Bitcoin wallet feud: Samourai and Wasabi clash over privacy filter

Wasabi's decision to filter transactions through Chainalysis draws criticism from Samourai, reigniting a long-standing dialectical battle in the Bitcoin wallet community.

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A dialectical battle seems to be reigniting on social networks, with two well-known Bitcoin wallets as protagonists. Samourai and Wasabi.

Through a post on Twitter, the Samourai development team accused its Wasabi peers of “having crossed a line.” The root of the criticism lies in the decision by zkSNACKs, the company behind Wasabi, to apply a filter to transactions going through the CoinJoin privacy protocol.

To filter transactions, Wasabi partnered with blockchain analytics firm Chainalyisis (“CA”)

The decision was controversial because CoinJoin seeks, precisely, to increase users’ privacy when sending and receiving bitcoin. From Wasabi, meanwhile, they argue that they seek to prevent the processing of bitcoins (BTC) that come from illicit activities. (Here we go again.. the illegal activities fairy tail).

Samourai has criticized Wasabi’s approach in the past. However, this Monday, April 4, it lashed out again, writing, “The fact that this company still exists and is heavily promoted by influential charlatans is a huge stain on the community.”

“A ‘privacy’ wallet contracting with Chainalysis and sharing customer data with an adversary seems like crossing a big red line,” they added. In responses to their own post, they also criticized those who continue to promote Wasabi “to the detriment of unsuspecting users.”

Wasabi’s point of view and supporters

For the time being, Wasabi has not responded to Samourai’s criticism. In a recent tweet, the company even reaffirmed that its wallet “represents a radical force against oppressive systems of control.”

Despite the lack of “official” responses, several users took up the banner instead and defended the project’s developers and their decisions.

One user even had a brief exchange with the Samourai account regarding the transaction information shared by each wallet. “Each transaction uses a different address and each UTXO has a different Tor identity on Wasabi 2.0. You didn’t even look into Wasabi 2.0, did you? It’s been almost a year, get up to speed,” Vlad “BTCTKVR.com” Costea wrote.

Of course Wassabi sponsors his show, so, not too sure about this guys honesty..

When Wasabi announced its new policy regarding CoinJoin, there was speculation that the decision could be linked to the wallet’s appearance among those that would have been attempted to be used to launder stolen funds during the hacking of The DAO in 2016.

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