This newest iteration promises more privacy at less cost for the user. The zkSNACKs coordinator in Wasabi Wallet 2.0 offers an initial coordinator fee of 0.3% which only fresh UTXOs will pay. Remixes (even after one transaction), Wasabi Wallet 1.0 coinjoin outputs and UTXOs of 0.01 BTC or less pay no coordinator fees in Wasabi Wallet 2.0 coinjoins.

We know you’ve all been impatiently waiting so we’ve compiled a concise list of some of the newest features in Wasabi Wallet 2.0. Read more about it below.

Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Welcome Screen

After the Wallet has been downloaded and installed users are greeted by a completely revamped User Interface and color scheme that welcomes them to the wasabi experience and outlines the project’s core values.

Loading Your Wallet

The login screen has been completely redesigned/revamped since the TestNet release. The border of the wallet has been changed and the previous sliding sidebar on the left has been replaced with a sleek transparent design.

Wasabi 1.0 users who have upgraded to Wasabi Wallet 2.0 will be able to access their wallets using their previous login information, new users will be presented with the following prompts:

Create a New Wallet

After the user has selected the ‘create a new wallet’ option  from the ‘Add Wallet’ prompt, they will then be able to:

• Name the wallet and create a password
• Write down the numbered recovery words in the correct numbered order
• Confirm recovery words by entering particular words in the sequence they were given.
• Choose a coinjoin strategy

Connecting to hardware wallet
The user can connect a hardware wallet to Wasabi

Import a wallet
Import an existing wallet to Wasabi

Recover a wallet
Recover an existing wallet using the Recovery Words

Loading the wallet

Initiates the Auto-start coinjoin countdown – a feature which usually starts within the first 15 minutes of loading your wallet. However, the user can start coinjoin immediately after the wallet has loaded by clicking on the ‘play’ button.

Coinjoin Strategy

There are 3 default coinjoin profiles meaning that they have specific default settings regarding the coinjoins. The user can choose which one it prefers or create their own customized one. The defaults are:

• Minimize costs
• Maximize speed
• Maximize privacy

The customize feature allows you to adjust the settings for the coinjoin

• Enable/disable Automatically start coinjoin
• Anonymity score target (2-300)
• Coinjoin time preference (hours, days, weeks, months).

The wallet home page displays the user’s balance, the privacy progress, the current exchange rate (BTC/USD) and the transaction history list. Users loading newly created wallets will have an empty wallet with a Privacy Progress of 100%.

Privacy progress indicates the percentage of progress in making your entire wallet private/making the coins in your wallet private. Users will have a privacy progress of 100% when there are no coins in their wallets.

Discreet Mode (formerly known as Privacy Mode) hides all the sensitive information on your screen by changing the numbers to hash symbols.

Other options on the Wallet Home Screen include:

Wallet Info (wallet fingerprint, derivation path & key information)

Wallet Settings (coinjoin related settings & Verify Recovery Words)

Wallet Statistics  (UTXO count, balance, address & key gap information)

Sending Bitcoin with Wasabi Wallet 2.0

• To send bitcoin, users need to click on the Send button in the upper right corner of the wallet’s home page.
• Enter the address you want to send bitcoin to or use your webcam to scan the QR code (available for Windows only).
• Enter the amount of bitcoin or dollar value you would like to send. The wallet automatically calculates and converts this amount to the amount of bitcoin that will be sent.

Before Sending transactions, the wallet provides a Transaction Preview that gives a summary of your transaction. This  includes:

-The amount of BTC you are sending
-The address you are sending the BTC to
-Who could know about this transaction (only if non-private coins are used)
-The estimated transaction confirmation time
-The transaction fee

Privacy Suggestions

To avoid change, users will have a single transaction with no transaction change returning to their wallets. Thus creating a smaller digital footprint on the blockchain and making your transactions a bit more private. Users can avoid change by sending more or sending less bitcoin than originally intended.

Get suggestions to avoid privacy leaks by having no change in the transaction

The wallet tries to maintain coins with differing denominations and tries to find the best coin combinations that will produce the least difference for the target amount.

Receiving Bitcoin with Wasabi Wallet 2.0

To receive bitcoin, users need to click on the Receive button in the upper right corner of the wallet’s home page. Label the address by entering the name of the entity or person you are receiving bitcoin from and then click the continue button to generate the receive address.

All previously generated bitcoin addresses which haven’t been used yet, are displayed at  Unused Receive Addresses.

Advanced Features

The Wallet Coins displays all the wallets’ utxo’s. The user can see all related information of the UTXO: confirmed, coinjoining, amount, anonymity score and the labels.

In the Wallet Coins, it is possible to select specific UTXOs.

Wallet Settings

The wallet settings consist of two tabs:

General

This allows you to manage your wallet’s privacy and appearance.

• Light/dark mode
• Run wasabi when the computer starts
• Run Wasabi  in the background when the window is closed
• Automatically copy address
• Automatically paste address
• Network anonymization
• Terminate Tor when Wasabi shuts down
• Fee display unit (display fee in BTC or sats)

Bitcoin

• Network: Main, TestNet & RegTest
• (EXPERIMENTAL) Run Bitcoin Knots on startup: this downloads the entire blockchain and allows you to run a full node
• Local Bitcoin Core/Knots version: display current version
• Bitcoin P2P Endpoint: connect to full node
• Dust Threshold: coins under the dust threshold won’t appear, 0.00005000 BTC by default

For a more detailed visual walkthrough of Wasabi Wallet 2.0’s new features check out this video by btcdragonlord.

Download Wasabi Wallet 2.0 here .

The post Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Feature List appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Read the podcast highlights below.

On Working on Wasabi 1.0 with Nopara73 and L.Ontivero in Lisbon.

After Dan started working on Avalonia, his journey with Wasabi Wallet began. In 2018, He was contacted by Nopara73 with an interesting proposition of shortening his vacation time to work on Wasabi Wallet in Lisbon Portugal, a mere few weeks before Nopara73’s presentation at the 2018 Building in Bitcoin conference.

“I met up with Adam, Lucas as well, and I was pretty impressed. And I was like, oh, these guys have flown from the other side of the world to meet me, to find out about Avalonia. And this was kind of like the first time I’ve met anybody, in person, from the sort of Avalonia community or anybody that was building anything with Avalonia. So for me, it was like a pretty exciting adventure and on his own.

So now it’s more than just some people that you just type in a box to, you know, these are actual personalities that you get to know. And, that was, that was really nice. So, Adam sort of tried to explain the concept of what he was doing and what it was. And obviously for somebody that is new to Bitcoin, obviously it was a lot to take in, didn’t fully understand it at first. But, I could see that as you say, he basically built a lot of the code, so he’d done all the engineering and the research to actually implement all of this stuff and it was basically missing the UI.

Basically, we were in a small flat, and me and Lucas would sit around the kitchen table and Adam told us his ideas about how the UX might work and we just went at it like one piece at a time and it was pretty intense. We were working really fast to put stuff together. I think it might’ve been three weeks from nothing until we had something that was at least demonstrable and functional.

If Adam hadn’t already done all the work that he’d done three weeks would have been impossible, so a lot of the stuff had already been done and that was mainly purely building the UI and yeah, and it was really good because obviously, I had so many questions about, Bitcoin, you know, I just had to be like a sponge learning everything. And we would sort of go for these long lunches, me and Lucas and Lucas would tell me absolutely everything that he knows. And I was asking him probably the same question anybody that’s new is asking, you know, over and over again. And he was really patient and explained everything in detail. And, and that was really cool for me.”

On Deciding to Change Wasabi’s UI

Though Wasabi’s initial design was based on Nopara73’s vision of a privacy-focused bitcoin wallet and had a targeted audience of Bitcoin’s early adopters and technical users who understood the principles of bitcoin and Coinjoining, the UI has served its purpose and it’s now time for an upgrade – Wasabi Wallet 2.0, which according to Dan, is completely different and a lot more refined.

The fundamental issue is that we’ve ended up with some slightly redundant UT  concepts in there that are technically now needed and after a while people got used to it and people started talking about our features and things that we could do with Wasabi. It started getting to the point where Okay, maybe we’ve gone a far as we can with the current UI  and as well it is important to remember that in the beginning there were not many users for Wasabi and I guess it was kind of an experiment – I don’t think anybody could’ve imagined that it was gonna get to where it is today. You know, maybe Adam did, but I didn’t imagine. I quickly realized that it probably was going to be once I started to understand.

The current UI that has served a very important purpose, which is it got us up and running very quickly, it’s become stable reasonably quickly, and lots of people are using it, but now it’s got to the point where, okay, we’re now this successful wallet, and we’re able to provide all these features. Would we have done the UI the same now if we’d known this was the position where we’re going to be a few years ago? And, in my opinion, we would have had similar concepts, but the UI would probably be quite different, which is why we’ve started work on Wasabi Wallet 2.0 and the great thing is now we’ve got lots of resources. So we’ve got UI designers, UX designers, a whole team just for the UX and implementing that. And that’s the direction we’re going in now.

“Now we start from a design. We will spend a lot of time on the design refining how the UI is gonna look, how it’s gonna be laid out, how the user is going to interact with what the user experience is around a certain feature or of the product. So there’s a lot more time available and we’re not rushing to get to the next conference in a few weeks. We’ve got months to spend on it. “

Wasabi’s UI will not be the only noticeable feature change with the upcoming Wasabi 2.0  release. Read our previous blogpost to see what’s coming and listen to the full episode below to hear more about Dan’s work.

Listen to other full episodes on all podcast platforms. Don’t forget to like, subscribe to and follow official Wasabi Wallet channels for more interesting and insightful topics on Bitcoin.

The post Podcast Review: Designing a Privacy-Focused Bitcoin Wallet UX appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

The conversation focused on developing the next generation of a more privacy-focused Lightning network with Istvan Seres, a researcher based in Budapest working on Wasabi as well as completing very groundbreaking research and education in the privacy aspects of the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

Here are a few things we learned from this podcast :

What is the Lightning Network

“Lightning is the one and only scalable solution for Bitcoin, which is non-custodial. So this is a super important property. So we want to scale Bitcoin in a non-custodial way, but also even maybe even more importantly at the end of the day, we want to preserve privacy. So, lightning is a layer on top of Bitcoin, which presumably provides both of these properties. So scalability and privacy and security.” ~ István Seres

Types of transactions on the bitcoin blockchain

“Lightning is a layer on top of Bitcoin. So, whenever we talk about privacy, obviously we need to see these two layers simultaneously because it just doesn’t make sense. I mean, an adversary will be present on both layers, for sure. So, you can think of your favorite three-letter agency: KGB, NSA, whatever.

So, obviously lightning requires two on-chain transactions. First, you need to open a payment channel with your peer or peers. That’s an opening channel transaction that happens on-chain. It has an on-chain footprint that costs an on chain transaction.

Once the payment channel is open, then you can send transactions back and forth between you and your peer. If this channel is depleted or your  business relationship is over, then you can say, “Okay, I had enough ice cream, I had enough pizza, I want to close this payment channel.

Also this channel closing transaction goes to the Bitcoin main net. You can have as many transactions as you want, but still, two transactions will be visible on the Bitcoin main net. But even so, whenever we talk about privacy,  I cannot stress enough that we need to consider an adversary that is present on both layers. The adversary will surely do some transaction graph analysis in the first place to assess and  see where the channel was opened and closed, as well as how it was closed. And then, the adversary is surely present also on lightning. That’s the reason why this argumentation is completely flawed, that we move off-chain so the transactions are not visible on the public ledger, on the blockchain, thus we are fine.

This is not the case because this is a permissionless financial network. Obviously, anyone can just fire up a lightning node and just listen to what’s going on, and record everything that they hear on the gossip layer, on the public channel layer. “~ István Seres

Potential attackers we should defend against

“In the on-chain case, usually we consider an ‘adversary’ who has access to the distributed ledger, to the blockchain, so obviously sees every transaction, in addition, in a more evolved case, we also assume that the adversary can hear what’s going on on the network layer. Thus, you can imagine that it’s already pretty devastating if the adversary can link, if you don’t use. For example, Tor,  then they can link your IP address with the Bitcoin transaction you just broadcasted.

This is the on-chain adversarial model so, the adversary hears everything on the network layer and also sees the public ledger. In the lightning case, we assume that the adversary is inside the network. Meaning, the adversary who wants to deanonymize us has many open payment channels with many other nodes in the network. It’s well embedded into the lightning graph and has many payment channels open with many other peers. Most likely whenever you want to route a payment, so Alice wants to route a payment to Bob then they will route it through Cecil, Dave, Eve, Frederic and so on. We can assume that some of these intermediaries are controlled by the adversary so the adversary will log that I needed to route some payments here and there.

That’s the model. Lightning Network if we think of an adversary then we think that the adversary has many open payment channels with other peers and they log every public information. The most important is that the adversary can have open payment channels with lots of nodes and has a lot of capacity.” ~István Seres

The goal of the Lightning Network

“One of the papers which recently came out and was presented in the Financial Cryptography Conference 2021 one or two weeks ago. It’s work by George Kappos, Ania Piotrowska and others  from UCL and Cornell and they identify basically four main privacy guarantees we want to achieve in the lightning network. First obviously, if you have a private channel, then in lightning, you can have public channels and private channels. So to exemplify, if Alice and Bob open a public channel, then it’s fine because all the networks can use this channel for routing payments. But if they decide not to disclose the details of this payment channel, then this is classified as a private channel and then no one else should be able to use this payment channel for routing unless they know the existence of this private payment channel. Some people say that approximately even 30% of the channels on the lightning network currently are private channels.

Therefore, the first privacy guarantee we want is that, if we have a private channel between Alice and Bob, then Alison, Bob wants this private channel to be secret. So, not even the existence of this private channel should be known to anyone.

The second privacy guarantee we want is third party balance secrecy.
In the lightning network, each payment channel’s capacity is public knowledge. Hence, we cannot hide that. If there’s a payment channel between Alice and Bob, then the capacity of it is known. The capacity of the payment channel is basically the sum of the individual balances of Alice and Bob, of the two parties corresponding to the payment channel and obviously, this information is known to Alice and Bob. But this privacy requirement dictates or this is at least our desire, that we want the individual balances themselves to be hidden. In short, Alice and Bob know their individual balances in the payment channel, but we want this information to be hidden from other parties.

The third Privacy property we achieve on the lightning network is on path relationship anonymity. Suppose Alice sends some payment to Bob and they route this payment through many intermediary nodes like Carol, Dave, Eve, Fred, whatever. What we want is, for example, if we just pick a random intermediary, Dave, then Dave should not be able to tell who is the sender and the receiver of this payment, right? That would be pretty devastating. With that, Dave should not be able to tell whether Carol is the sender of this transaction or Alice or one of Carol’s neighbors and similarly, also Dave should not be able to tell whether Eve is the recipient of the payment or Bob.

Lightning uses onion routing. Every routing node only knows the predecessor and the subsequent nodes where they need to route the payment to. Obviously if there’s one hop then we cannot really do anything because then it’s already obvious who is the sender and that receiver. But also the length of the payment path is unknown to intermediaries. Even if the payment has just one hop the payment router cannot know whether the payment has one or two or three hops, whether he or she the only routing. This is on, on path relationship anonymity.

And the fourth and the last one, according to this paper, is off-path payment privacy. For instance, let’s say I am an observer. I have many payment channels to my friends, and I should not be able to tell what’s going on along payments that do not involve me as an intermediary. If Alice sends a payment to Bob okay, there are some intermediaries, Carol, Dave and all, all these nice guys. But still, I should not be able to tell how much money went through along those payment routes, or even just the existence that the payment occurred along some routes. Again, these are the four privacy guarantees according to this paper so hiding private channels, second, third party balance secrecy, third anonymity, fourth payments, privacy.”~István Seres

Of course, the guys delved deeper into this topic and discussed each of these aspects in tandem, but you’d have to listen to the entire podcast to learn more about the lightning network. Don’t just take my word for it.

Listen to the full episode here:

The post Podcast Review: The Privacy Guarantees of the Lightning Network appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

How to Use :

After Wasabi Wallet 2.0 has been fully loaded, users can click on the send icon, usually located in the upper right corner of the screen. This opens a dialogue box requesting the necessary information needed to send btc to another address.

By hovering over and clicking the QR Code icon to the right of the dialogue box, users will be able to automatically allow Wasabi Wallet to access their web camera to scan the specific code.

Users then have to align the QR Code within the designated dialogue box, allowing the code to be read.

Users usually input their btc addresses using the copy-and-paste method or using third-party software like notepad or messaging applications to send BTC addresses, allowing these third-party websites to associate particular/specific addresses with the corresponding profiles. This latest feature eliminates this issue.

It also avoids problems caused by clipboard malware, where the malicious software may unknowingly replace the valid address on the clipboard with one owned by the attacker.

Though this feature has not been implemented in the current Wasabi Wallet software, it will be in Wasabi Wallet 2.0. Unfortunately, the feature is currently only implemented for Windows.

The post Coming Soon: QR Code Implementation appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

The answer to this question has been revealed at the unveiling of the Satoshi Nakamoto statue in Budapest, Hungary where a life-sized bronze bust of Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto has been erected.

Though there have been countless speculations regarding Satoshi’s identity since the October 31st publication of the Bitcoin white paper almost 13 years ago and the subsequent creation of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block, no one has come close to revealing who Bitcoin’s creator is.

The concept, which was the work of Hungarian sculptors Réka Gergely and Tamás Gilly portrays Satoshi as a hooded figure whose facial features are obscured by a bronze and aluminum alloy heavily polished to reflect the faces of anyone who comes close enough, emphasizing Nakamoto’s unknown identity.

Regardless of Satoshi’s true identity, András Győrfi, the event’s co-founder and Bitcoin advocate believes that a new chapter in the history of the internet was opened with Nakamoto’s invention of digital currency with blockchain technology being a significant contribution to the world.

Here’s what he had to say about today’s event:

On creating a Satoshi Nakamoto statue

I truly believe as a journalist working in this field that Bitcoin, and especially, the blockchain has a huge significance, and we’re only scratching the surface in what Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and especially the blockchain can do in all sorts of fields. I’ve mentioned art, logistics, finance and the list goes on and on, science and beyond. So Bitcoin itself, yes, extremely important. Cryptocurrencies, yes, very important. It’s going to be huge. Trillions of dollars, I believe. But the blockchain is our main focus, the blockchain as a general use technology for various fields.

This is why he deserves a statute.

On choosing the location,  Graphisoft Park

Graphisoft was the first company in the world in the 1980s to use computers for architectural design. It was a huge, huge thing. Even Steve jobs invested in them. He has a statue, not far from here. Mr Gábor Bojár, the founder of Graphisoft, built these office buildings and this [campus] as a startup hub. So this is a cradle for innovation. It’s not only beautiful. It’s very inspiring. A lot of young people, a lot of great ideas, so this is perfect. It wasn’t easy to find a location, but we found this and they welcomed us with open arms and we truly believe that this is the perfect location, not only because of the beauty of this place, but what it represents.

Placing the Statue close to Steve Jobs’ Sculpture

Both of them are idols of the global IT industry; very different fields, probably very different personalities, different goals, but they’re both idols. They both fit into a hand full of icons of the tech industry with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and the list goes on.

On Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity

It doesn’t matter. His gender, his race, his age, his nationality. It doesn’t matter. We are all Satoshi.

On Wasabi Wallet

I believe that the technology is advanced behind Wasabi and I think Wasabi is one of those companies of the crypto industry that are trying to push the envelope…

Wasabi represents the attitude that every crypto company should have, that we don’t want to make millions of dollars in two weeks, we want to create a product that advances the technology.

The biggest takeaway from today’s Satoshi Nakamoto Reveal

You never know where your ideas are gonna take you and what your ideas can grow into. The best example is the statute itself. As I said, I was sitting there and on a rainy afternoon I had this idea and in my first [and even] my second thought was, ah, okay, who cares? But then I told one of my colleagues, then another colleague, then I called one of the sponsors and another one. And everybody, everybody threw in a great idea. For example, Gabriela Debrecen from Mr Coin, the first Hungarian cryptocurrency exchange. She told me that Satoshi has to wear a hoodie. I wanted those old fashion hats from the 1920s and to put a Bitcoin logo on the edge of the, or the rim at the hat, Gabriela told me, “that’s crazy!”

If you have an idea, then, go for it. Not all ideas are going to work out. Of course, I failed in a lot of things, but sometimes, you’re going to succeed.

Thank you András Győrfi for taking our interview and thank you for making the first state of Satoshi Nakamoto happen.

The post Satoshi Nakamoto Statue Unveiled appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Significant changes to Bitcoin Knots:

• Mainnet and testnet activation parameters for the taproot soft fork (BIP341) have been included in this release; these also add support for Schnorr signatures (BIP340) and Tapscript (BIP342).

“Taproot will be activated at block 709632, expected in early or mid November. When activated, these improvements will allow users of single-signature scripts, multisignature scripts and complex contracts to all use identical-appearing commitments that enhance their privacy and the fungibility of all bitcoins. Spenders will enjoy lower fees and the ability to resolve many multisig scripts and complex contracts with the same efficiency, low fees and large anonymity set as single-sig users. Taproot and Schnorr also include efficiency improvements for full nodes such as the ability to batch signature verification. Together, the improvements lay the groundwork for future potential upgrades that may improve efficiency, privacy and fungibility further.” ~ 0.21.1 Release Notes

Wasabi Wallet does not utilize the Taproot-related features.

The post Upgrade to Bitcoin Knots v0.21.1 appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

The value of collecting and connecting like minded people to each other is apparent in the popularity of social media. The bitcoin privacy ecosystem is not exactly very large. So, for this reason, a lot can be gained by having people knowledgeable and passionate about this topic congregate to discuss this and any corresponding topics. This is the motivation behind having a weekly Research Club Experience.

Initially, the Research Club meetings maintained a specific agenda. This included inviting the authors and contributors of a number of academic papers to “pick their brains” or one of the Wasabikas would give a concise presentation on a paper of the week. But things have long since changed.

While there are still meaningful discussions on Bitcoin privacy, Wasabi Wallet 2.0 and the future of Wasabi Wallet, the conversations have become a bit more relaxed. Although the topics may sometimes stray l off-topic, the meetings are still very engaging. Regardless, who wouldn’t want to hear the Wasabikas’ thoughts on almost anything? Oh, and there’s no hierarchy, just a group of people sharing ideas.

Don’t believe me? Read about Rafe’s experience:

I‘ve learned so much from these calls. When it started, we went through many privacy related papers and it helped me to understand many concepts that I was previously struggling with: Dining Cryptographers, Knapsack, Anonymous Credentials, etc.
Special thanks to Adam, Lucas, Yuval and Max who had the patience to explain everything, even the basics; and for Aviv, who created awesome presentations that made the topics easier to digest.

I didn’t know a lot about privacy tech when we started and I still consider myself a newbie, but with the information I received, I’ve been able to do more research on my own and even help/teach other people.
As far as I know, we were able to accomplish the primary goal of these calls, which was to find a way to provide even better privacy for Bitcoin.
I’m happy to see how well Wabisabi has been going forward and to me, it sounds brilliant but there is still a lot of work to do. Nowadays, the calls rarely have an agenda like they used to in the beginning, but they are still one of the highlights of my week. I can’t even count how many stunningly good conversations we’ve had, from privacy all the way down to the meaning of life.

These calls have also been a great place for me to ask my newbie questions about the nuances of Wasabi and the tech behind it. With the things I’ve learned, I have been able to teach many of my friends about the importance of privacy and I’m proud to say that Wasabi has pretty much become a synonym for Bitcoin privacy in my circles.
It has also been a great way to get to know the people who are working on Wasabi. The open minded and public conversations, which anyone can join, are an important part of why I got interested in the project in the first place. ~ Rafe

Anyone can join these meetings and be a part of the conversation.

There’s no secret handshake or secret code – just follow the link on any given Monday at 18:00 UTC.

For previous Wasabi Research Club episodes, check out our Youtube Channel and for everything else, click here.

The post Wasabi Research Experience appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Eight years ago, David Molnar was a software developer working at what could be considered a typical 9-5 job. Now, he’s the CTO of one of the best established privacy-centric software wallets in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This journey all started when nopara73 came to intern at his company.

Long before Wasabi Wallet’s official existence, David was nopara73’s mentor, teaching him C# while he interned at his company. They maintained this relationship for two years until nopara73 left on a journey across Asia. Nopara73 would continuously check in with David to update him on his work and adventures while David would provide remote work opportunities for nopara73. He admitted that nopara73 continuously tried to persuade him to work with him prior to Wasabi Wallet’s official release, but he always turned down the offer since he was still heavily invested at his previous workplace. Eventually, David realized he had been working at this company for 10+ years and had gotten to the last rung of its corporate ladder. It was time for a change.

After mentioning his plans to leave within a year to nopara73, David was presented with yet another job offer as a senior developer at Wasabi Wallet. He admits that he knew nothing about Bitcoin or how he would be able to program its software at the time, but he accepted the offer under the mindset that:

“If nopara73 could show me the code, sooner or later I’d figure it out.“

It was at that moment that the student became the master.

Nopara73’s offer was exactly what David was looking for as it allowed him to work with fresh, high-end technology while using the newest software and language specifications. Although Bitcoin was relatively unknown, the potential of its development made the proposition even more exciting.

David says he enjoys being pushed to his limits and with Wasabi Wallet, he got just that. In their first month of being reunited, David travelled to Thailand to work alongside nopara73. As idyllic as this sounds, he wasn’t exactly lounging on the beach. Instead, he had to now learn about Bitcoin while learning to program its software using the Mac operating system after working on a Windows PC for 10 years.

“I was literally coding on Mac, not just running the software. It was a pain. I had a Hungarian keyboard with no notations so it was annoying trying to figure out which button does what. But it had to be done, so I learnt and got used to it.”
~ David Molnar

There was a silver lining: “Nicholas Dorier’s N bitcoin made everything convenient because I could use the programming language I’m most familiar with: C#.”

However, the challenges would keep coming as David would soon find out. By March 2019, a mere four months after joining the Wasabi Wallet team, he was selected to speak on behalf of Wasabi Wallet at the 2019 MIT Bitcoin Expo.

Nervous and excited for another adventure, David practised for weeks rewriting his presentation on Wasabi Wallet and CoinJoin many times while watching countless Andreas Antonoupolous videos in preparation for the 20-minute presentation. Now, with numerous presentations under his belt, the nerves have gone but what remains is the elation that comes with being recognized and supported by his peers for the work and dedication that he and his team continuously put into Wasabi Wallet. Undoubtedly, an inspiration to continue working:

“We keep updating ourselves and are creating what is required. We are not just settling because it works. We are always refactoring ourselves. I’ve noticed that I have been changing from time to time. I’m trying to adapt to the new requirements”

This constant evolution is due to the Wasabikas’ work ethic:

“Everyone who works here is engaged with software development, you don’t need to push people to work because they like to work. You are the only one responsible for your own involvement and this is sometimes a good thing because you have the freedom to do anything you want. Of course, anything productive!”
~ David Molnar

Testing Contribution Game

At Wasabi, David introduced Testing Contribution Games in an effort to keep users and developers close enough to receive constructive feedback from the other. He acknowledges that this encourages community involvement and has collectively improved the software’s stability and usability while ensuring that users enjoy the software:

“When you are testing your own products, you automatically have some bias and there’s no way to detach yourself from this because you know how it works and will use it based on your knowledge. You will avoid many test cases and you won’t see some minor, or large issues with the software or the user interface. You won’t do such a complex sweep through of the software. It’s very important that you have fresh eyes and a clean mind to inspect the software for the first time and this can only be done by involving the community.”
~ David Molnar

Lurking Wife Mode

Another one of his innovations at Wasabi Wallet caused quite a bit of controversy. Not for its functionality, but its name: The Lurking Wife Mode. This is a Wasabi Wallet feature that hides sensitive and critical information from physical observers by changing the information to hashtags with one click:

“When we implemented this feature, Nopara73 and I were thinking about the name. I came up with three ideas and one of them was Lurking Wife Mode.

At the time, we had a mysterious loss of funds case. Everyone on the team was trying to figure out how some part of the funds was taken from the wallet. After a week of fruitless investigations, it turned out that the user’s wife sent those funds to an exchange.

It started as a joke, but later it was surprising how much attention we got for how sexist this was. We didn’t think that it would blow up. We never got as much interaction on Twitter for writing code or anything else, but this, this was surprising.“
~ David Molnar

The feature has since been standardized and integrated into Bitcoin Core, though the name has been changed to Privacy Mode. David still maintains a level of pride for its creation.

Becoming CTO

Becoming the CTO of zkSNACKs after nopara73 decided to step down was another challenge that David accepted. He later understood nopara’s decision after realizing the complexity of the workload. “There were daily problems, not regarding the code but everything else, and they take you away from the core tasks that you value and enjoy doing.”

He has since found a method to the madness:

“It’s not about what to do, but what not to do, there are so many ways to go about it. I can find 100 tasks right now that I can work on but you have to find the one that serves the company’s goals the most. So you have to say no to the 99. Find what not to do instead of what to do.”
~ David Molnar

He also maintains a unique perspective in regards to his responsibilities in general:

“Sometimes I feel like MacGyver when there is a problem,someone is missing from a specific place, and I can jump in. I like to do this because it’s a new challenge, something to learn. I like adapting and figuring out how to do things in a specific role. Sometimes my solutions are like MacGyver’s solutions, but in the end, it works.”
~ David Molnar

Undoubtedly, David has come a long way from being introduced to Bitcoin by his former intern, and what a journey it continues to be. He believes that Bitcoin is revolutionary, Wasabi Wallet is a part of the revolution and he wants everyone to take part:

“Bitcoin is an open space and I would like to invite everyone to join. I’m not only talking about buying Bitcoin but developing, creating…feel free to do anything because that’s what Bitcoin is about. Contribute to open-source projects – it’s a very exhilarating feeling.”
~ David Molnar

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Having a Savings Account Makes Sense Again

I remember in the olden days, my grandma deposited her money into the bank because the interest rate was high enough to make this worthwhile. In the last thirty years, this has not been the case.

Things have changed with the introduction of digital currency. It has been said that having a lot of FIAT is the worst option you can have as it is constantly losing value. A better option would be storing your value in Bitcoin – it’s worth keeping as much as possible in savings.

One of my favourite things, however, is gifting this experience to my friends and family members who are unfamiliar with Bitcoin. Take a look at Riccardo’s article on how to do this with Wasabi Wallet.

~ Dávid

User-Friendly Wallets

Wasabi Wallet is the only privacy bitcoin thing that I use because it’s the only thing that is user friendly enough for a bitcoin noob like me.

~ Jumar

Do Nothing and Earn

This is a little off-topic, but I used to play World of Warcraft and there’s an expression that means ‘Do Nothing And Win’. With Bitcoin, the concept is the same: you do nothing and Earn – DNAE.

When I was at my workplace before Wasabi, we were in contact with Dávid. He told me about a possible job opportunity but when we got into the details I was not sure about it. How could I stay alive if I received my salary in Bitcoin? How will I turn it into fiat currency?

When Dávid told me that he keeps his savings in Bitcoin, I asked him immediately, “isn’t that risky? What if it drops in value?” He said, “if it drops, then it will rise again and the best thing about keeping it in Bitcoin is: you do nothing but you get richer.”

I bought 10 USD worth of Bitcoin then and at the end of the month, it was worth 12 USD. At that point, I understood what Dávid meant … I did nothing with it but it was worth more.

The Bitcoin system is stable but the missing key is privacy. We at Wasabi Wallet have solved this. Bitcoin will grow to the moon. What is worth 1x today, will be worth 2x later.  We just need to plan for the long term, be patient and it will pay off.

~ Roland

The Shortlist

• BTCPay
• JoinMarket
• Bitcoin Core
• Bitcoin Knots
• Lightning Network

~ Nopara

ColdCard

COLDCARD is an affordable hardware wallet that can be backed up easily via an encrypted microSD card. It’s one of my favourites because it can pair with any hardware wallet which is a very unique feature that enables you to send and receive directly to and from a hardware wallet.

Bitcoin ATM

The ability to turn cash into Bitcoin in only a few taps on a tablet screen not only makes Bitcoin ATMs AMAZING INNOVATIONS but another one of my favourites. It doesn’t take much effort to get the coins. All you need is cash to Buy bitcoin from your local ATM and nothing is more private than cash.

~ Dolapo

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