Privacy Shouldn't Be A Product, Stop Treating It Like One

Privacy is a very important issue. It can be how you manage keeping parts of your life separate. It can be how you maintain your sense of dignity. It can be how you respect someone else’s trust. It can be a matter of your safety, even your life. At the center of all these things, it is the control over your own information. Specifically, control over who is made aware of what.

Understanding who you have to trust to keep your privacy, who you don’t have to trust, how difficult it is to overcome protections of your privacy and who can feasibly accomplish that, all of these are important things for people to understand when trying to achieve privacy.

Bitcoin has one of the most atrocious track records I’ve ever seen at honestly communicating these realities to users when it comes to Bitcoin privacy tools. I’m sure anyone who isn’t brand new to the space is well aware of the years long feud between Wasabi and Samourai, two projects that offered centralized coinjoin coordinators as a service. Samourai developers were arrested in an insane and baseless overreach trying to apply custodial financial regulations to a purely self custodial project, and Wasabi voluntarily deactivated their coordinator over fears of similar legal action.

This is a horrible state of things, but the reality is the state of things has always been horrible. The past few years prior to Samourai’s arrest and Wasabi’s deactivation were a whirlwind of nonsense.

Both teams have downplayed and hidden risks of their own services, while rabidly attacking the other. Both teams have had privacy or security related issues that they did not disclose to users. Both teams dodged around and hid from the simple reality of both projects: whether due to conscious design choices, or implementation flaws, both projects relied on the coordinator being trusted to not de-anonymize its users.

Many people likely would have still used both projects knowing that, but the reality is the choice to do so while those projects were active for most people was uninformed. Privacy is ultimately about patterns in our behavior revealing things about what we are doing, and the risk you take when concealing something is that if not enough effort was taken to keep it private whatever you did can be revealed.

People having their actions revealed can have consequences. It can ruin someone’s social life, it could create legal consequences if violating some law. In the most extreme consequences, it can literally result in someone losing their life.

That is not truly respected by a large swath of people producing privacy tools, and most definitely was not by the teams at Wasabi and Samourai. That needs to change. We don’t need anymore marketing slogans and troll campaigns.

We need objective and rational definitions of threat models. We need real mathematical analysis of the privacy provided. We need to define the monetary and resource costs required to undermine that privacy. We need rational scientific effort, not PR campaigns and slogans.

Without that, privacy for Bitcoin is not going anywhere. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.