Says the supporter of software which requires mass surveillance company's approval to have your coins mixed; which makes any coinjoin made my Wasabi objectively not trustless.

There is nothing preventing the third party from refusing any coin, and thus, from refusing a private coin.

Great. I can't verify myself I'm subjected to a Sybil attack chain analysis attack, so let's buy some private coins from someone who can neither verify he's being subjected same like. 

There is no malicious coordinator in my hypothetical scenario. There is a malicious third party (coinVerifier named in the source code), which can arbitrarily refuse to have some coins in the WabiSabi round. The third party can attempt to attack to my non-private coin by refusing to accept any other non-private coin, accept a small number of private coins, and fill the round with their coins. That would make it look as if it's a big coinjoin, but the third party will be able to de-anonymize it much more effectively.

In Wasabi, the coordinator initiates a request to a third party. Subsequently, the third party obtains the authority to approve or disapprove the coins participating in the coinjoin round. As a result, the entire coinjoin round hinges on the judgment of the third party. Could you explain to me how it makes sense for a coinjoin round to rely on a company that aims to de-anonymize coinjoins?

With clearly inferior anonymity set, as every Wasabi user is practically using zkSNACKs' coordinator. You can't expect someone who merely wants to enhance their privacy, to run a coordinator, given there's a monster with millions in liquidity. He can't compete. WabiSabi coinjoins are nothing with no such liquidity.

I have to trust the coordinator for not attempting to perform a Sybil attack, and in the unnecessarily complicated case with zkSNACKs, I have to trust their chain analysis buddies with clear incentive to attack likewise, will neither attack.

In which case I must have acquired one private coin without being Sybil attacked somehow.

I can't create private coins myself. I can create private coins only if I will mix mine with other people's coins.

I know. That's why I took a hypothetical scenario where the coordinator isn't malicious. Even in that scenario, you have to be aware of the chain analysis company for not screwing the coinjoin up, with clear incentives that go against the coinjoin from happening uninterruptedly.

How would it be detected, and by who? Surely not by the user, as they accept their coins can be disapproved and they gain no right to know why:

You are literally advertising a competing privacy service in your signature, what do you mean "He can't compete"?  It's obviously a massive red flag that "Whirlwind Money" has chosen to collect their customer's data and custody their coins instead of coordinating WabiSabi coinjoins with that liquidity, which are non custodial and do not reveal any data to the coordinator.


No you don't have to trust the coordinator, as I explained earlier, Sybil attacks by a malicious coordinator can be detected.


Yes, such as coordinating a WabiSabi transaction yourself.


You can coordinate your own WabiSabi coinjoin with peers of your choice to create private coins without anyone's permission.


It doesn't matter if a chain analysis company is providing data to the coordinator is malicious vs the coordinator themselves being malicious, clients recognize it as an attack by the coordinator anyways because the coordinator is the middleman that bridges the communication between the two.


As I explained before, a malicious coordinator is detected if a private coin is rejected from registering.


You can get private coins without anyone's permission by coordinating WabiSabi coinjoins.

Regular people who merely want privacy cannot be expected to setup an entire company themselves. That's nonsense.

Custody is indeed a problem. As for customer's data, they will sometime implement blinded bearer certificates. Do you want to talk to us about the part where you literally fund mass surveillance firms with coinjoin fees?

If I already have private coins, which is not the case for the overwhelming majority of people who try Wasabi for the very first time.

And have inferior privacy, as the default coordinator contains orders of magnitude more liquidity than an average coinjoin with me and my peers. And even if I do coinjoin with them, and later on want to coinjoin with the default coordinator, I will still have to trust that the third party will approve our private coins afterwards.

Clients who have somehow acquired private coins beforehand can recognize that. Clients who merely want to improve their privacy while owning only non-private coins cannot recognize anything.

I mean both are true. Obviously the chain analysis firm cannot be trusted to approve which user is allowed to gain privacy, ergo is malicious, and zkSNACKs either, for attempting to allow from such company to gain that authority. Both zkSNACKs and the chain analysis firm are malicious.

And to acquire a private coin, you need to firstly do a WabiSabi coinjoin, which requires to trust the intentions of a coordinator.

I understand that, and it is important! One big question mark for me (PR-wise) is why they fight critics to the bone instead of answering their questions. As far as I know, that's not how you get people who worry about the security and privacy of your product, to try it out..

Besides the fact that you should stick to the topic at hand (your own service), centralized services do have some inherent advantages. Of course, a trustless solution would be preferred, but centralized CoinJoin coordinators (as you have shown) also have the ability to spy and censor.
Please get it: no matter how often you repeat the words 'trustless privacy' and no matter how well that works for your usual audience, Bitcointalk isn't buying it.

First of all: it's not my job to.. do your job. I don't have to fix your product. If you want to run a successful privacy product, it's your job to make sure it actually preserves and improves privacy.
Secondly; cancel all your contracts with blockchain analysis, authorities and whoever else is telling you to spy on users. Kill your central coordinator. Then build something without a central point of failure (technologically and organizationally).

How?
And does this mean I have to use a different Bitcoin privacy service, to be able to use your Bitcoin privacy service?
How do I even tell whether I have 'private coins' or not? Do you have a 'coin checker' tool? (not that I'd ever put my addresses in such thing..) We've had this discussion so many times now; 'naughty' may seem like a fitting term for you but whatever is immoral and or illegal to you, is not to many others globally - maybe even the majority of people..

Cut the bullshit; we are obviously not criticizing Greg Maxwell's (!!!) 10-year-old idea of CoinJoin (which you're trying to rebrand to WabiSabi.. different story) right now, but the fact that you do pay a surveillance company to spy on your users. If you continue with these strawmans, you'll only make more of a fool of yourself than you already have.

Let's not forget that the option to change coordinator was hidden (even non-existing in GUI, from what I recall), at least when they transitioned from Wasabi 1.x to 2.x.

Actually a lightbulb just lit inside my head - they could block Whirlpool coinjoin UTXOs for retaliation or something.

So if the third party coordinators are not publicly accessible, how is the average Joe going to use them? It would also be trivial for Wasabi to answer this question - just pull every Wasabi coinjoin from the blockchain, and then subtract their own ones. The fact that they don't tells you everything you need to know.

He can't tout "Use a third party coordinator" as the ultimately solution for every problem Wasabi has, when he knows fine well there are very few third party coordinators and the ones that exist have almost no volume.

And none of that does anything to solve the rampant address reuse, some coinjoin participants receiving zero privacy, or Wasabi grinding outputs in to dust as has been discussed elsewhere.

Wasabi Wallet has worked fine for 99.9% of average joes, hence the lack of demand for alternative coordinators. That's not really on them if there's no alternatives or there's not enough volume. The solution is there, people just have to be willing to build it.

You would probably get a lot of false positives if you are relying on blockchain analysis to determine what is or isn't a WabiSabi transaction. Because WabiSabi allows mixing arbitrary amounts then a lot of muli-input transactions paying multiple addresses could be misidentified as being CoinJoins.

The address reuse issue has been discussed extensively since 2019. It's not that hard to go on Github, social media, and blog posts to see what was causing the issue and what measures were taken to prevent this from happening. Not every instance of user error or misuse can be prevented but I have not heard of this still being an issue besides a claim from a Samourai-ran twitter account where it actually turned out it wasn't a Wasabi coinjoin.

The grinding to dust accusation is not really something I had heard about so I haven't looked into what it's all about. The claim seems to be coming from Samourai so I would take it with a grain of salt since they are known to lie and exaggerate.


JoinMarket is great and a viable alternative to Wasabi. It actually has more volume than Wasabi and Whirlpool combined according to the most recent publicly available statistics that I could find. Using JoinMarket alone isn't enough to give you perfect privacy. There are several theoretical attacks which could happen on JoinMarket as well. According to their developer:

So there's not even a CLI flag or GUI option? I'm not saying editing config files is hard for me, but you are trying to tell us, realistically, average users are going go through their file system to locate a config file and then.. recompile? Or is it at least read out at runtime?

Do you provide any guides for that at least? What about running coordinators? Is that nicely documented and encouraged or do you simply use the fact that it's technically possible as an excuse to escape the fact that your product is fundamentally flawed, at least when used the way 99.9% of users are using it?

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Let me rephrase: if the default way of using your ('privacy'!!) software has bad privacy, it's not your users' fault, it's your software's fault.

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If we define 'working fine' (you haven't, making your whole post very vague at best) as: 'have not experienced negative consequences after using Wasabi', this is a very weak argument.
The quality of a privacy solution is shown when someone actively tries to challenge it. Since most users realistically don't experience a situation where authorities or threat actors try to deanonymize them, in theory they could have just used no privacy solution at all and would have 'been fine'.
This is not the measure you should use when evaluating Wasabi. You should consider what happened if someone 'went looking'. Realistically, they would pay Coinfirm their regular fee and easily buy the information they need for further analysis.

By linking the depositor's address with their withdrawal destination.  Coinjoin coordinators are not trusted with their customer's data and are not trusted with depositor funds, so it's clear that Whirlwind is acting maliciously by choosing to act as a trusted third party instead.


You don't have to setup an entire company, you just have to find other peers who want to coinjoin with you.


The point of owning the private coin is so you can verify the coordinator is not performing a Sybil attack on your non private coin, there's no trust at all.


Go ahead then, explain what attack vector you are talking about since I've already explained how the Sybil attack vector is detected and defeated.


What question do you have about the security and privacy of the WabiSabi coinjoin protocol?  I'm happy to answer.


That's not true, the coordinator does not know which inputs belong to which outputs in their coinjoin transactions, so they do not have the ability to spy like a centralized mixer does.


What part of it don't you understand?  Coinjoins are completely non custodial and do not require you to trust the coordinator with your data.


WabiSabi coinjoins do preserve and improve privacy, you can verify that for yourself:  https://mempool.space/tx/d465033214fd2309dcce5a90c45fcaa788aa4394ee36debe07aad8d8a37907d2


No, anyone can coordinate their own WabiSabi coinjoins.


Coinjoin them.


This isn't true.


You would know there is no reason you could be rejected because the coin is private.