Wasabi Wallet is non-custodial, meaning that you retain full ownership over your private keys and, consequently, your bitcoin. Wasabi is also open-source and emerged out of a community that promotes the values of collaboration, transparency, and meritocracy. Anyone can see and verify how Wasabi Wallet works for themselves and can even contribute to its code if desired.

Wasabi Wallet is well-known for making privacy-boosting coinjoin transactions accessible to everyone, but some may not be aware of the extent its range of customizable features allow users to shape their own experience while usingWasabi Wallet. So let’s dive into some of Wasabi Wallet’s stellar features:

• Impressive customizability with Wasabi Wallet
• Coinjoin strategies
• Privacy progress
• User-friendly pricing
• Further customizable settings
• Privacy-oriented suggestions
• General settings
• Bitcoin settings
• Engage with Wasabi Wallet’s privacy-enhancing features

Impressive customizability with Wasabi Wallet

You’re likely aware that coinjoins are special bitcoin transactions integrated into Wasabi Wallet that involve combining two or more people’s transactions, removing the link between which outputs are paid by which inputs, significantly improving Bitcoin privacy and fungibility.

Wasabi Wallet uses the WabiSabi anonymous credential scheme, which helps make coinjoins as accessible and efficient as possible. Wasabi has automatic Tor integrations that mask users’ IP addresses to enhance their privacy while using their wallet, and locally installed Tor integrations are also possible.

Wasabi Wallet backups are hierarchically deterministic, which means a single recovery seed phrase can generate a nearly infinite amount of new bitcoin addresses for users to receive payments with.

Within Wasabi Wallet, you’ll find that you can select from a range of customizable options based on your particular needs when it comes to Bitcoin privacy. A coinjoin anonymity score target can be chosen from a range that falls between 2 and 300. Users can instruct the wallet to wait hours, days, weeks, or months for the cheapest available mining fees before coinjoining in order to save every possible sat.

Wasabi Wallet is accessible to users with limited knowledge of Bitcoin privacy strategies, and the platform is equipped with guides to help users navigate the wallet. At the same time, Wasabi’s customizability makes its use satisfying to users with specialized knowledge.

Coinjoin strategies

When you launch Wasabi Wallet, you’ll notice there are three default coinjoin profile types that you can select from: Minimize Costs, Maximize Speed, and Maximize Privacy. In addition to these three default profiles, users can also opt to design their own customized profile that strikes an ideal balance between affordability, speed, and privacy.

Privacy progress

Next to your balance, you’ll notice a privacy progress bar that assigns a percentage based on the amount of your entire wallet balance that has been made private using coinjoin transactions.

When you first create your new wallet, your score will appear as 100% until you add to your bitcoin balance. From there, you’ll be able to improve your privacy progress percentage by making coinjoin transactions.

User-friendly pricing

When registering for a coinjoin, Wasabi’s default coordinator charges 0.3% for inputs worth more than 0.01 BTC. This fee is designed to only be paid once since the coordinator allows any output of a previous coinjoin round to register for future coinjoin rounds for free. This allows users to further increase the privacy of their coins without paying again. To further encourage best privacy practices, coordinator fees are also waived for any change created from payments sent using private coins.

As a side effect of allowing no coordinator fees for change outputs, the transaction recipient is able to coinjoin without paying the coordinator as well. This means that transactions sent from one Wasabi user to another will not require coordinator fees for either transaction participant.

Further customizable settings

With Wasabi Wallet, you can toggle Discrete Mode (which was previously known as Privacy Mode) which hides all sensitive information on your screen, replacing all of the numbers with hash symbols. This can be useful under circumstances wherein access to your wallet is necessary but there are other people nearby who may be able to see your device’s screen. Discrete mode is also convenient for taking screenshots of the client without revealing every detail of your transaction history.

Privacy-oriented suggestions

Before you send a transaction using Wasabi wallet, you’ll be provided with a Transaction Preview that gives you a quick overview of how much bitcoin you’re sending, in addition to the address it’s heading to, the estimated transaction time, and any fee to be incurred. When non-private coins are being sent, your Transaction Preview will let you know who could have access to information about the transaction.

When you send bitcoin using Wasabi Wallet, you’ll also get suggestions on how you can avoid creating leftover change from your transaction that is returned to your wallet. The orange shield icon appearing in the top right part of the Transaction Preview shows how much more or less to send with your transaction in order to create only one output, reducing the sender’s footprint on the blockchain.

General settings

Within the general settings area of Wasabi Wallet, you can choose whether you want to run your wallet in light mode or dark mode. You can opt for network anonymization, and whether Tor should terminate or continue to run when Wasabi is no longer active. Fees can be displayed either in BTC or sats and you can dictate whether Bitcoin addresses are automatically copy & pasted or not.

Bitcoin settings

In the Bitcoin settings area of Wasabi Wallet, you can choose which network to operate on: the Main network, RegTest, or TestNet. You can elect to run Bitcoin Knots as a full node which downloads the entire blockchain history.

If you’d like a full walkthrough of the features of Wasabi Wallet and for a visual demonstration of the range of customization that it can allow for, check out this walkthrough video.

Engage with Wasabi Wallet’s privacy-enhancing features

Wasabi Wallet is private, secure, and incredibly easy to use. The wallet lets you get up and running with just a few clicks while performing coinjoin transactions in the background.

The wealth of features available to Wasabi Wallet users emerged out of an engagement with the community surrounding Wasabi. By reacting responsively to suggestions for ways that everyone’s Bitcoin experience can be made more seamless and more private, Wasabi has continued to become even better.

Recent improvements to Wasabi Wallet include an even smoother UI, optimized connectivity with Tor, and an enhanced experience for whales who own significant amounts of Bitcoin. If you’re looking to make bitcoin transactions in a significantly safer way, download Wasabi Wallet to get started.

The post Lesser Known Features of Wasabi Wallet appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Most Bitcoin users don’t run a node, which means they are relying on someone else’s. What this means is that someone else’s computer is trusted to propagate their outgoing transactions to miners, validate incoming transactions as legitimate, and store a copy of the blockchain. In this regard, running your own node is incredibly beneficial. You put into practice one of the most important principles of Bitcoin; one that has become a mantra in the Bitcoin community: Don’t trust; verify. Unless you run your own node, you’re relying on third parties to validate transactions, including your own. Running a node enables you – on your computer – to validate transactions on a completely equal level to everyone else on the Bitcoin network.

Transaction validation occurs in two separate instances. Validity is first checked when your node is listening for transactions relayed to its mempool that are not already in a block, and validation is done again after a block is mined to check transactions that your node’s mempool was not already not aware of. Before your node propagates transactions across the Bitcoin network, it checks that they are valid against a long set of criteria. The most important criterion for validity is that the sum of input values must be greater than the sum of outputs. In other words, your computer checks that all Bitcoin transactions are actually requesting to spend money that exists rather than counterfeiting new money. A host of other things are checked by your node when building a mempool including the transaction size, the fee, the locking and unlocking scripts, and much more. The second stage of node validation occurs after a new block has been found by a miner. Only valid blocks are propagated across the network, as each node independently ensures they are valid before forwarding them to their peers. This brings us to an important point: miners are not trusted parties. For example, nodes will reject a block if the Proof of Work is insufficient, or if the miner rewards themselves with a million new bitcoins. By running a full node, you quite literally trust no one. Instead of trusting, you verify.

In addition to benefiting you individually, running a node is a voluntary way to contribute to the entire Bitcoin project. Just by running the Bitcoin software on your computer, you are helping make Bitcoin more robust and decentralised. We said at the beginning that all Bitcoin needs to exist is two nodes – which is true. But when there are more nodes in different geographic locations, it becomes increasingly complex to coordinate a simultaneous physical attack on the Bitcoin network. It is this distribution that makes it possible for there to be rules without rulers. Decentralisation is not only the key philosophy of Bitcoin from an ideological standpoint, but necessary for its survival. Previous forms of electronic money failed because their dependence was concentrated in one physical location. Bitcoin, in contrast, has no single point of failure. Bitcoin can’t be externally stopped because there’s no headquarters to bomb, raid, or shut-down. The more people run nodes, the more this statement holds true.

Thousands of computers running the Bitcoin software produce the blockchain, which is an immutable record of every transaction in Bitcoin’s history. Bitcoin’s immutability is enforced physically since an infeasible amount of Proof of Work would be required to change transaction history. Bitcoin’s immutability is also enforced socially since everyone must agree on the same rules for transactions, not just the order of transactions. Any user who changes the rules in their favor does not derail or destroy the software for everyone else, the cheating node merely creates an invalid fork that no other nodes besides its creator recognize as legitimate. The Bitcoin blockchain is a record of historical truth that cannot be deleted. It is not stored centrally or changed easily. By running your own node, you make the Bitcoin blockchain that much more indestructible.

Thus, Bitcoin’s success has necessitated the collective impact of thousands of volunteers running nodes. This small action makes Bitcoin that much stronger and decentralised. But perhaps more importantly, it means that you are in complete control. You are verifying that everyone else is playing by the rules, that no one cheats in the monetary system you are a part of. You are doing your part creating an “electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party”. Running a Bitcoin node is the wonderful intersection of individualism and altruism. You should give it a try.

The post The Benefits of Running a Full Bitcoin Node 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.

Open Source vs Closed Source Software

Most companies opt to work on closed-source software to maintain control and to profit from their work. The point of opening a business, after all, is to make money. But many argue that some of the best innovations are open source.

This is a problem because there is no financial incentive to develop open-source software. It’s as if a pharmaceutical company puts in years of research to find a cure for; polio, let’s say, and then gives this cure to the world completely free of charge. Although Jonas Salk did exactly this, it’s hard to imagine any of today’s big pharmaceutical companies doing this (did someone say COVID 19?).

Wasabi Wallet is in a unique situation where it is an open-sourced software under the MIT license, but has a private company, zkSNACKs backing its development. This development has been a collective effort by scores of contributors over the years.

Without the support of zkSNACKs however, Wasabi Wallet would certainly not be as refined as it is today. More importantly, there certainly wouldn’t be a team of developers working on the underpinnings of its next iteration, WabiSabi. To this point, the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is based on the development of open-source software.

Collaborating for Philanthropy

This is why zkSNACKs, alongside Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin, have come together to make a .86 bitcoin, or $40,000 contribution (split evenly between the two companies) in support of the growth and development of Bitcoin Knots – an open source enhanced bitcoin node/wallet software. More specifically, Bitcoin Knots is a Bitcoin full node and wallet software which can be used as an alternative to the more popular Bitcoin Core.

Bull Bitcoin was created with the objective of building the financial and software infrastructure to support the establishment of the Bitcoin Standard. Bull Bitcoin is Canada’s most trusted exchange to buy and sell Bitcoin and is designed to let you retain full control of your bitcoins when you buy, sell or spend Bitcoin on this platform directly with your own Bitcoin wallet.

One of Bull Bitcoin’s core values is “skin in the game”.

Cypherpunks write code, but cypherpunks don’t always get paid. We can’t expect the world’s most talented experts to contribute indefinitely without financial compensation. If the companies that profit from Bitcoin open-source development don’t provide the necessary funding, who will? ~ Francis Pouliot

It is no secret that all transactions coming in and out of bullbitcoin.com and bylls.com are anonymized via CoinJoin using software developed by Wasabi Wallet, which itself relies on the Bitcoin Knots software developed by Luke-Jr.

And the Winner is…

Luke-Jr has dedicated years of his life to the advancement of Bitcoin technologies. ~ Francis Pouliot

The list of his contributions and achievements are too long for us to describe without doing Luke a disservice. His knowledge, skills and expertise are invaluable and some might say are without equal. There is no doubt he has been – and remains – one of the most valuable contributors to Bitcoin development.

In the End, We All Win

Of course, zkSNACKs has a history of supporting open source software development. Last June, the company donated 1 bitcoin to the HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund. Meanwhile, Bull Bitcoin believes that for the decentralization of Bitcoin, it is critical that users have different options when choosing the Bitcoin node implementations that suits them best. Making a contribution to support the development of Bitcoin Knots aligns with both company’s mission in the bitcoin ecosystem: to support the development of open source software to maintain the decentralization of Bitcoin.

The grant has been paid in full, without conditions or expectations.

Something for the Purists:

*Astute observers will note that this grant is awarded at an important time in the history of Bitcoin development: the activation of the Taproot soft fork. While it is true that this event may have reminded us of the invaluable past and current research and development contributions of Luke-Jr in respect to the activation of soft forks, we want to make it absolutely clear that our grant is unrelated to Taproot activation via BIP8 LOT=True.

The post Wasabi Wallet & Bull Bitcoin Grant to Support Bitcoin Knots Development appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.