are the results out already who got the bounty rewards?

Amazing, congratulations. At this point in time where we encounter a lot of difficulties in maintaining a little more privacy and individuality in our lives, and in which governments and companies insist on knowing all our steps, it is very important to see successful initiatives like these that seek to offer greater privacy in our lives.

Congrats and thank you all.

good decision, congrats to both projects!

Here is a solution for your third point:

Just like Bitcoin a CoinJoin wallet should build a network of nodes with a mempool.
It works like this:

Alice wants to coinjoin a transaction so she sends a message to the mempool

In this message it is specified the listening node which is the communication port for Alice plus eventual informations or conditions releted to the coinjoin she wants (maybe she wants to be paid for the coinjoin and she states the fee or she wants to coinjoin with 3 or 4 participants, etc...)

Alice builds a path of nodes to her listening node just like it happens in the lightning network in which every node of the path is only aware of the 2 nodes communicating with it

Alice --> node A --> node B --> node C --> node D --> Alice's listening node

In this example of path node C will only be aware of node B and node D

Bob sees Alice's message on the mempool and decides he wants to coinjoin with Alice

He construct a path to a Bob's listening node just like Alice did

Now the 2 listening nodes talk to each other and through them Alice and Bob communicate in a secure way

They settle the details for the coinjoin, sign it and then send it to the Bitcoin network.

This is not limited to 2 participants, it can be extended to 3 or more and it could become a standard in which every privacy oriented coinjoin wallet participates.

Of course this is far less efficient than a centralized solution but we already know decentralization is inefficient.

Very happy to see this announcement, and really pleased to see the donors continue to support these efforts: theymos, greg, pieter. Guys like us don't know how good we have it, but this is really the direction we always knew Bitcoin was headed. Further evidence that the scalability issue has long been solved (or in the midst of being addressed) and that the next direction to be tackled is privacy.

Also agree, as much as mixers have been the go-to solution for typical users in past, they're still highly centralised and CJ should, with time, require less of that aspect.

Good job Wasabi and JoinMarket!

While I realize you just meant it as a light "fun fact", I think it's worth pointing out that walletexplorer is very primitive and semi? unmaintained -- and you won't be able to trick any serious analysis tool with a coinjoin like that. [Although coinjoins can do an amazing job at tricking them! But you really need the coinjoin to look like a normal transaction for that]

I can pretty much guarantee you that it will have zero effect in confusing more advanced tools. I've tested way more complex and advanced things to try trick up analysis, and it's not easy. Sometimes even I'll momentarily fool it, but later it'll "back propagate" (correct term??) information from how the outputs are spent (and associated clustering), to get a better understanding of the transaction. Like I've seen them reliably determine which outputs are change, in settings that should be impossible.

Taking bustabit as an example, it does smart partial batching so it frequently sends transactions with: (1 payment, 1 change) and (2 payments, 0 change).  Naively they are indistinguishable, but in reality analysis software has proven to have almost no problems distinguishing once it's been able to collect enough information after they're spent.

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If you want to trick analysis software, pretty much a prerequisite is reasonably uniform wallet behavior (now is a joke...) and good practices (e.g. avoiding address reuse as much as possible). This will create an environment where there's a lot less "redundancy" (??) in the analysis, such that it has to lean on increasingly fragile assumptions.  And then (and only then really) you can be cute and do something like a bustapay/p2ep  or import/export a reused address output from/to a friend or something.

Now they'll probably realize you broke their models, but it'll be too hard to figure out (short of having law enforcement contact you for help declustering ).


But yeah, if you just got two very strongly clustered wallets with different behavior and created a single coinjoin between them (even if it was undetectably a coinjoin...) it's not really going to get you anywhere against advanced analysis (although it'll confuse something like walletexplorer, which maybe is something you want to do).

Wouldn't you guys not just create a 'dark' pool here where only dark gray coins are getting mixxed with each other and no reasonable one will use that  for anything good after ?