy should have a marginal cost near 0, or the high commissions will discourage use. It should not also be a” product “that grifters can exchange to make a quick dollar deceiving unworthy users. And finally it should be strong and robust, mainly against the intersection attacks.”
[An intersection attack is an attack taking advantage of mixed coins being spent in the same transaction(s) together improperly to deanonymize their history.]
He is currently contributing to the Rust-Payjoin Library managed by Dan Gould to work towards his final goal of a decentralized Coinjoin protocol.
“Payjain is currently [specified] as a protocol of construction of 2 -part collaborative transactions. Although this reaches only the first of these two objectives, the generalization to several parts offers the opportunity to make the third correctly, potentially in any portfolio. “
Alliances
Yuval thinks that alliances are a precious improvement of the Bitcoin protocol, but thinks that the current set of alliance proposals is revealed greater long -term impact than they would not actually be alone.
“The current favorites, CTV+CSF, seem to be a significant step forward, but the way I see would not be enough for the type of long -term downsizing improvements that we would need for global adoption, even if the CTV is generalized in TXHASH.”
He is a fan of the concept of Varops of the great proposal for restoration of screenplays by Rusty Russel as a general mechanism to limit the most complicated alliances or other operational codes to prevent them from making the validation of the block too expensive for users.
“I am sad to say that I also find many of the disappointing discussions, with many words spent in the clubs on why the favorite optional code is the best hammer because look how many problems seem to be a particular type of nail if they crush quite strong enough and you are such a idiot and on top of the one clearly dishonest to not share my preferences.”
Overall, he thinks that the conversation on the alliances is managed badly, with too much attention to the proposals of individual alliance rather than considering which types of use cases we want to enable and which use cases we do not want to enable and work back from there to design appropriate proposals to serve the desired use cases.
Use it or lose it
As for what medium bitcoiners can do to improve their privacy or support privacy in general, he had this to say:
“It accepts that there is no magical solution, we are a little stuck with the bitcoin we have to the transactions chart. So it is critically evaluates which solutions are available, convenient and safe to use and use them.”
In the end, privacy requires everyone to act. So what do people do? Lightning offers an improvement in the degree of privacy, there is still Kindmarket and Wasabi (with the declarations of non -responsibility from above). Do what you can. Investigate the tools, check what you can and make sure to consider appropriately from who you are trying to remain private and how much efforts will take to do it.
“Even if you don’t think you need a privacy today, at least find out what you might allow you to use if you may need it tomorrow, so you’re not caught by surprise. Also consider that people who really need it today cannot have it without who can live without it, so if you want to have this option tomorrow, you should practice today. Use it or you lose.”