Confidentiality is an extremely significant matter. It can pertain to how you choose to keep aspects of your existence distinct. It can concern how you uphold your sense of respect. It can involve how you honor another individual’s trust. It can even be a question of your security, or potentially your life. At the core of all these issues lies the authority over your own data. Particularly, the authority over who is informed about what.
Grasping whom you need to rely on to safeguard your privacy, whom you can disregard, how challenging it is to bypass privacy protections, and who can realistically achieve that, are all crucial elements for individuals to comprehend when striving for privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most dreadful records I’ve ever encountered regarding transparently conveying these truths to users concerning Bitcoin privacy instruments. I’m certain anyone who isn’t completely new to this area is well aware of the long-standing conflict between Wasabi and Samourai, two initiatives that provided centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. Samourai developers faced arrest in a bizarre and unfounded overreach attempting to enforce custodial financial regulations on a purely self-custodial initiative, and Wasabi voluntarily disabled their coordinator due to concerns of similar legal repercussions.
This is a dismal situation, yet the truth is that the circumstances have always been dire. The few years leading up to Samourai’s arrest and Wasabi’s suspension were filled with absurdities.
Both groups have minimized and obscured the risks associated with their own services, while fiercely attacking the other. Each team has experienced privacy or security challenges that they did not communicate to users. Both teams evaded and concealed the straightforward reality of both initiatives: whether due to deliberate design choices or implementation shortcomings, both projects depended on the coordinator being reputable enough to avoid de-anonymizing its users.
Numerous individuals would likely have continued using both initiatives despite this knowledge, but the fact is that the decision to do so while those projects were operational for the majority was uninformed. Privacy ultimately relates to the patterns in our behaviors exposing details about our actions, and the danger of concealing something is that if insufficient effort is made to keep it private, whatever you’ve done may be uncovered.
The exposure of people’s actions can lead to repercussions. It can devastate someone’s social interactions, and it could incur legal ramifications if a law has been breached. In the gravest instances, it could even result in someone forfeiting their life.
This reality is not genuinely acknowledged by a significant portion of those creating privacy tools, and most certainly was not by the teams at Wasabi and Samourai. This situation demands transformation. We do not require any further marketing catchphrases or troll strategies.
What we need are objective and logical definitions of threat models. We require authentic mathematical evaluations of the privacy offered. We need to ascertain the financial and resource expenditures necessary to undermine that privacy. We demand rational scientific efforts, not PR initiatives and slogans.
Without these measures, privacy within Bitcoin will remain stagnant.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.