+ downloads on Google Play in “Early Access” program (wen 1.0?) - Stealth Addresses (BIP47/PayNym) - Coordinated Chaumian CoinJoin (Whirlpool) - Peer 2 Peer CoinJoin (Cahoots) - Decoy CoinJoin (STONEWALL) - Full coin control - Connect your own full node - Offline transactions - Tor based encrypted communication layer (Soroban) - And more...
Council of Geneva outlawed the disclosure of information about the European upper class to protestant banks. ➔ 1910s - Swiss bankers traveled to France to advertise its banking secrecy during World War I. ➔ 1920s Swiss bankers gain a reputation for refusing to help foreign governments track down tax evaders of their newly formed income taxes. ➔ 1934 - Swiss legislators make bank secrecy part of Federal Swiss law with Article 47 ◆ Disclosing a bank customer’s identity to a foreign government is a criminal act. ◆ Cash custodians who did not maintain “absolute silence” about their clients’ financial information would face imprisonment and government fines. ➔ 1940s - Protected German Jewish assets along with Nazi gold and cash balances.
signs the European Union Savings Directive (EUSD) requires banks to report “non identifying” tax statistics to EU member countries. ➔ 2008 - Swiss bank UBS is implicated in US tax evasion and agrees to disclose information on 4,000+ clients in a prosecution deal with the US DOJ. ➔ 2012 - Switzerland sign the US FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) requires banks to report “non identifying” tax statistics to the IRS. Only one Swiss bank will open accounts for US citizens today, and only if they are not a tax resident.
Legislative attempts to enforce privacy will ultimately fail • There is always a bigger and stronger...legislature, with more guns. • Digital doesn’t have the ability to create enforceable legislation even if it did work. ◆ Must find alternative methods of enforcement • Cryptographic systems • Encryption schemes • Hard to change protocols
new “identities” on demand ◆ Low barrier to entry (permissionless) ◆ Strong avoidance of personally identifiable information ◆ If they know your “True Name”, they can get you to do their bidding. (Vinge, True Names)
◆ The primary and dominant money of the economy must be a bearer based instrument with no central issuer. (censorship resistance) ◆ The current fiat money system is unsuitable for use within the digital safe haven. • Patriot Act (USA, but global implications) • FACTA • SARs • “Crime of unexplained wealth” • “War on cash” • AML/KYC encroachments ◆ A future digital national fiat currency will be even more unsuitable. Time isn’t on our side...
◆ little/no government regulatory oversight ◆ No bailouts if shit hits the fan ◆ Requires “street smarts” to navigate ◆ Natural navigation towards systems that diminish or eradicate counterparty risk
The biggest advantage of the Digital Safe Haven is the ability self custody with relative ease • No counterparty risk • Permissionless • Ultimate level of control placed on the individual
money. And a Digital Safe Haven requires a safe digital money. - Digital currencies offer great promise of serving as the monetary powerhouse underpinning the Digital Safe Haven economy - But also offer the possibility of creating a worse version of the hellscape we’re trying to escape from!
know it today is an example of a tool of revolutionary change and potential that has been captured by regulatory and special interests and has already been leveraged into new chains, to replace the old ones it “disrupted”. A few examples of early events in internet history... 1998 - International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) was supposed to be a process to design the ICANN framework by the “internet community”. Powerful tech companies and stakeholders boycotted this open event and wrote their own secret rules that later became the official bylaws and quasi regulations. 2002 - ICANN eliminates the “internet user” representative position from the ICANN Board - ISOC (The Internet Society) revise their bylaws to ensure governance of the society would be controlled by the two largest corporate members.
Edward Snowden disclosures show the extreme levels of cooperation of industry participants with national intelligence agencies, even in cases where the cooperation would be considered unlawful! - W3C enables DRM as a web standard by secret vote (EME, Encrypted Media Extensions) - FCC “Net Neutrality” - EU - GDPR - “The Internet as a public utility”
(but not perfect) form of money for the Digital Safe Haven economy ◆ First mover advantage (largest existing user base, and most likely to grow in the future) ◆ Despite regulatory capture at on/off ramps, the protocol has shown robustness for over a decade ◆ Bearer asset ◆ Pseudonymous
provide value) ◆ Strong attitude of compliance within the “industry” can lead to regulatory capture events ◆ Transparent ledger for anyone (including adversaries) to see. Not a big problem in a fully pseudonymous system but big problem when combined with KYC/AML records and other metadata. ◆ Strong retail investment focus distorts the use case from useful money to speculative investment.
to the Digital Safe Haven ➔ No meat space identity ◆ No KYC / AML. No Exception. ◆ No 3rd party integrations with services that KYC/AML ➔ Low barrier to entry to participate ◆ Android APK ◆ FOSS (Unlicense) ➔ No third party custodial risk ◆ Everything non custodial, all the time ➔ Increases the barrier of entry to surveil ◆ Tor (network privacy) ◆ Encryption (ECDH) ◆ Transaction Privacy (accounting for a public blockchain)
the foundation for a decentralized cryptographic identity system ➔ Based on theoretical work by Justus Ranvier and The Open Bitcoin Privacy Project ➔ The only stealth address implementation in production within the Bitcoin ecosystem ➔ Solves a major privacy issue that bitcoin users have. Sharing an address without worrying about the entire world knowing their balance and history.
totally break the links of past history with the future activity of bitcoin as revealed on the public blockchain. ➔ Whirlpool is the only CoinJoin implementation on Bitcoin to offer 100% entropy mixes with zero deterministic links. ➔ Fee structure that is flat and designed to incentivize good post mix behavior ➔ Non Custodial ➔ Strict change output segregation ➔ Address reuse prevented ➔ Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android ➔ FOSS
a peer to peer CoinJoin and a decoy CoinJoin, both versions being indistinguishable from another on the blockchain ➔ Designed to introduce entropy (confusion) into transactions that would otherwise be deterministic. ➔ Clever use of inputs and outputs create transactions with many combinations
to peer CoinJoin that looks like a standard bitcoin transaction. This particular transaction is designed to directly undermine the common ownership heuristic. ➔ Designed to introduce entropy (confusion) without a specific fingerprint on the blockchain. Any simple transaction (2 outputs) can be a Stowaway. ➔ Actual amount transacted not viewable on the blockchain ➔ First implementation of an idea by Gregory Maxwell that would later be known as “payjoin”
of transaction that adds distance between the origin address and the destination address of a transaction. ➔ Designed to help users avoid proximity based censorship and account closures at third party services such as exchanges.
Samourai Wallet can be broadcast to the network over mesh network. ➔ Bypass data network limitations and restrictions with full offline wallet support. ➔ Joint project with goTenna Mesh and Samourai Wallet goTenna Mesh
based encrypted communication layer. ➔ Bitcoin agnostic. Can be used for a wide variety of communications between peers. ➔ Use in Samourai Wallet with PayNym decentralized identity to seamlessly and trustlessly coordinate peer to peer CoinJoin transactions. ➔ FOSS
and full node is used to query balances and transactions, users can run Dojo on their own single board computer and connect their wallet to it. ➔ DIY or Purchase a plug-n-play ➔ Tor based ➔ FOSS
for granted today is rapidly disappearing. ➔ Digital currencies provide great promise for the individual to reclaim these eroding liberties, but also present new challenges if not handled with care. ➔ We see Samourai Wallet positioned as Bitcoin’s best gateway into the Digital Safe Haven economy ➔ Thank you!
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