Sad to see many Bitcoiners parroting this absolutely misguided "hot take". Consensus-rule-changes to enhance privacy in Bitcoin may be possible someday and a good thing to pursue! But it's important to get there using sound logic, and this is not it.
In order of relevance, here are the main issues with this new mantra by the "cool kids":
1) Embedding zerolink-grade privacy features into the Bitcoin protocol, even assuming it was possible (more on this later), would *not* have prevented the current events with Whirpool/Wasabi: it would have just *extended* them to all legally-incorporated and centrally-run Bitcoin wallets. You may think there may be counterexamples: "why aren't all legally-incorporated and centrally-operated Monero or Liquid wallets closing down?". The answer is because they are still irrelevant, and censorship is slow. Zerolink wallets also operated for a long while until today. But if Wasabi can't operate legally, then no wallet that operate on a Bitcoin-with-wasabi-like-privacy-guarantees can't operate legally. It's just logic. It's absolutely ridiculous to think that the DoJ would just go: "oh no, if it was just two of them we could shut them down, but it's DOZENS of them, including absolute geopolitical powerhouses like Electrum, Bluewallet and Spectre...too many, we have to give up...we outlawed the possession of physical gold for decades, but we can't quite go to such an extreme as banning Bitcoin wallets altogether, that would be too much"! Embedding more privacy in the consensus rules, if feasible, would just remove some ambiguity, plausible deniability, grey areas, legal arbitrage opportunities.
2) The above isn't to say we should *not* do it anyway, if feasible! The disadvantage of extending/generalizing the Samurai/Wasabi issue instead of solving it may be compensated by the advantage of improving Bitcoin's privacy anonset, by forcing better default behaviors on clueless users who wouldn't care for privacy enough to use specialized tools, but don't dislike privacy enough to avoid Bitcoin altogether. Also: improving Bitcoin's privacy culture, by cutting the "compliant Bitcoin" bullshit and reminding everybody that without privacy Bitcoin is a fool's errand. But the "hot take" dishonestly promotes the idea that such consensus-rule changes are obvious low-hanging fruits (maybe following the lead of Snowden's shitcoin, Zcash, which BTW started off with opt-in and not default privacy features). They aren't. Famous onchain privacy-by-obfuscation techniques (like CT in Liquid/Monero or shielded txs in Zcash) aren't incentive-compatible and are in direct trade-off with scalability. Conjoin itself (with the possible exception of some payjoins, and excluding a future CISA soft fork) is sadly included on this category.
3) Even if the most promising path to better Bitcoin privacy pass through offchain/omission technique, and not the onchain/obfuscation ones Snowden seems to implicitly promote, that doesn't mean there are no possible L1 consensus-rule changes to consider. Some covenants proposals, for example, would improve the Lightning Network, which has a huge potential as a privacy-by-omission tool, incentive-compatible and useful for scalability as well. Interest is recently resurfacing also for the incentive-compatible CISA idea. But these changes will not happen because Snowden "warns developers". Bitcoin protocol developers aren't Snowden employees and aren't driven by "warnings", and beside that: they are not in charge of Bitcoins protocol-rules at all! Economic nodes are, and even if some famous developers change them, most economically relevant users will not change their node accordingly if not convinced. This may difficult to understand for people working on centralized shitcoins, where promoters decide, developers implement and users blindly follow, auto-updating nodes or not running nodes in the first place.
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Edward Snowden
@Snowden
I've been warning Bitcoin developers for ten years that privacy needs to be provided for at the protocol level. This is the final warning. The clock is ticking. x.com/wasabiwallet/s…
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