When?

Monday, September 13th.

What’s New?

As we mentioned in our previous report, Wasabi 2.0 was constructed under brand new considerations. The fundamental idea was to bring privacy into the bitcoin ecosystem (with privacy being the default). Let me share a short story to demonstrate why:

I remember when Peter McCormack asked me to take a look at his computer at the Bitcoin 2019 conference because Wasabi was not working for some reason. He barely had 5 minutes to meet because he was the keynote speaker at the conference. He says,

Time is a depreciating asset that you have…the balance I have to strike in life is How I use my time and how much bitcoin I own. ~ Peter McCormack

What does this have to do with Wasabi Wallet? When we started to think about our next iteration (the as of yet not named Wasabi Wallet 2.0), we considered who best represents the opposite side of the Bitcoin ecosystem spectrum. While Wasabi 1.0 was wildly popular amongst cypherpunks, it was incredibly difficult to use for the average person.

People shouldn’t be forced to spend time understanding the blockchain to use Wasabi Wallet. Instead, developers should create tools that intuitively ensure privacy for its users. So we decided to completely revamp the software.

What is the progress in the User Interface?

Send Fee Chart

What are the most important parameters when you are about to send bitcoin?

• The destination
• The amount
• Time priority

The first two are straightforward however, the 3rd one is more complex. The naïve answer is the quicker the transaction, the better, but if the tradeoff is price, then the answer changes to: “it depends”. It depends on the current fee environment, which is constantly changing according to network activity. So, the idea is to demonstrate this in a chart — without overwhelming the reader with fee rate or sat/vbyte — just to get a grasp of where the breakpoints are for one to consider. For example, sometimes it is not worth paying twice the fee just to gain 20 minutes.

The exact fee amount that will be paid for the transaction will be discussed later.

Privacy Optimization When Sending

When you are sending bitcoin you might consider leaving absolutely no trace. You can avoid the change by selecting a coin that is almost the exact amount required. Maybe this can be achieved with a combination of two or more coins. Wasabi will try to find the optimal one under the hood and provide you with 3 options.

In addition, the algorithm will try to avoid situations that were problematic in the first version (like post-mix consolidations).

TX History

The transaction history will contain a new column with the label of the  transaction so it will be easier to recognize each transaction.

Privacy Mode

When you turn on privacy mode, this feature masks all of the user’s private information. This feature was first introduced in Wasabi 1.0 and has proven to be useful when creating screenshots or if the user is in public.

QR Code Reader

The title says it all. You will be able to read a QR code by using the computer’s camera. If it is a bitcoin address of a payjoin URL, Wasabi will handle it automatically.

This is not just convenient but also protects against clipboard malware.

What are the New Features Regarding CoinJoin?

Background Running

Wasabi will be able to run in the background. Why is this useful?

• It can continuously synchronize with the backend and blockchain, so you will be able to use the wallet immediately when opened.
• The wallet will be able to synchronize and display mempool transactions, even if it is only running in the background.
• CoinJoins can happen without even opening the wallet.

All of the mentioned features are configurable in the settings, so you can customize its operation.

Auto CoinJoin

This is one of the most complicated features of the wallet. Like Wasabi is ensuring Network level privacy by default (Tor), we would like to ensure blockchain level privacy by default. So similarly, CoinJoins will happen in the background automatically with a minimal amount of user interaction. This is the concept but there are many questions to clarify, like:

• If the fee environment is expensive, should the wallet stop CoinJoin? If yes, how? Should there be a threshold? How can we display this to the user?
• How to select coins: those which are candidates for CoinJoin?
• How should the algorithm decide when to finish CoinJoining?

These were just the most basic questions, but there are many nuances within each. Also, there will be a pause button to temporarily stop CoinJoin operation with one click.

Manual CoinJoin

If the user decides to opt-out of automatic CoinJoin, there will be an on-demand start/stop manual switch. The CoinJoin will still happen under the hood and there will be some simple indicators regarding the status.

WabiSabi

WabiSabi is the name of the new CoinJoin framework. Without getting into the details, let me emphasize the most important features compared to the current CoinJoin (ZeroLink) implementation.

• Instant Privacy: You don’t need to piece together multiple CoinJoin procedures to make your entire wallet private.
• Pleb Compatibility: no more 0.1 BTC minimum denomination to CoinJoin!
• Perfect Mix: you will most likely be able to avoid having unmixed small amounts in your wallet that cannot be used for anything. No more “toxic change”.
• Consolidate Within a CoinJoin Privately: As the coordinator, we have always considered ourselves an adversary to obtain even more privacy. With WabiSabi, you will be able to CoinJoin more coins within one CoinJoin without leaking the information as to which coin is coming from the same source to the coordinator. This will also decrease the fragmentation of the wallet by reducing the number of coins in the wallet.
• Better Blockspace Efficiency: The CoinJoin transaction will be constructed as efficiently as possible by providing the most privacy with less outputs.

The post Wasabi Wallet Preview Progress appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

In the last year and a half we have established the main framework for our upcoming 2.0 release. We reviewed all of the CoinJoin literature and published the research paper for our new CoinJoin protocol, WabiSabi. The user interface will be completely replaced by the new one, which will be much more intuitive. We are aiming to offer privacy for everyone and to make privacy the default.

Milestones

We’ve created 3 milestones before Wasabi Wallet 2.0 is released in its complete and final version:

• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Preview will contain a minimal subset of features, only the most fundamental ones. This milestone aims to have a rudimentary version of the software released so as to start testing and fix all the initial bugs. This should only be used on the bitcoin TestNet network.
• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Release Candidate will include all features and will be available to the public for reviewing and testing. We will work on this version until the quality of the software is sufficient.
• Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Final Release (Series) will be the first version of the 2.0 series.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. ~ Winston Churchill

At this point, we are working on the first milestone, the Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Preview. Check out the timeline below:

Wasabi Wallet 1.0 will keep working during the 2.0 final release series. Both services will run in parallel. It will be turned off after most of the users have upgraded to 2.0. Don’t worry, you will have time to play with 2.0 before you actually start using it.

Time estimation for Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Preview

There are still a few uncertainties so there is no exact time estimation. Instead, we enumerated all the tasks and take the worst, optimal and best estimations as an average. So the most probable time estimation is 10 weeks from now but can range anywhere between 6 and 14 weeks as of the publication date for this article.

Brief presentation by Wasabi Rockstar developers

We put together a brief video presentation of our current progress. Check out the video. It contains a demo of our new user interface!

The post Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Update appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

• MacBook Pro: currently debugging a new feature in Visual Studio for Mac.
• Lenovo Legion: my main development machine with windows 10. The large screen is the main screen I usually run Visual Studio there and code. The laptop screen is used as a revolving screen, the current task at hand is opened there, like documentation or google translate or a virtual box with Ubuntu.
• MacBook Air: my former mac development environment. I just moved to the new one so that will be obsolete. I remember, back in 2018, I started my career on this machine when nopara73 told me: “we need someone to debug mac issues, can you take this task?”. By the way, I was a dedicated Windows user for 10 years before that, so the following months were unforgettable…
• Lenovo IdeaPad: the so-called “Release” machine where Wasabi releases are forged.
• +1, ThinkPad: my former development machine under the Legion laptop. As it is smaller and has a longer battery life than Legion, I use it at conferences or when traveling.

This is the story behind the picture.

P.S. I hid an easter egg in this image worth X bitcoin, the first person who finds it can take the money.

Special thanks to Chiefmonkey, which produces Laser Cut Bitcoin Art, and gifted us two Wasabi Wallet-limited edition “Cryptoarnarchy pills” (the two orange pills in the image above).

The post When you realize you need 5 laptops to get the job done appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.