Privacy is a very important issue. This could be how you manage separating parts of your life. This can be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It could be how you respect another person’s trust. It could be about your safety, and even your life. At the heart of all of this is control of your own information. Specifically, controlling who is aware of what.
Understanding who you should trust with your privacy, who you shouldn’t trust, how difficult it is to overcome protecting your privacy and who can feasibly achieve this are all important things that people need to understand when trying to achieve privacy.
Bitcoin has one of the most terrible track records I’ve ever seen in honestly communicating these facts to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone who’s not new to this space is well aware of the years-long feud between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offer centralized coin coordinators as a service. The Samurai developers were caught in a crazy, baseless overreach while trying to apply custodial financial regulations to a purely self-guarding project, and Wasabi voluntarily deactivated their coordinator due to fears of similar legal action.
This is a terrible state of things, but the truth is that the state of things has always been terrible. The last few years leading up to the samurai’s arrest and Wasabi’s deactivation were a whirlwind of nonsense.
Both teams downplayed and hid the risks involved with their services, while the other team frantically attacked. Both teams had privacy or security issues that they did not disclose to users. Both teams evaded and hid from the simple reality of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices, or implementation flaws, both projects relied on the reliability of the coordinator to not hide the identity of their users.
It is likely that many people would have continued to use both projects knowing this, but the reality is that choosing to do so while those projects were active for most people would have been unaware. Privacy is ultimately about our patterns of behavior revealing things about what we do, and the risk you run when you hide something is that if enough effort isn’t made to keep everything you’ve done private, it could be revealed.
People whose actions are exposed can have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, and can create legal consequences if certain laws are violated. In the worst consequences, it can literally lead to someone losing their life.
This is not really respected by a lot of people who produce privacy tools, and certainly not by the team at Wasabi and Samurai. This needs to change. We no longer need marketing slogans and phishing campaigns.
We need objective and rational definitions of threat models. We need a real mathematical analysis of the privacy provided. We need to determine the financial costs and resources needed to undermine that privacy. We need a rational scientific effort, not public relations campaigns and slogans.
Without it, Bitcoin privacy will not disappear.
This article is a takes. The opinions expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.