The next time you need to spend some bitcoin to buy something, we invite you to try buying it this way. You might be surprised how well it works for you. And if you’re still unsure whether this is for you, keep reading.

Who is it for? What features are they looking for that they can’t find elsewhere? What kind of products do they buy? I was curious about these questions, so I took the time to interview some users (anonymously) to bring you this information.

Who Uses Wasabi’s Buy Anything Button?

Wasabi users care about protecting their privacy. They value expertise and want something that just works. Buy Anything Button users are pretty much the same but they also appreciate personalized attention.

Let’s explore what that means in more detail by looking at the exclusive features of the Buy Anything Button.

Anonymous: No Email, No IP

Wasabi is one of the most anonymous software out there. It’s not just about bitcoin privacy, but online privacy in general. If you’re using the Buy Anything Button, you’re prioritizing your privacy.

The Buy Anything Button takes advantage of Wasabi’s Tor implementation (learn more about how Tor works in Wasabi) to provide strong network privacy when communicating with the ShopInBit team in the chat interface. Your IP address will never be revealed.

Unlike most other services, you don’t need to provide an email address or any other identifying information when ordering digital products. Of course, when ordering physical products, you must provide a shipping address, but ShopInBit’s privacy policy ensures that this data is pseudo-anonymized after 30 days. 

It’s also important to remember that you can buy products, from different stores, but you do it all through one gateway: The Buy Anything chat interface. This way, you avoid giving shipping information to multiple vendors. 

“it’s very much akin to ordering something from the hotel reception: you tell them what you want, they bring it to your door, and you pay for the product + service. Nobody else except for the person at the hotel reception knows what you bought and how much it costs.”

Concierge Service: Hassle-Free Experience

It’s pretty convenient to ask for what you want through a chat interface, get a bitcoin invoice, pay it, and have the items delivered to your computer or door. Especially if it’s more than one product, you can order it all together instead of visiting multiple websites. 

For many, convenience and time savings are everything.

Particularly when it comes with extra personalized attention. One user revealed that when he ordered an airline ticket, the concierge found a way for him to get extra legroom for free. Other times, if there are auctions for a business class seat, he can get you to bid on it.

Concierge service means that you are being taken care of, which is very different from a DIY (do-it-yourself) shopping experience.

Top Shopping and Travel Expertise

Sometimes when you go to a fine restaurant, you don’t want to choose from the menu yourself: you want the professional waiter to tell you what’s popular or what he thinks is best for you. 

The same can be said for online shopping, especially if you have a concierge service with top expertise. One user needed Christmas gifts for 5 different people, so he provided the description of the people and the budget in the chat interface. The ShopInBit team quickly figured this out, he was able to save time, and everyone was happy with their gifts.

Why waste countless hours figuring this all out when someone already has?

The same goes for travel. You want to go to Italy, but you might not know which cities are better this time of year, which hotels, which airlines to avoid, or what activities to do. Well, your anonymous concierge will help you figure all that out.

Which Item Categories are the Most Popular?

As you may have guessed, travel is one of the most sought after categories. Many bitcoiners have developed a nomadic lifestyle (somewhat related to sovereignty) which requires them to always be arranging travel plans. This service is perfect for those that appreciate privacy, convenience, time saving and access to travel expertise. 

Tech products are also quite popular, and personal care products too.

Conclusion

You know yourself, you know if this is the type of experience you’re looking for. If you’re a Wasabi Wallet user, and you’re someone that spends bitcoin to live, maybe you also appreciate personalized attention, well then why not give it a try?

I know I will. 

The post Your Anonymous Bitcoin Concierge: Buy Anything User Stories appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

You’ve downloaded the new version and now you’re ready to give it a try. You want to treat yourself and your loved ones to some nice gifts, but you feel uninspired and don’t know what to get. If that’s the case, this article is for you. 

We asked ourselves: “What are 10 crazy things you can buy with Wasabi Wallet’s Buy Anything feature?” Let’s push the boundaries of your imagination. Expect to be surprised, even shocked for some.

1. Garden with 50 Bonsai Trees

Are you a fan of the Japanese art of growing and training miniature trees? How about going all out and creating a bonsai garden with up to 50 trees? 

This is what your backyard could look like (if you have a yard the size of a downtown area).

Not a Bonsai fan? On to the next one. 

2. Pay for a Funeral Bill

Things got dark pretty quickly, but the point is that we’re here for you in the good times and the not-so-good times. Whether the funeral home accepts credit card payments or only bank transfers, ShopInBit’s support agents can take care of it for you.

Let’s go back to something happier.

3. A Harp

The Buy Anything feature is also geared toward musicians, and there’s no discrimination based on the size of the instrument. Just make sure you have enough storage space for your harp. 

You + A brand new harp + the Scottish Highlands? 

But how are you going to get your harp there? You’re going to need a car, and while you’re at it, you might as well forget about the harp and just get a very cool car.

4. A Mercedes GLE 63 S AMG

Imagine it’s the middle of 2025 and Bitcoin is now at $300,000, wouldn’t you dare to buy your dream car? I know the most frugal of you will still have only one chair in your house, but the rest of us deserve to live a little!

Of course, you will be sure to print your favorite wallet’s logo on your brand-new Chad car.

Enough with the jokes and the luxury, let’s talk practicality.  

5. 1 Year Rent for your New Apartment

You just found a great new place in your town. The only problem is, they want you to do an extensive credit check investigation, but that goes against your principles. You’d rather pay a year’s rent in advance so they’ll respect your privacy. 

Wherever you are in the world (except Iran, North Korea, Ukraine, and Russia), you can pay your rent using the Buy Anything feature in Wasabi Wallet. 

You have the apartment and a floor mattress. Try to guess what’s next.

6. Completely Furnish your Apartment using the Buy Anything Feature

For the interior designers out there, Wasabi and ShopInBit have got you covered. We already know you love bitcoin, so we took the liberty of imagining a living room with an orange touch.

We know you do a better job of designing than we do, and whatever you choose to furnish and decorate your home, you’ll be able to have it shipped to you directly from your Wasabi Wallet.

7. A 3m² Swimming Pool

We imagine that after all that hard work decorating your home, you are hot and ready for a dip in the pool, but where can you get one? 

Open up Wasabi Wallet, click ‘Buy Anything’, and order the outdoor pool of your dreams. Or pay a pool contractor to build you an indoor pool.

Bitcoin or Swimming Pool? Why not both? 

8. An 85″ TV

After a long day of swimming, why not end it by watching the bitcoin price rise on an 85 inch TV you just got delivered from ShopInBit? Might as well bring the family together for that.

Ok, enough with the fun, let’s get serious.

9. 2x Server Rack R182-Z93, Dual Epyc

We know that you value privacy and self-custody, not just for bitcoin, but for your entire digital life. 

You live by two mottos: “Not your keys, not your coins” and “Not your metal, not your computer”.

You want to take things to the next level and build a server room at home. There you’ll be able to run open-source software to replace cloud-based systems, and also run your own open source LLM (Large Language Model) to train your AI models without the censorship of Big Tech.

Okay, it may not look like that, but it will feel like it, and you will feel like a real cyborg.

10. A Fully Customizable Adult Sex Doll

Now that you’re a cyborg, you might want a cyborg companion. I won’t post any images here, I’ll let your imagination run wild. As crazy as this sounds, it will be possible to buy anything, even this, directly from your Wasabi Wallet.

What are you waiting for? Download Wasabi Wallet’s new version.

The post 10 Crazy Christmas Gifts You Can Buy Through Wasabi Wallet appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Ironically, commercial banks actually make the best case for bitcoin. The financial system’s internal lunacy means that any remotely sane alternative is a threat. The lunacy referred to is called fractional reserve banking. As Satoshi Nakamoto highlighted, “banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve”. These credit bubbles are effectively a form of counterfeiting. When you borrow money from the bank, the money is created as digital credit then and there, out of thin air. These banks are spending from their reputation, which is only partially backed by their depositors’ funds. As a result, despite the fact that customers at banks have a legal claim to their property, all of these claims could not possibly be met at once. Indeed, we have seen instances where all customers demanded their money at once. The financial crisis in Greece is a good case in point. Upon these requests, the bank could not return the money because the customers never truly controlled it. 35% of the ATMs ran out of money, and banks were ultimately shut down for a whole week. The inherent trust is why the system collapsed.

Bitcoin is the antidote to this risk of fraud, providing a solution to the banking system. It replaces human trust with mathematical provability so that for the first time in history, humans can take complete self-custody over their digital money. Mathematical proof of ownership, in the form of digital signatures, is what allows for digital self-custody. The only other way to fully self-custody one’s money today is to hold physical cash. However, this prevents remote payments, and also compromises security – if someone broke into your house, the cash could be stolen. Bitcoin does not require you to choose between self-custody and worldwide payments – you get both. Undoubtedly, Bitcoin is a threat to the financial system, which prohibits digital self-custody whilst promoting digital counterfeiting. “You shall not counterfeit” is a Bitcoin commandment, violated by the modern financial system. The greatest offenders are commercial banks – but they are not the only ones.

Central Banks also inflate the money supply in programs commonly referred to as Quantitative Easing. Money is created out of thin air (you may have noticed this recurring theme) and artificially injected into the economy, eroding everyone’s savings. In the developed world, the ramifications of this may not be that swift at first, but a look at Argentina exemplifies this point. The central bank has drastically inflated the money supply, leading to a 98.8% year-on-year inflation rate. This shows how quickly the value of your savings can be drained. Even in the United States, the dollar has lost more than 80% of its purchasing power against gold since 1970. The infinite supply of fiat money makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to save for the future. Conversely, Bitcoin has a perfectly scarce supply of 21 million that cannot be inflated, only distributed. Counterfeiting is impossible in the Bitcoin system, as everything is publicly auditable. A record of all transactions ever made is publicly available, making it impossible to create fake money.  As such, it is a savings technology engineered to hold its purchasing power. Bitcoin removes the need to trust the central bank not to debase the currency — a trust which has been breached throughout history. We can send digitally and save permissionlessly with bitcoin. Bitcoin threatens the central bank’s monopoly over the money they control. No one controls Bitcoin, and it cannot be inflated.

Now to our second commandment: “You shall not confiscate”. Bitcoin is money that cannot be taken away from you without your consent. Money protected by mathematics provides incorruptible security compared to the current financial system which is protected by flesh and blood. “Owning” your money in the bank means that you are trusting the bank to return your money upon request. However, owning bitcoin fulfills the true meaning of the word. It requires possession over your private keys – 12 or 24 words that you alone know. Owning your keys is the only way to take possession over bitcoin. Anyone could try and guess the keys, but they’d have to guess one hundred and fifteen quattuorvigintillion (2²⁵⁶) times.

Confiscation and censorship of money within the traditional financial system is something we have seen. Alexei Navalny, a political opponent of Vladimir Putin, had his bank accounts frozen in late 2020. In response, his ally, Leonid Volkov, urged supporters to use bitcoin to receive donations. Money that cannot be confiscated is disrupting a system where confiscation is possible, and sometimes rampant. But, in Jacob Applebaum’s words: “with cryptography(,) no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.”

Bitcoin is an emerging branch of freedom, growing on the plant that is the Internet. This branch, though still young, poses a significant threat to the financial system. And indeed, as Washington said about Liberty, it is rapidly growing. Beyond the more philosophical benefits that Bitcoin poses, there are practical ones, too. Bitcoin’s decentralisation renders it borderless. To send a million dollars from the US to Japan would take days and would be expensive. You can send $1 million of bitcoin to Japan for a couple of cents and it would be confirmed in 10 minutes. With the increased globalisation of the economy, Bitcoin is simply an easier digital payments system. But it is two profound, ethical bedrocks of Bitcoin that threaten the financial system: the inability to counterfeit and confiscate and; more simply: the inability to steal. Bitcoin has taken root. It is Liberty – the plant that “when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth”. We shall see how this plant blossoms, as it begins to revolutionise humanity’s ancient technology: money.

The post Why Bitcoin is a Threat to Current Financial Systems appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

However, not all Bitcoin wallets deliver on this promise. In fact, some wallets purposefully take it away. Nonetheless, getting into Bitcoin will always bring you to make a choice of a wallet.

The two things that you have to be aware of in order to make an informed decision on a Bitcoin wallet are:

• Bitcoin wallets don’t store bitcoin in them, they are stored on the blockchain
• Bitcoin is not private by default, using it leaves publicly available tracks

Having this in mind is what will give you a picture of what you might have traded away in your choice of wallet. Rather than jumping blindly into a choice, the qualities highlighted in this article help you:

• Find a Bitcoin wallet that suits you
• Keep your Bitcoin safe
• Avoid possible mishaps while using Bitcoin since transactions are irreversible once confirmed
• Use Bitcoin privately

1. You Want Your Bitcoin to be Safe.

When it comes to your hard-earned Bitcoin, the worst that can happen is that you lose it all.

Often this is the price you pay for not understanding how Bitcoin wallets work.  

Bitcoin wallets don’t keep any bitcoin in them. Instead, they store the relevant credentials called private keys that allow you to control any bitcoin sent to you. Losing these keys means losing your bitcoin.

The safety of your bitcoin depends on who stores your private keys and how they do it.

Who has Control of Your Private Keys?

You can either keep your private keys or trust someone else to keep them for you.

This creates the two major classes of wallets in terms of control:

• Custodial Wallets – someone else has your private keys and they control access to your funds.
• Non-Custodial Wallets – your private keys are in your possession and only you can control your funds.

This is similar to a bank vault for your assets. You either let the bank store your assets for you or you have a personal vault at home.

Custodial Wallets

You don’t own the vault at the bank, the bank does but they offer a service that will allow you to access your assets. You have trusted them enough to know about your assets and store them for you.

Similarly, in custodial wallets, third parties are entrusted to permit you to transact and to keep your Bitcoin safe. A common example of custodial bitcoin wallets is centralized bitcoin exchanges.

Non-Custodial Wallets

The vault at your home is yours and yours alone. You’re responsible for its safety and only you control who can or cannot access your vault. Likewise, non-custodial wallets give you full responsibility for the security of all of your Bitcoin.

Keeping Your Non-Custodial Wallet’s Seed Phrase Safe

Going the non-custodial route means that you’ll have the wallet’s seed phrase to keep safe.

This mnemonic phrase is what you use to initiate or recover your wallet. It is also the source of your private keys and the public keys you use to receive bitcoin in your wallet.

Understandingly, this seed phrase should be for your eyes only. If any other person has it, they can use it to recreate your wallet and steal your funds.

What is also worth noting about seed phrases is that bitcoin wallets go about them differently.

Depending on your wallet, the length of the word phrase will vary from 12 to 24 words. While more words mean stronger security from a potential brute force, a 12-word seed also does the job.

Which Way to Go, Custodial or Non-Custodial?

Custody is a big deal with bitcoin because Bitcoin’s core intent is to remove any third parties or intermediaries from how people transact. Despite that, the type of custody you choose only matters to the extent that it can keep your bitcoin safe.

With Custodial Wallets, you can lose your bitcoin if the central exchange gets hacked, goes bankrupt or your funds get frozen.

Funds in your non-custodial wallet will always be safe as long as you can keep a secret. However, your funds will be gone if you lose your private keys either by accident or through theft.

How Does Your Bitcoin Wallet Store Your Private Keys?

Your bitcoin wallet can either be Hot or Cold. This depends on whether the private keys are stored on a device connected to the Internet or not.

Bitcoin wallets that run on the web, on desktops and on phones are considered hot. The term hot refers to their extent of connectedness to the Internet to allow for transactions.

Cold wallets use hardware that has no ability to connect to the internet and are considered the safer option between the two.  Examples of such cold wallets are Trezor, Coldcard and Ledger.

The choice between cold and hot wallets is motivated by the length of time and the amount of bitcoin one wishes to store. The common practice involves keeping huge amounts of Bitcoin in cold wallets and intermittently transferring small amounts to hot wallets for transactions.

Watch out for Fake Wallets

Fake Bitcoin wallets and exchanges exist primarily to swindle you of your Bitcoin.

Be vigilant of fake websites. Cybercriminals try to exploit new users by imitating legitimate websites using a different domain extension, and can even pay to promote these scams to the top of search engine results. In the case of application installations, make an effort to verify the authenticity of your downloads using PGP keys.

2. Your Financial Privacy Doesn’t Have to be Sacrificed

Bitcoin wallets are not private by default. When you don’t prepare for this, anyone can access your private financial data.

Your wallet leaks your transactional information when:

• Your wallet needs KYC(Know your Customer) details for you to transact
• Your wallet reuses addresses in transactions
• Your wallet does not incorporate any privacy-enhancing techniques like Tor
• Your wallet accesses the blockchain’s data through a third party instead of directly

So what can wallets do for your privacy?

Bitcoin Wallets can Work With Zero Knowledge(zk)

Bitcoin is a permissionless technology. All wallets can work and let you transact without revealing any personal information to the wallet service. This includes how your wallet accesses the public ledger.

When your wallet needs your personal information in order to use it, you ultimately surrender your privacy. This might be what seems like common practice with exchanges but the personal information collected is meant to be used against you, not used for your protection.

Wallets Should Always Generate A Fresh Address for New Transactions

A wallet that does not allow you to generate new addresses for transactions you receive will hurt your privacy. Since all addresses can be publicly viewed, receiving bitcoin using the same address multiple times will remove any doubts that two transactions were made to the same entity.

Address reuse hurts your privacy as the sender also, so before you spend your Bitcoins, check the address you are paying merchants or exchanges and request a new one if you see it has already received coins before.

There are also other risks associated with address reuse in Bitcoin.

Privacy Tools can be Built Right Into Your Wallet

Since Bitcoin implements a public ledger to keep transactions, privacy consideration cannot come as a second thought when picking a wallet.

For users who are conscious about their privacy, multi-participant transactions like coinjoins and the Lightning Network provide a crowd to hide in. That said, having a wallet with built-in privacy tools will make safeguarding your privacy effortless.

3. Your Bitcoin Wallet Should be Nice to You

A wallet’s user-friendliness is what inevitably makes your Bitcoin experience smooth. It will also be what stops you from making unintended mistakes.

But how exactly can a wallet be nice to you?

Your Wallet Helps You Track Your Transactions

The pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions can quickly throw you into an organizational chaos.

The easiest way a wallet can help you follow the privacy properties of your addresses is by offering you a way to label your deposits and expenses.

Your Wallet Stops You from Sending to Faulty Bitcoin Addresses

If you send your coins to the wrong address, you might never get them back. This means you’ll always have to exercise care when sending bitcoin and your wallet can help you with this. How exactly?

A wallet can detect invalid addresses and help you double-check addresses before confirming transactions.

Your Wallet Saves You from Erroneous Transaction Fees

If you were to pay for a $15 meal with two $20 bills, you would confuse the cashier since you could complete the payment with a single $20 bill.

Bitcoin wallets should avoid this confusion as well. Since transactions with extra input addresses waste an unnecessary amount in mining fees. A wallet should be smart enough to only spend just enough coins to make your payment, without overusing your wallet’s balance.

A Friendly Wallet Offers You A Back-Up Option

Seed phrase backups are a critical feature that will allow you to quickly recover your wallet in case of accidents.

A Simple User-Friendly Interface is the Way to Go

Is the wallet’s design straightforward to use? Only when it makes it easy for you to find your way around it regardless of your level of tech expertise can it be considered easy to use.

There Is Always Room for A Better Experience

Having a wallet that is upgradable means that any experience you currently have can be made better. Moreover, new updates are what inevitably resolve new bugs, improve usability, and fix vulnerabilities.

You’ll Need Technical Support When Things Go Sideways

Whether in the form of documentation, video tutorials, or live customer support, good technical support goes a long way. When it comes to your valuable bitcoins, having a helping hand when you get stuck is a nice thing to have.

Can There Be A Perfect Bitcoin Wallet?

Fatefully for Bitcoin, no single wallet can rule them all. In fact, the nature of Bitcoin is that anyone can make their own wallet if they so wish.

Regardless of this, the best bitcoin wallet will always remain the one that keeps your bitcoin safe, shields your privacy and is friendly to you.

The post Qualities of a Good Bitcoin Wallet appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Compared to the existing fiat-based financial ecosystem, Bitcoin has a lot to offer as a medium of exchange. This article will list some of the reasons why Bitcoin serves as the best currency for everyone.

Global Acceptance

When it comes to money, perhaps the most startling realization is that money itself is not useful, it only serves a purpose within a social contract. Money only has value when there is someone who is ready to accept it as valuable. To explain this, imagine if the richest man was rocketed to another planet alone with billions worth of paper cash.  He would be as poor as someone with nothing here on Earth, because the rich person doesn’t have anyone to accept the money he has in exchange for something on the new planet. This is in contrast to Bitcoin which is a borderless means of exchange. In a financial ecosystem that is largely cashless, there are always people ready to accept Bitcoin for a service or for goods, anywhere in the world.

All of the 5 billion people connected to the Internet around the world can set up a Bitcoin wallet and accept bitcoin and verify their transactions in real time without being inhibited by physical or political boundaries. Unlike most fintech applications that don’t have a presence in every country around the world, Bitcoin transcends all borders. Bitcoin bridges the chasms of national territories, different languages, and the use of different currencies that have been established throughout the world. In addition, international transfer with fiat is largely fragmented, resulting in higher fees and complicated processes to set up payments. Bitcoin simplifies this. In an economy becoming all the more digitized, every business can benefit from integrating Bitcoin and accepting payments and more and more businesses are realizing this. Just as how the wheel made travel easier and the Internet made the globe smaller, Bitcoin as a medium of exchange makes global payments simpler.

True Ownership

Henry Ford, “It is enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning”. As a famous industrialist and one of the wealthiest men in the world, Ford understood a lot about the world and his remarks reflect an informed perspective. Why would he make such remarks that are seemingly outrageous? One would wonder why there hasn’t been a revolution yet. The truth is that much of the information surrounding how fiat-based financial systems work is enshrouded in a mesh of jargon that may make it uninteresting to the person who doesn’t have a deep understanding of economics. Either way, what Ford tried to infer isn’t any secret knowledge someone who’s curious cannot discover for themselves. So what about banks and the monetary system that could lead to a revolution? The covered-up fact is that the monetary system allows banks to create and own all the money in circulation and profit off the work of everyone else through loans; all while creating the illusion that the customers actually own the money. The fancier term for this monetary system is the fractional reserve banking system.

With this system, any money kept at the bank is never yours and is possessed by the banks to be given out as loans. Banks do not have every single dollar given to it by their customers. In fact, if a small percentage of customers would request their deposits, banks will fall into a cash crisis. With this debt-based system, banks lend out customers’ deposits based on the faith that not all customers will at one point in time withdraw all their money. By doing this, they essentially create a pyramid-like system where they can lend and profit from money that isn’t theirs. Since banks make money when they create loans, they become incentivized to create more debt in order to profit even more. This serves to allow banks to increase the amount of capital in the economy by lending out money that is idle. Furthermore, if all the financial decisions made in giving out loans fail to be repaid, the debt-based monetary system obliges the government to bail the banks out using taxpayer money. This creates a system where banks can make money out of thin air while creating an alliance between a small minority of politicians and bankers to profit off the backs of the rest of society in the name of a monetary policy.

The only way the pyramid scheme fails is when the players below the pyramid bail out of the game. Otherwise, the bankers and politicians continue to gain by creating more profit out of thin air. As long as the game continues and the banks are still entrusted with other people’s money, the circle persists in a way that results in banks owning all the money in circulation as deposits or money given out as debt. By buying bitcoin and transacting in bitcoin, you opt out of a fiat system that is built and exists mainly to profit off your hard-earned money. Unlike the fiat system where any deposit you make is equivalent to the bank repossessing that share of the money in supply, any Bitcoin which you own as money is truly yours and only yours. The exception is is you keep your bitcoin on an exchange where it is treated the same way as banks treat your money. When you transact with Bitcoin as your currency, one prevents banks from controlling all the money in supply (and in turn owning you). The revolution Henry Ford foresaw is Bitcoin.

Transactional Freedom

Bitcoin removes limitations existing in fiat-based currencies. As a good medium of exchange, Bitcoin allows you to transact anywhere and anytime. No daily limitations on the maximum amount you can send or receive. As a self-sustaining system that has no intermediaries, you can hold any amount of funds with bitcoin and no one can freeze or limit who you can transact with. Bitcoin is a purely digital asset; so long as you keep your private keys with you, no one can confiscate your Bitcoin. The nature of Bitcoin is that users literally become their own bank. With your wallet seed phrase in your head, one can move about their daily activities and travel anywhere in the world while controlling millions worth of bitcoin. With just an address, you can send or receive bitcoin with no need for approvals permission or 3rd parties charging pointless fees. Furthermore, setting up a Bitcoin wallet does not require anyone’s approval or scrutiny.

Unlike fiat-based money transfer services, no one can impose any terms of service that you don’t understand. As a result, you don’t sign up for liabilities or pick up consequences that you don’t mean to in order to transact. In regards to transactional freedom, Bitcoin is the most inclusive financial system. The human element in finance unavoidably breeds bias. As a decentralized system, no one is in charge and therefore doesn’t have any preference as to who should or shouldn’t use it. By being independent of human bias, Bitcoin spans across all genders, races, ages or sexual orientations, serving all equally.

Deflationary

A harsh reality is that governments intentionally make you poor by printing and devaluing money. Despite the narrative of printing being necessary to stimulate economic activity, it simultaneously results in devaluing all existing money. This makes any money you hold lose its purchasing power. As a result, the same effort required to live will always increase. The resulting inflation hits lower-income earners more. The low-income earners are the ones who pay the heaviest price in an inflationary money system where there’s a sky-high ceiling to the amount of money that can be poured into the economy. The decisions around monetary policy aren’t always sound and when they fail, the results can be disastrous to an economy. An example is in Venezuela where poor monetary policy resulted in a rapid devaluing of their currency to the extent that the weight of notes required to buy a whole chicken weighed more than the chicken itself.

While inflation is disastrous to an economy, money printing also has its winners too. The inflation caused by printing money is famously referred to as a poor person’s tax because those who hold store value in fiat are the ones most hit. With Bitcoin, the amount of Bitcoin in circulation will always remain capped to a certain limit and as a result, the more people use the currency, the more its purchasing power increases.

Privacy and trustlessness

Of interest is the fact that the fiat-based monetary system enables the most sophisticated surveillance system that can be conceived. While the worry around surveillance is mainly focused on the internet and other communication channels, the amount of surveillance made possible by the electronic cashless system is greatly overlooked. Financial services offered by both banks and financial applications collect a lot of personal data about their users. There is no option for anyone to use the existing fiat-based electronic services without revealing a great deal of private information about themselves. This hurts any amount of privacy one might wish to enjoy while transacting. Additionally, financial services generate a lot of financial information relating to all our daily financial affairs. Banks and financial services know who you transact with, what your sources of money are, and what you spend your money on.

Surveillance of their customers is greatly incentivized for both banks and financial services because such information is valuable in allowing businesses to profit more. The financial benefits accrued from surveilling customers supersede the motivation to respect the customer’s privacy.

While using Bitcoin frees one from giving away sensitive personal information in order to transact, the amount of privacy one can enjoy while transacting with Bitcoin is largely dependent on how well one uses the technology. In fact, since Bitcoin utilizes a public ledger to enable transactions, it can equally serve as a great surveillance tool. However, with the right tools when using Bitcoin, one can be free from intrusive surveillance. A good wallet is usually a start but further using conjoins allows one to use it privately. By using bitcoin anyone can reclaim their privacy and at the same time unsubscribe from the fiat-based electronic transfer system, which exposes you to exploitative banking practices.

Bitcoin may have its fair share of challenges in its use as a currency but it offers great features that make it a better alternative to fiat currencies. Everyone is allowed to take advantage of Bitcoin to enable them to transact without “middlemen”, as Satoshi intended.

The post Bitcoin as the Currency for Everyone appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Bitcoin is a key factor in the investment strategies of many institutional and retail investors. Mass awareness of Bitcoin has largely arrived, as the percentage of people who are at least familiar with the idea of Bitcoin is high. However, there are gulfs between those with awareness of Bitcoin, those who own the cryptocurrency and those who use it as the currency it was designed to function as.

Considering the impressive functionality Bitcoin already possesses and the historic highs its value has hit, it can be startling to remember that mass adoption is still underway and will represent massive growth in value and applications.

As is the case with any emerging technology, those who immerse themselves in the landscape prior to mainstream adoption put themselves in a powerful position as cryptocurrency becomes more entrenched in the financial world. Let’s take a look at the path of adoption that Bitcoin is on, the tools that can make Bitcoin even better and what the implications of a hyperbitcoinized world could be.

Degrees of adoption

According to a report from 2022, around forty million Americans have either traded crypto or have expressed interest in doing so. Another report from one year earlier stated that more than a quarter of Americans own bitcoin.

While these numbers are impressive, they don’t refer to a clearly-defined standard of what adoption truly means. For example, those who buy bitcoin simply to hold as an investment strategy are certainly Bitcoin users, but they can’t be said to have embraced the full potential of Bitcoin as the world’s most promising system for value transfer and storage.

As such, the percentage of users who have adopted Bitcoin in a significant way—making it central to both their saving and spending needs—is far lower than the numbers cited above. The fact that so few people are using Bitcoin to its fullest potential is another reason to feel optimistic about the future of Bitcoin adoption, as the room for growth is immense.

Bitcoin as more than an investment strategy

Compared to many other assets, Bitcoin adoption happens on a sliding scale rather than in a binary fashion. For example, when personal computers gained popularity and affordability, computer adoption could be easily measured by whether one had a computer. When someone purchased a computer, they could be said to have fully adopted computer usage.

Bitcoin adoption, however, tends to occur in waves that increase in frequency and size. A user may experiment with trading for $20 worth of bitcoin, and then may begin exchanging more and more of their fiat currency for bitcoin when they become more comfortable and optimistic in the network’s infrastructure and the third-party tools that facilitate its use.

Particularly in the developing world, Bitcoin can empower a staggering number of people who currently do not have access to traditional banking. Across the world, decentralized finance is a pathway towards regaining the privacy that has been eroded by over-intrusive tech giants.

Bitcoin can help usher in a new area of financial liberation by helping users sidestep the issues associated with the traditional online payment ecosystem, including high fees, red tape, long wait times and a lack of control over one’s funds.

Comfort and confidence

One sign that some experts associate with widespread adoption is the ability to utilize cryptocurrencies without a full technical understanding of how they work. This point may seem counterintuitive since users with a high degree of knowledge about Bitcoin are good for the development of the landscape, too.

The reality, however, is that to become attractive to a more substantive portion of the population, Bitcoin needs to be accessible to those without extensive knowledge of the ins and outs of blockchains, peer-to-peer networks or even financial systems.

This can be compared to how smartphone adoption did not rely on users understanding the infrastructure and underlying technology that made these devices possible. It was smartphone usability that propelled these devices into each of our pockets, not a sense of their potential or an abstract belief in what they represented. Tools that help make Bitcoin streamlined and intuitive for users of all backgrounds will have a key role to play on the path toward full-on adoption.

Promising factors regarding bitcoin’s global adoption

Bitcoin is the best hard money asset

Bitcoin is a quickly evolving ecosystem. Developments and trends in the larger cryptocurrency space can be difficult to anticipate; few could have predicted the dramatic rise in popularity of NFTs, for instance, or the surge in awareness and value attributed to memecoins. In El Salvador, Bitcoin has established itself as the country’s legal tender—a degree of adoption that would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.

However, Bitcoin’s growing global adoption is unsurprising, when one keeps in mind that Bitcoin is the most solid and technologically-advanced form of hard money that exists. Though developments, value swings and news stories associated with Bitcoin can be hard to predict, its future is fixed and predictable.

Bitcoin has no elasticity, which means the supply of Bitcoin is not and never will be affected by changes in price. After all, only 21 million Bitcoin will ever be produced. In times of global instability and rapid inflation, Bitcoin’s status as hard money is made even more attractive by how it exists entirely in the digital world, making storage and security solutions ideal.

Bitcoin is always improving

While Bitcoin is often thought of as enabling anonymous transactions, it isn’t fully private by nature. Transactions and address balances are visible on the blockchain to anyone interested in viewing them. While Bitcoin addresses could be thought of as anonymous because they don’t themselves directly link to users’ identity, these addresses can be linked to users indirectly through personal information collected by merchants.

Third-party tools that bolster Bitcoin’s privacy and security represent important developments aiding adoption. coinjoin methods are one way Bitcoin’s privacy can be tightened up. With coinjoin, separation is created between each bitcoin’s past, present and future by pooling and mixing bitcoins to obscure their provenance. Wasabi offers an open-source and easy-to-use Bitcoin wallet that lets users easily utilize customizable coinjoin features.

Factors inhibiting Bitcoin adoption

Government fear and cynicism

Some of the aspects of Bitcoin that make it a powerful and empowering tool are the same aspects that make governments wary of it. Bitcoin cannot be readily regulated and it has the potential to weaken the ability of governments to create monetary policy and influence the economy.

Some forward-thinking governments have utilized Bitcoin to improve circumstances for both the country and its citizens. In particular, 2022 has seen Ukraine benefit enormously by embracing Bitcoin during their hardships. The government has accepted donations and other aid in Bitcoin and citizens have used it to facilitate cross-border transfers, as a hedge against inflation and to mitigate the effects of an unstable national currency.

For the most part, major countries including the United States and China have taken consistent steps to restrict and regulate the use of Bitcoin, as its decentralization poses a risk to their economic control over individuals.

Bitcoin-resistant governments often point to the link between Bitcoin and crime as being at the root of their skepticism. However, many Bitcoin and finance experts have pointed out that the link between Bitcoin and cybercrime is largely overblown.

In 2020, a report from Chainalysis stated that the percentage of cryptocurrency transactions linked to criminal use has been decreasing overall to around a third of one percent of all cryptocurrency transactions today. Meanwhile, the UN estimates that between two and five percent of global GDP can be linked to crime and money laundering—a far higher rate. For this reason, government hand-wringing about Bitcoin’s facilitation of illicit activities can be read as ill-informed at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

In an investigation of how government bodies identify black market transactions, the Wasabi team discovered that governments view anything that was purchased in a “non-compliant” way as a black market transaction, regardless of what was purchased. However, common practices among blockchain analysis firms recognize that black market transactions require more stringent classification.

Technological barriers to entry

There’s an unfortunate trade-off that often happens for new users of Bitcoin wherein monetary sovereignty is traded away in exchange for ease of use. Newcomers to the Bitcoin landscape are often looking for the path of least resistance. These all too often come in the form of heavily-marketed centralized exchanges that can be more closely aligned philosophically with big banks than they are with the modern-day cypherpunk vision.

Users with knowledge of blockchain technology tend to be aware of how to keep their Bitcoin secure, and of the importance of maintaining ownership over their private keys. On the other hand, users who make use of and trust these popular centralized exchanges for storing their bitcoin sacrifice much of the decentralized freedom that Bitcoin represents.

Adoption of Bitcoin in the future can be greatly aided by tools that provide users with a smooth and streamlined experience without leading to increased centralization. Non-custodial wallets like Wasabi that don’t make users give up their private keys are an important development, as they help Bitcoin adoption grow while protecting Bitcoin users from the relentless creep of centralization and regulation.

Wasabi Wallet’s Role in Bitcoin’s Growing Adoption

Beyond the financial benefits of pivoting to Bitcoin, the philosophical implications of a global population that’s vested in increased agency online is a reason to be optimistic for the future. Bitcoin is an inherently idealistic proposition—a decentralized currency that puts users in control of their funds and, by extension, their privacy.

A belief in Bitcoin’s widespread global adoption needs to be rooted in the realities it faces, particularly in terms of security and privacy. After all, Bitcoin’s adoption will only be a success if it retains its ability to be a crypto-anarchist-minded tool that protects users’ secure financial transactions.

The post What the Growing Bitcoin Adoption Means appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Bitcoin is right in the middle of the path to mass adoption. Many still do not understand the disruptive changes in the relationship between the state and the individual that will come with the triumphant advance and expansion of this technology.

Let’s take a look a decade into the future and sketch a likely scenario that could play out:

Western democracies are currently experiencing an economic depression that is exacerbated by a pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. Central banks are flooding the market with an unprecedented amount of freshly printed banknotes to cushion the negative effects on the real economy. The negative long-term implications caused by this are completely ignored or deliberately brushed aside by politicians whose concerns only last as long as the legislative periods for which they were elected.

Continuously increasing inflation rates, rising national debt and the impossibility to accumulate wealth due to ever-increasing tax-rates are only a few worrisome aspects of the much broader concerning status quo.

There’s a diminishing number of new enterprises being formed due to overregulation, increasing time preferences of enterprises & consumers and the corresponding waste of resources from keeping zombie companies alive.

Nevertheless, there is a way out = Bitcoin. This decentralized, censorship-resistant and nonconfiscable store of value with a fixed cap of money supply enables an escape from this broken system. It is not a hidden or unrecognized escape, but more of a traceable escape. Because Bitcoin has a publicly viewable, fully verifiable transaction ledger, it can make individuals transparent and recognizable through once-disclosed personal data being connected to transactions. Certainly this situation will change. By imposing absurd and abusive state regulations, individuals will begin to use privacy-enhancing tools and techniques. The current software for storing and sending Bitcoin will gradually integrate this technology as a fixed component in order to enable the transfer of value to the ever-growing cyber realm – without recognition in terms of traceability of a transaction and assignability to an individual identity.

States can therefore only access the assets of their population with a high degree of difficulty. Prosecution of individuals will be harder with the use of privacy techniques offering legal improvability. There is also no reasonable cost/benefit-ratio from the point of view of the state to further violently enforce their theft of individual wealth. State issued currencies will face harsh competition through Bitcoin. Therefore, in the long run, the behavior and role of the state as a monopoly of coercion dictating many aspects of its people’s lives will change fundamentally.

The individual will be empowered through Bitcoin, forcing the state to offer services for which people are willing to pay lest being abolished. Thus, the state will transform itself into an agency that is comparable to an enterprise serving the individual needs of its customers. The state’s ability to function as an unlawful gangster organization trying to mass-surveil and control everyone’s life will be over.

A deflationary money-system like Bitcoin will let a society emerge in which individuals are incentivized to save, to invest their time in productive activities which are well planned and thought out and punish resource-wasting and rash behavior. Basing on these fundamentals, the economy will flourish and prosperity will grow exponentially.

This is the rough sketch of a future we are heading for with Bitcoin becoming the dominant worldwide standard. A requirement for this playing out is to solve and implement the last part of the puzzle: easy to use privacy in Bitcoin for everyone.

The post Privacy in the Information Age appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

In the internet’s early days, it was structured more in accordance with anarchist ideals, offering users privacy and a less hierarchical experience. Today, the internet is dominated by government and Big Tech players that have eroded personal autonomy and transparency.

Everyone has a fundamental right to privacy. These days, pushing back against the tide of insidious data collection and online privacy infringements requires the deployment of anarchist-inspired notions of self-determination and privacy as freedom. Wrenching some sovereignty back from overreaching companies, organizations, and government agencies is feasible with the help of privacy-minded tools and strategies. Let’s take a closer look at how digital initiatives that promote greater freedom and autonomy are embracing anarchist principles.

What is Crypto-Anarchy?

The internet is at the root of how many people organize their lives. For this reason, most contemporary discussion of personal freedoms tends to be centered around the right to digital privacy.

The prefix “crypto” is often used negatively to refer to groups who have hidden motives or views. For instance, the term “crypto-fascist” refers to those with fascist views who hide their fascism in order to avoid stigma or consequences. On the other hand, the “crypto” prefix used in the term “crypto-anarchy” refers to strategies for cultivating autonomy that make use of cryptography tools.

As such, while crypto-anarchy is rooted in strategies that foster privacy and anonymity, these goals themselves are not obscured by crypto-anarchists. In fact, many crypto-anarchists are actively involved in promoting the importance and value of digital cryptography tools.

Historically, anarchism itself has been associated with left-wing thought, and anarchy’s aversion to hierarchical structures draws associations to communalism and libertarian socialism. However, crypto-anarchy today has links to anarcho-capitalism, too—a right-libertarian political philosophy centered around ownership of private property absent of centralized control.

Anarcho-capitalism calls for a voluntary society that individuals design themselves with the help of private agencies; in an ideal anarcho-capitalist society, individuals would voluntarily opt into contracts of participation designed to fulfill the will of the people.

Anarchy and Privacy

Anarchist thought is largely centered around skepticism towards coercion from intrusive governing forces. Personal privacy is widely regarded as an inalienable right. For instance, the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.”

Freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom from discrimination are all rooted in the individual’s right to create boundaries and to choose what to reveal and what to hide from others. Actions as simple and intuitive as putting on clothing or closing the bathroom door are rooted in our implicit understanding that there are aspects of ourselves we prefer not to share with others, for a number of reasons.

As individuals, we make countless decisions about our privacy every day. Insisting that our privacy is not violated without consent is an important way we protect ourselves from abuses of power. However, the ever-increasing role of technology in our lives has blurred our relationship to privacy. While we would naturally feel skeptical of anyone eavesdropping on our conversations, going through our mail, or searching our homes without a warrant, digital surveillance has created a panopticon effect in which it’s nearly impossible to tell who is collecting information about us, and for what purpose.

Crypto-anarchist tools offer users renewed awareness and control over what information they are sharing with external parties, which is an important step in eradicating privacy intrusions.

A History of Bitcoin’s Relationship to Anarchy

The principles that led to the development of Bitcoin are the result of a deep and sustained engagement with anarchist ideals. The original development of this technology can be traced to the Cyperpunks’ mailing list from the early 1990s—a virtual meeting place of early digital privacy enthusiasts.

The Cypherpunks are an example of a digital voluntary society. Many Cypherpunks communicated anonymously by way of aliases, and used cryptographic tools both as a matter of principle—believing in online anonymity as a path towards greater online freedom—and to seize the potential of the power of cryptography as a path towards decentralized and uncoerced economic transactions, for instance.

Challenges Facing Bitcoin’s Role as a Privacy Tool

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency. All transactions are permanently recorded and stored on the blockchain without the need for regulatory forces or third-party verification. These are essential aspects of its potential as an empowering and privacy-minded digital currency. However, these characteristics also require additional tools and strategies to ensure its capacity to maximize privacy and personal freedom.

Many newcomers to Bitcoin see it as a short-term investment vehicle, primarily focused on fluctuations in the price of bitcoin rather than the revolutionary potential behind decentralized money. Novice users may leave their bitcoin exchanges, which essentially negates the freedom-related benefits of Bitcoin.

Most popular cryptocurrency exchanges are centralized (CEXs), meaning third parties have control and oversight over users’ funds. The well-known expression “not your keys, not your coins” refers to the fact that those who have access to bitcoin assets’ private keys (CEXs) ultimately have control over the assets.

When users put their private keys in the hands of others, this is an aspect of their privacy (and freedom) that they are giving away in exchange for convenience.

The pitfalls of CEXs go beyond the privacy-related issue of private key ownership, too. Major crypto exchange hacks have occurred in the past, resulting in users losing their bitcoin. Some bitcoin exchanges, including Quadriga, have been outright scams, defrauding users of their money.

One of Bitcoin’s most integral features is how it offers users the ability to have custody of their own assets, without fear of outside interference. An understanding of the fundamental principles of Bitcoin and the history of its development is an important aspect of learning how to use it as a defensive privacy tool.

Defensive Tools to Establish Personal Privacy

Those with limited familiarity with Bitcoin often presume it to be an anonymous currency, but the opposite is true. Bitcoin operates under principles of transparency, which allow all transactions on the blockchain to be publicly viewed and verified.

Users’ public keys can be linked to past transactions, which can be linked to users’ personal identities through Know Your Customer (KYC) policies. KYC requires that merchants collect data about their customers. For instance, if you use Bitcoin to purchase an item from a website, that website may collect your address and other information, creating a link between that information and your Bitcoin address. Users’ IP addresses can also be linked to Bitcoin transactions, leading some users to enlist services that hide their IP addresses.

Anonymizing Strategies

New tools have been emerging that seek to improve Bitcoin’s privacy in order to give users more control over how personal data is shared. Coinjoin is one popular anonymizing strategy for Bitcoin. Coinjoin works by allowing users to temporarily join their funds together, acting as a kind of opaque wall between previous and future transactions.

Additionally, privacy experts tend to recommend privacy-minded internet browsers to make bitcoin-related activity less publicly viewable. Tor’s browser is a well-established anonymizing tool. Its free browser gives users the ability to mask their web activity from outside parties using multi-layered encryption. When it comes to communicating about cryptocurrency transactions, experts recommend end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal.

Wasabi Wallet

Privacy-minded digital wallets are an effective way to maintain control over your bitcoin and to address the privacy concerns inherent to Bitcoin. Wasabi Wallet 2.0 is a privacy-focused bitcoin wallet that is user-friendly and offers a shortcut to the privacy-enhancing benefits of Bitcoin as a tool for crypto-anarchists.

Wasabi Wallet is a zero-knowledge tool, which means its developers collect no information about users. Making use of the Tor network, block filtering, and coinjoin technology, Wasabi Wallet 2.0 is trust free. It is also a non-custodial wallet, giving users control over their own private keys, offering the full self-determining potential of Bitcoin.

Wasabi Wallet as a Defensive Technology

Without access to the right tools, protecting oneself from insidious surveillance and data collection can feel overwhelming. Across the internet, privacy and security issues are widespread, and many web-based services are oppressively hierarchical, offering little to no independence and freedom for users.

According to one study from the Pew Research Centre, four in five Americans feel they have little to no control over how their data is viewed and collected online, and around the same number believe the pitfalls of this digital surveillance outweigh any benefits. The same study shows that well over half of Americans are concerned about digital surveillance.

Those interested in preserving their privacy online have rightfully gravitated towards Bitcoin and the crypto sphere, which has a history rooted in strong-willed individualism in the face of intrusion from overbearing institutions. While some people associate the term “anarchy” with the avoidance of rules or consequences, the opposite is true—crypto-anarchist ideals are centered around transparency, equality, and fairness for all. Privacy is a key component of personal freedom, and tools like Wasabi Wallet help users defend their individual online property rights as part of a path toward a more liberated life.

The post We Already Live in Anarchy appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Bitcoin is at the forefront of future-thinking approaches to payments, investing and a range of other applications that extend far beyond its role as a digital currency. While Bitcoin represents the future of digital currency, its prioritization of censorship resistance has links back to the cypherpunk movement, which first emerged in the 1980s and became prevalent in the 1990s as internet adoption began to pick up steam.

Tracing contemporary privacy concerns back to early online privacy activists can be an enlightening way to develop a sense of where Bitcoin may be headed in the future. Some of the top figures who advocate for online privacy, including Timothy May, have links to the original cypherpunk movement. Assange penned the 2012 book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, which bolstered mainstream awareness of the cypherpunk movement.

Cypherpunks tend to believe in the power of cryptography and other online privacy strategies centered around combating widespread digital surveillance. For decades, cypherpunks have been designing strategies and platforms to preserve online privacy for those who recognize its importance. Let’s dive into the history of the cypherpunk movement and how its adherents and principles are having a continued impact on the Bitcoin landscape.

Who Were the Original Cypherpunks?

In the early nineties, a group of computer scientists, programmers, and cryptographers assembled with mathematician Eric Hughes in order to discuss what they saw as the looming threat of increased surveillance facilitated by the burgeoning internet infrastructure. These early internet activists shared a libertarian sensibility—believing that the state should hold only minimal involvement in citizens’ private lives. The cypherpunk movement grew out of monthly meetings between this group and its name was a play on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction coined by Jude Milhon, which itself drew influence from early hacker culture.

The group created the first anonymous remailer,  the cypherpunk mailing list, in which they developed visionary ideas about online privacy. Tim May—who previously worked at Intel—was a founding member and prolific contributor to the cypherpunks electronic mailing list. He also put forth the idea of tools enabling anonymous browsing of the web as well as the idea of anonymous online marketplaces and anonymous whistleblowing systems—all of which are ideas that have seen a number of applications in the years since. The cypherpunks communicated in a brash, jargon-laden style, and their mailing list grew into a core hub of the discussion and development of online privacy strategies. The mailing list became defunct in the early 2000s, but by then the movement was fully up and running and had developed anonymous ways of communicating and sharing resources online.

Is the Cypherpunk Movement Active Today?

In his work “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” Eric Hughes wrote “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” Frequently, politicians and those who run large social media companies assert that privacy can no longer be expected online, and that only those who have something to hide should be worried about being watched. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an influential TedTalk about online privacy in 2014, we make countless choices every day about what we choose to reveal and obscure from others in our lives and we should protect our right to be able to do so online.

Many online privacy-minded applications and initiatives were either created by people with links to the original cypherpunk movement, or were directly inspired by its philosophies. As mentioned, Julian Assange was an active member of the cypherpunk mailing list and his WikiLeaks organization was directly inspired by the cypherpunk focus on the need for anonymous whistleblowing resources. Other influential people associated with the cypherpunk ideologies include Jacob Appelbaum, who was not involved with creating the cypherpunk mailing list but was later a core member of the team that developed the open-source anonymous communication platform, Tor; Adam Back, who created Hashcash (a proof-of-work algorithm) and Blockstream (a company providing products and services built around Bitcoin), and Bram Cohen, who created BitTorrent.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper using concepts that drew directly from the work of Adam Back, with whom Nakamoto had been in contact. In Bitcoin’s whitepaper, Nakamoto referenced the revolutionary concept of a currency in which transactions are publicly viewable while utilizing private keys to sign unique transactions. Bitcoin was a leap forward in the development of the kind of cryptocurrency first posited by the cypherpunk movement.

Recent Cypherpunk Developments

Much of the appeal of Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies is centered around the values championed by the cypherpunk movement. Decentralized, anonymous currency rooted in cryptography offers resistance to unnecessary (and ultimately corrupt) government interference. Ideally, cryptocurrencies place privacy and transacting power back into the hands of individuals who are able to control what information they share.

Alongside the continued growth and development of Bitcoin—which maintains its cypherpunk-influenced integrity—there has also been a movement towards cryptocurrencies that have moved away from decentralized models. In the interest of mainstream growth and adoption, they stray from the individual privacy efforts that are central to the cypherpunk vision. Converting centralized (fiat) currency into Bitcoin often requires the use of centralized exchanges and the regulations these entail, which typically degrade users’ privacy. Many new Bitcoin users utilize centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken, which collect extensive personal information and have policies that threaten transaction privacy.

Bitcoin is central to the development of a forward-thinking movement towards individuals holding the keys to their own Bitcoin. However, there are aspects inherent to Bitcoin that have privacy concerns that innovators are taking steps to combat. The fact that every Bitcoin transaction and address balance is viewable to anyone on the blockchain is key to the decentralized authentication of Bitcoin transactions, as it avoids the need for middlemen. When each transaction’s details can be viewed, it ensures nobody breaks the rules.

While Bitcoin addresses are not directly linked to users’ identities, they certainly can be. Once one active address’ identity is revealed, the privacy of each party that has engaged in transactions with the compromised address can be threatened. Additionally, “know your customer” requirements from online merchants, which verify users’ identities over time as a security function, can disturb users’ privacy when ostensibly anonymous transactions are connected to these transactions.

Coinjoin as a Contemporary Cypherpunk Innovation

An important concept when it comes to Bitcoin’s ability to provide an anonymous and private payment method is fungibility. Fungibility refers to the ability of an asset to be exchanged freely for the same denomination of the same asset. For instance, an unmarked $20 bill’s value does not depend on the bill’s provenance. On the other hand, non-fungible stores of value include artworks, which are unique and where previous ownership is factored into an item’s worth.

Bitcoin is designed to be a fully fungible currency, but this can be threatened when certain coins can be linked through their transaction history to an unscrupulous user or exchange. One technique associated with restoring fungibility for Bitcoin users is Coinjoin. Coinjoin is an obfuscation strategy that severs the tie between previous transactions by joining coins together, which effectively anonymizes them.

CoinJoin activity itself can be viewed on the blockchain and there is still a limit to the success of this obfuscation strategy. Some users may feel that coins that have undergone this process are undesirable. For this reason, the widespread adoption of Coinjoin may be necessary in order to create a situation where obfuscation is destigmatized and seen as a privacy-retaining tool, rather than as a sign of suspicious activity.

The growing mainstream adoption of Bitcoin is an example of destigmatization of this nature, as the link between Bitcoin and anonymous online marketplaces like Silk Road (wherein users paid in bitcoin for goods and services that were illegal in certain jurisdictions) became less of a focus.

Wasabi Wallet as a Tool for Cypherpunks

One groundbreaking tool that goes a long way towards making Bitcoin adhere to the privacy standards that the original cypherpunks strove for is Wasabi Wallet—a privacy-focused, non-custodial Bitcoin wallet. Wasabi Wallet uses Coinjoin obfuscation and integrates Tor as a strategy to prevent network deanonymization attacks.

One challenge faced by Bitcoin wallet developers is how to ensure the privacy of users while also making wallets user-friendly and accessible to those without extensive technical knowledge. The original cypherpunk movement was composed of developers, programmers, mathematicians, and cryptographers. The movement’s motto — “cypherpunks write code” — refers both to the programming skills of the community and the focus on encryption. These days, widespread adoption among those without specialized knowledge is the goal of many developers of Bitcoin-related tools.

Wasabi Wallet is a desktop wallet, which tends to allow for more robust software than mobile offerings. It prevents third party access to users’ wallet information, increased fungibility provided by Coinjoin technology, and offers the privacy benefits of the Tor onion network.

The recently-launched Wasabi Wallet 2.0 provides a revamped interface. Wasabi Wallet lets users choose between three coinjoin strategies, depending on whether their main priority is maximizing privacy, maximizing speed or minimizing costs. Users can easily view their wallet’s privatization progress and can also implement Discreet Mode, which further hides sensitive information.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies tend to naturally attract those who value online privacy and who see the benefits of being in control of how information is collected and distributed. Wasabi makes it easy to send and receive Bitcoin with more privacy than other services suited to average bitcoin users. Coinjoin and other anonymization strategies implemented by Wasabi are paving the way towards a landscape in which it’s possible for all Bitcoin users to be cypherpunks, even without specialized knowledge.

The post Modern-Day Cypherpunks appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.

Presently, using intermediaries in financial transactions always sacrifice privacy; as such, there’s a growing need for decentralized peer-to-peer technology to facilitate money transfers. Bitcoin comes with some drawbacks in terms of privacy. The application of distributed ledger technology is fundamental to allowing bitcoin to work without “middle-men,” but the transparency affects Bitcoin’s ability to be used as currency. Consequently, bitcoin has had to evolve to meet the advances in technology used in deanonymizing public ledgers and degrading privacy.

The advancement in Bitcoin privacy will be most visible on the following fronts:

1. Wallets
2. Exchanges
3. Coinjoins
4. The Lightning Network
5. Open Source Development
6. Awareness and public sentiment

Wallets

The big question about wallets is, who keeps your private keys? If your wallet allows someone else to store your private keys, then the amount of privacy you have is controlled by the party trusted with your private keys. Giving away your private keys means that you trust the other party to always serve your interests over theirs, which is not always the case. A good wallet allows you to store your private keys. The wallets we use in the future will directly influence the amount of privacy we have while using bitcoin. The other feature of wallets that directly affects privacy is address generation. Working with a single unchangeable address is detrimental to a user’s privacy as it builds a strong association with one address. The future of privacy will have more wallets allowing users to generate addresses on the fly whenever needed.

There will also be a more significant shift in the number of users running full node wallets. A node in bitcoin is software that allows a computer to have its record of the public ledger that other computers on the network can read or write. A full node also provides computation power when it participates in validating transactions before transmitting them throughout the network. Running a full node may be technical, but it gives the user more security and privacy when they know what they are doing.

With a growing number of novice users joining bitcoin, it will be critical for future wallets to be straightforward to use for everyone. This will directly affect fast advancements in user interface design to improve usability and user experience. The simplicity of the wallet does a lot to protect users from avoidable mistakes that may affect users transacting with privacy in mind. The trend for future wallets will likely sway in the direction of wallets that preserve privacy while being easy to use all at the same time.

The least private wallets in the future will be wallets that lack network-level protection from network deanonymization attacks. Such wallets will always reveal more network information about the users transacting with the wallets rendering them porous. To counteract this, the future will see more and more bitcoin wallets using Tor. The most private wallets will likely be Desktop wallets since they allow users to run better software than mobile phones. Wallets are at the center of the mass adoption of Bitcoin and privacy. There will always be a direct correlation between the wallet used to transact and the privacy of the user.

Exchanges

Bitcoin may be the future financial system, but it’s unlikely that it can exist independent of the traditional financial system. The fact that bitcoin is a global currency means that users in different countries still need to convert their existing currencies into bitcoin and then back to local currencies. This is a role exchanges play. Centralized exchanges cannot exist outside the regulation that necessitates having all their customers fill KYC forms, degrading privacy. Central exchanges propagate the lack of privacy existing in the current financial system onto bitcoin. The biggest win for the future of privacy will be the growth of decentralized exchanges. Unlike centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges enable Bitcoin transfer in exchange for other currencies without giving away private information. The development of decentralized exchanges is likely to grow further with the growing interest in Non-Fungible Tokens and other cryptocurrencies. Users will easily exchange Bitcoin for other valuable assets with decentralized exchanges without giving up privacy. The near future will also see a more significant rise in the acceptability of bitcoin as a mode of payment, resulting in less need for exchanging bitcoin on central exchanges for local currencies.

CoinJoins All the Way

Coinjoins are probably a magic pill in the quest for bitcoin privacy. In a coinjoin, multiple users combine their coins and the output to every user is the same value of coins they put in the transaction, except that all the coins cannot be distinguishable from each other.  Soon, trustless coinjoins will be more common because apart from improving privacy, they allow for fungibility. It will be noticeable that coinjoins will be more and more popular and their frequency will increase. For future wallets, conjoins will be one of the main features that make a wallet attractive to new users. Coinjoins will also see a shift to the type of coinjoins that do not allow third-parties access to users’ wallet information. This is useful as it will enable users to preserve any private information they don’t wish to give away in a coinjoin. With the increase in the number of coinjoins, the public ledger will be more obscure enabling greater privacy.

The Lightning Network

The development of the lightning network has the potential to revolutionize Bitcoin privacy and payments. By performing transactions off the main ledger, the lightning network allows for more private transactions. Already there exist implementations of the lightning network on bitcoin wallets but they haven’t been widely adopted yet. Wallets incorporating the Lightning Network will come with more development and advancements.

Open Source Technologies

Truth has to be verifiable. Open-source software allows us to inspect the software we use so that there is no fishy business. Privacy concerns make it important that the software we use really does what it says it does and not anything else. To establish trust, the trend of open source privacy tools is likely to pick up pace.

Public Sentiment about Bitcoin Privacy

Bitcoin hasn’t been free from misconceptions. Probably the most pervasive relates to the usage of its privacy features in crime. Such claims have stopped others from leveraging bitcoin’s privacy features to protect their financial information. Regardless of any held opinions, bitcoin has kept going because it’s desirable that a decentralized currency should exist and like all inventions, it is a driving force for both good and bad. The privacy features on bitcoin give users power that other tools can’t afford, but we cannot assume that it is to be used entirely for bad. Future bitcoin users will understand that taking control of our financial privacy is necessary and that a future where our private worlds are constantly encroached upon isn’t worth living in.

The post The Future Vision of Bitcoin Privacy in 5 Years appeared first on Wasabi Wallet - Blog.