Great note for those interested in Bitcoin privacy.
quotingWhirpool, Wasabi and Joinmarket, criticize Bitcoin privacy.
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Whirpool: They sell it to you as perfect privacy, a priori it seems to be so, but how do we know that the initial coinjoin entries are not being selected by samourai? If this is so, it is useless and it doesn't matter if we have the coordinator code, we don't know what samourai executes. Not to mention the crap they have going on with their Android client that shows the xpub to their servers, another way to trace by elimination even if you use Dojo, although this is now mitigated with Sparrow. If you run Whirpool you are left with only trusting them, I have always said they are a honeypot. There is no proof that they are acting honestly, their system is not transparent.
Wasabi: To ally with chainalysis, it is more than enough not to use it and I believe that neither they understand their new protocol, I do not know how to calculate anonymity sets with wabisabi, I do not know what it offers me and even so, and in spite of the errors of its protocol, you do not have to trust them, its operation is transparent, because you see the input queue and you observe that it is simply executed as a queue, there is no possible selection by the Wasabi team as in Whirpool.
Joinmarket: I think at this point it is the only feasible solution. It is not controlled by anyone, it is a decentralized platform in the same way that Nostr does not depend on a central server and its servers do not communicate with each other, in joinmarket the takers act as coordinators, the coordinator is not properly decentralized but everyone can act as a coordinator and in the same way as Nostr, the takers or coordinators do not communicate with each other. On the other hand, there are the makers which is the Joinmarket liquidity pool and they are selected by the takers according to an algorithm. You run your own coordinator, you can review the code, you can compile it, there is no trickery in which participants are chosen and how.
That said, there are guidelines to follow with Joinmarket. As a taker it is easy to know who you are in the mix if the rest of the makers keep remixing. That's why it's important to play both taker and maker. A simple rule of thumb is that you play the maker until mixdepth 4 and then execute a transaction as taker to a final address where you save the balance as mixed.
Bitcoin privacy sucks, let's face it, plus coinjoin breaks the fungibility of bitcoin because it's easy to mark coins as participating in a coinjoin and subsequent hops, as many as you want. We have to look for layer 2 solutions or new forms like cashu (chaumian ecash).
Any form of privacy that degrades the fungibility of Bitcoin is bad, keep this in mind.
In the meantime, Wasabi and Samourai followers can continue fighting, especially those of Samourai, believing in FIAT money and in you is the same thing, a matter of trust, and in privacy there is no place for trust and even less in a third party.
The people who are working on Chaumian eCash solutions are much more honest because they do not want your fees, they want the privacy of Bitcoin.
