Privacy is a very important issue. It’s how you manage to keep parts of your life separate. This is how you can save your dignity. This can be done by respecting the other person’s beliefs. It could be about your safety or even your life. At the heart of all this is control over your personal information. Specifically, control who gets to know what.
Understanding who you should trust to protect your privacy, who you shouldn’t trust, how hard it is to defeat your privacy protections, and who can make it happen are all important things for people to understand. access to privacy.
When it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools, Bitcoin has one of the worst records I’ve ever seen for honestly communicating these truths to users. I’m sure anyone who isn’t new to the space is familiar with the years-long debate between Wasabi and Samurai, two projects that offer centralized coordinators as a service. Samurai’s developers were arrested for trying to apply the financial rules of detention to a single self-sustaining project in a foolish and unwarranted overreach, and Wasabi voluntarily fired its coordinator, fearing similar legal action.
It’s a scary situation, but the truth has always been scary. The last few years before Samurai’s arrest and Wasabi’s dismissal were a whirlwind of mischief.
Both teams downplayed and hid the risks of their services and attacked the other fiercely. Both teams have privacy or security concerns that they haven’t disclosed to users. Both teams turned and hid from the simple truth of both projects: whether through conscious design choices or implementation flaws, both projects relied on a coordinator and lost the anonymity of users.
Most people would probably know this and still use both projects, but the truth is that most people were unaware when these projects were active. Privacy is, after all, the patterns of our behavior that reveal what we do, and the risk you take when hiding something can be exposed no matter what you do if you don’t make enough effort to keep it private.
People’s actions can be exposed and have consequences. It can disrupt someone’s social life and lead to legal consequences if they break any law. In the most extreme cases, it can lead to the loss of someone’s life.
It’s not really respected by most of the people who make privacy tools, and the teams at Wasabi and Samurai certainly aren’t. This needs to change. We don’t need any more marketing slogans and troll campaigns.
We need objective and rational definitions of threat models. We need a real mathematical analysis of the given privacy. We need to determine the monetary and resource costs necessary to breach this privacy. We need rational scientific effort, not PR and sloganeering.
Without it, privacy is not going anywhere for Bitcoin.
This article is a Take it. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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