The founder of a Bitcoin privacy wallet has been sentenced. If you visit https://samouraiwallet.com/, you can still see the previous notice from the U.S. authorities (see image below). However, there are several interesting points worth sharing regarding this matter:
1) The original report referred to this wallet as a mixing tool. Are there mixers on Bitcoin?
Yes. The Samourai Wallet uses Coinjoin, which can be seen as a type of mixing tool.
Coinjoin allows multiple users to combine their UTXOs into a single large transaction. This manually achieves a mixing effect at the transaction level.
Other users can also earn a fee by providing mixing liquidity through this process. Samourai Wallet's Whirlpool is a specific implementation based on Coinjoin; the team also profits from this service.
There are also more automated solutions like Joinpool/Coinpool, which mix coins through a continuous pool of UTXOs.
However, Coinjoin and Joinpool can sometimes mix for the sake of mixing, while for real payments involving one receiving and one paying, there is the Payjoin solution: the payee adds a UTXO to the payer's output. If a new address is added, it becomes very difficult for outsiders to determine who paid whom and how many people were involved.
In summary, these are all part of the privacy solutions available on Bitcoin. Therefore, viewing Bitcoin as a protocol and network with no privacy is clearly inaccurate.
2) Is Samourai another example of a tech geek like Tornado Cash facing regulatory crackdowns?
Not necessarily. For instance, Peter Todd believes:
https://x.com/peterktodd/status/1985639375946830067
The privacy implemented by Samourai may not be entirely complete, which raises suspicions of misleading users to some extent. Additionally, there is considerable controversy within the community, including past threats to others. It is unclear whether this ruling is related to these issues, but overall, the reputation is relatively poor.
3) What alternatives are still available?
Similar options include using Wasabi Wallet. Alternatively, you can use more powerful desktop wallets like Sparrow to directly call some third-party protocols.
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