Privacy is a very important issue. It can be how you manage to keep parts of your life separate. It can be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be the way you respect the trust of another person. It can be a matter of your safety, even your life. Among all these things, control your personal information. Specifically, control who gets notified of what.
Understanding who you should trust to protect your privacy, who you shouldn’t trust, how difficult it is to defeat the protection of your privacy and who can possibly achieve it, these are all important things for people to understand when trying to do so. achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has the worst track record I’ve ever seen in honestly communicating these facts to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone new to this space is well aware of the years-long dispute between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offer centralized coinjoin brokers as a service. Samourai developers were arrested for the unfounded and unfounded trick of trying to apply accounting rules to a self-sustaining project, and Wasabi voluntarily closed their consultant for fear of similar legal action.
This is a terrible state of affairs, but the truth is that the state of things has always been bad. The last few years before the arrest of the Samurai and the blackout of Wasabi were absurd.
Both groups downplayed and hid the risks of their services, while attacking the others harshly. Both parties had privacy or security issues that they did not disclose to users. Both groups escape the simple truth of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices, or implementation errors, both projects depend on the intermediary being trusted not to alienate its users.
Many people may still be using both projects knowing that, but the truth is they chose to do so while those projects worked for many people who were ignorant. Privacy is ultimately about patterns in our behavior that reveal things about what we do, and the risk you take when you hide something is that if not enough effort is made to keep it secret anything you did could be exposed.
People exposed to their actions can have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, it can cause legal consequences if it violates a certain law. In extreme cases, it can literally lead to someone losing their life.
That’s not really respected by a lot of people who manufacture privacy tools, and it certainly wasn’t the Wasabi and Samurai teams. That needs to change. We no longer need marketing slogans and troll campaigns.
We need rational and rational definitions of threat models. We need a real statistical analysis of the given privacy. We need to explain the financial and resource costs required to undermine that privacy. We need a sound scientific effort, not PR campaigns and slogans.
Besides, Bitcoin privacy isn’t going anywhere.
This article is a Take it. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.