EP43 Bitcoin podcast with Bitcoin Q+A. (Coinjoin)

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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Now what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Today on Bit by Bit, I speak to Bitcoin Q&A for the final part of our four-part series.

We've talked about wallets. We've talked about nodes. We've discussed lightning. And now we're going to learn about coin join. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have chain surveillance companies tracking our every move.

But the reality is, we do. Just because they want to spy on you doesn't mean you should allow them. Luckily, we have some amazing tools at our disposal. And Bitcoin Q&A does an amazing job of talking us through exactly how to use them.

I hope you enjoy learning about coin join. And if at the end of the show you want to give it a try, but you're not 100% confident, then check out the links in the show notes and have a read through Bitcoin Q&A's content.

It really is brilliant. Bitcoin Q&A cares deeply about privacy. It's clear from his website all of his writing and our previous episodes. He's been really kind and helped me with some of the privacy goals that I was striving for but just didn't have the technical capability to reach.

This type of kindness is just one of the reasons that I love doing what I do so much. I've met some amazing people and I've made some great friends. Bitcoin Q&A, I would now class as one of them.

So thank you to him for the last few episodes, helping me and putting out all of this amazing content. And thank you to my show sponsor, Coin Floor, for making this all possible. Bitcoin Q&A, welcome back to Bit by Bit.

It's nice to have you on again. We are back for number four, Max. It's a pleasure to be here, as always. And so today, coin join. We've obviously covered the wallets, we've covered the nodes, and now we're here for coin join.

What is coin join, why should we be doing it, and why is it so important? Okay, I think it's probably easier to start with the why first and then explain. Let's explain the problem first that coin join is trying to fix.

We've covered the basics of the blockchain. So everybody listening to this, if they've covered off those first episodes that we've done, we'll be aware that the blockchain is completely transparent, so anybody can log into a block explorer and can see any transaction they like.

Basically, they can look at blocks from ten minutes ago, or they can look at blocks from ten years ago, and they can follow those transactions. They can see where coins are going from A to B to C and so on.

And there are chain surveillance firms that are doing exactly that to try and cluster users together and follow them across the blockchain to, well, they sort of badge it to say that they are trying to stop bad actors from doing naughty things using Bitcoin.

The problem with that is, obviously, that type of dragnet surveillance, it sort of ties everybody with the same brush. And so, you know, you or I or anybody listening to this could fall prey to these firms that are tracking people.

And, you know, that could result in if this surveillance firm was working with an exchange. And they deemed that one of your previous transactions before you sent to this exchange was something that they didn't agree with.

They could either block your deposit to the exchange. If you've already got funds on that exchange, they could withhold, they could sort of ask you for additional identification. They could even prevent you from withdrawing your funds again because they don't agree with one of your previous transactions.

Now, obviously, that's not a Bitcoin that I want, and I'm guessing it's not a Bitcoin that you want either Max. And it kind of goes against everything that sort of what most people getting into Bitcoin.

You know, it's against most people's principles of sort of censorship resistant payments. And for me, these chain surveillance firms are, they're going completely against that. And so, enter coin join, which is a tool that's been created to try and fall.

Well, anybody including these chain surveillance firms to fool them and to stop them being able to track entities across the blockchain. And the reason I say entities is because obviously Bitcoin is pseudonymous, so there are no names on the blockchain.

It's just addresses sending from address A to address B and so on and so forth. Now, obviously, if you're buying KYC Bitcoin from, say, your typical exchange, like a cash app or anything like that,

obviously, then these companies do have the option if they're working together with chain surveillance firms to tie addresses on the blockchain to your personal identity. So again, that's probably, yeah, me banging on about it all the time, Max, about going no KYC.

Perhaps we can get into that later rather than diverting away from the whole coin join piece. So, yeah, so coin join is a tool designed to basically mess with the heuristics that these chain surveillance firms use to track people.

So a heuristic basically for those that have not heard the term before is kind of an assumption basically one of the common ones that most of these surveillance firm views is known as the common input ownership heuristic.

So that basically just means that if there are more than one input into a Bitcoin transaction, it is assumed that both of these both of those inputs belong to the same entity just because of the nature of how transactions are created.

Generally, an entity would need control of both of those inputs to input them into the transaction. So it is always assumed that they belong to the same person,

which again, if that can leak various privacy data, you know, if you receive a transaction from me and you also receive a transaction from somebody that's deemed a shady company or a shady character.

And then you combine those two inputs into a transaction to say an exchange. And they obviously use sort of by linking those two inputs together, you've given away the fact that they both belong to you.

And again, like I said before, that exchange might deem one of those inputs has come from a shady source and say, no, I'm sorry, we're not doing business with you anymore.

So, right. So coin join. Where does that all tie into coin join? So a coin join comes in many shapes and sizes, but they all kind of work towards the same, sorry, work on the same, the same basic principle.

And that is two or more users collaborating to put together their pieces of Bitcoin, their UTXOs into a single transaction. And that transaction is structured so that anybody looking at that transaction on a block explorer would not be able to tie the inputs to the outputs.

So it's basically, if you were to sort of think of an image of this, it would kind of look like a load of lines or jumble up together. I'll tell you what I'll do actually, Max, I'll give you a link to it to an image of one so you can include it and show notes or something.

Just so people can visualize it. But basically, it's the website with all the green lines. Yeah, that's from kYCP.org. Yeah. So it's basically a load of users jumbling up their pieces of Bitcoin together so that anybody watching the chain cannot tie the output to the input of the transaction.

So what that does then is it's kind of like a, if it's done correctly, it's kind of like a brick wall. They may have been able to follow the 10 transactions previous to this that you made. Once they hit your coin join transaction, they can't say for sure which of those outputs of that transaction that you took part in is yours.

So they would either have to, again, guess and they might get it wrong, depending on how the coin join is constructed, you know, they might have five different paths to follow after that.

So obviously, this is, again, it's like a brick wall, so to speak, and they can't be sure which path after that any future transactions that you make are you.

So it makes it very costly for them then. So if they were helping on following you again, and they would have to follow all five of these, or however many outputs to the coin join, they would have to follow all of those paths to try and wait for you to slip up.

And obviously, if that path goes on and you maintain good spending habits after the coin join, they can never ever be certain which of these outputs is yours.

Okay. Yeah, so basically what you're saying is it's kind of like, they obviously know, because you bought with KYC, they know your name and address and all your details, they then know where you sent that Bitcoin from that point to another wallet or another

wallet after that, and they're then assuming that you're still the owner of that amount of Bitcoin and they can continuously track you and see how much you have who you're interacting with and everything that you're doing.

They don't know 100% that they, but they can have a pretty good guess. And what you're saying is that this basically breaks that link and makes it much, much harder or, you know, in an ideal world impossible for them to track because I guess it's not just like, Oh, well, you know, it's so they can, it's like

anyone can do this, anyone can track and anyone can see how much you have and potentially, you know, if you're somebody who's bought a large amount, you could potentially be a target so actually a lot of it, this is for safety reasons as well.

Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think a good term with Bitcoin join is it kind of increases the user's deniability. So, like you say, it just creates for anybody watching and creates lots of possible outcomes.

So that, yeah, these change available for change surveillance firms are never ever sure which path to follow afterwards. So like I say, it's kind of like it offers you forward looking privacy basically so key thing to remember afterwards

is, is that obviously, as great as some of these con join implementations are, that's only a single transaction and it should, I think we'll cover this off later with some of the samurai stuff, but some of the, all of the transactions that you make afterwards

after the coin join, you need to be mindful of the steps that you're taking because, you know, this coin joint could sort of create that proverbial brick wall in the transaction history and give you a fresh start.

But, you know, you can very easily slip up afterwards. And so it's very prudent that you maintain some good spending habits after the coin join as well, which, again, like I said, we'll cover that off in more detail after.

Okay, so this is sort of like coin control and making sure that you're not having these things merge so you may have had something that has just broken that link and then you merge it back into a wallet that already has the links and then they can assume that, okay, you're back in control

is that the sort of thing that you're talking about? Yeah, exactly. So I'll give you a working example. So let's say, make it nice round numbers too easy to follow. Let's say you put one coin, one Bitcoin through a coin join implementation and break that down into 10 smaller pieces over various coin join transactions.

So you've now got 10 pieces of 0.1 Bitcoin. If after that you, so let's say you wanted to send them all to cold storage. So if you were to create a transaction from a wallet that doesn't allow you coin control, which means basically you can select which pieces of Bitcoin you want to include into that transaction.

So let's say you just some wallets offer a select or button or send or button. So you've broken down that one Bitcoin to coin join transactions into 10 smaller pieces. Great. You've now got some privacy, some sort of forward looking privacy.

And then you hit the send or button and create a transaction that sends it to your cold card back into back into one big chunk of Bitcoin. Anybody watching the chain, it wouldn't take them too long to associate your original transaction.

The coin join that broke it down from one Bitcoin into 10 smaller pieces. It wouldn't take them too much to work out or hang on 10 transactions ago. This person had one Bitcoin. This entity had one Bitcoin.

They broke it down and they merged the exact same amount back together again. They could use that again as one of their heuristics to assume that that is the same person. So effectively, you've just wasted your money on fees for a coin join.

And you've also just given up all that privacy again. And they're sort of back to square one and they know they know where your funds are being held. So I think let's say coin control is important and using any postman expending tools that are available, which again, we'll probably cover off a bit more after with the Samurai stuff.

Definitely. So I guess for most people, and I'm speaking, you know, because of experience with this. When it took me a little bit of time to actually pull the trigger and get involved and actually start to coin join my funds because it seems there's lots of ways that it's really easy to trip yourself up and make mistakes.

And it sort of worried me to the point where I was like, you know what, like this is just too complicated and I'm just going to make a mistake and then I'm going to end up wasting a load of money doing it and I'm not going to get what it was I wanted out of it anyway.

But after speaking to you in the background over the last, you know, whatever, a couple of months, I've gone from having, you know, nothing ever going through a coin joined to now actually using Samurai.

And it's been great. It's been really good. And, you know, I'm sure I found a way to fuck it up somehow and I'll need your help to fix it down the line. But it seems at this point that I haven't. And I think that it's a lot of it is just people being concerned about not knowing how to do it and am I doing it properly.

So what I thought would be good for this episode is, let's talk about what I think we'd both agree is the most simple, easy, best user interface for a coin join, and I think that Samurai right now.

Try and take someone through from what a normal person will do is they'll maybe buy from a couple of different exchanges. Maybe they have a little bit from a non KYC place but they've bought from maybe a couple of different exchanges where they've got all their details.

And then they've maybe whacked all of that onto a treasure or a ledger or a cold card, and that's where it is now. It's all sat there.

For that person who's now thinking, yes, you know what, I actually don't really want to be tracked. I don't want everyone knowing how much I've gotten and what I'm doing with it. I want to actually have some privacy in my life.

Let's talk it through from there. If that's possible. Yeah, sure. So, before I get into the into detail of that, just using the example that you said about the, you know, they bought off some KYC exchanges, which, you know, with my, my sort of reality check head on these probably what unfortunately most people are going to do.

And so I just want to warn everybody that if you did buy from a KYC exchange, throw in all of your stats through through a coin join implementation, like will pour is never going to on KYC you does this.

It's not going to erase that record of you buying X amount of sats from cash app on this date using this payment method with this driver's license blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, you can never get rid of that.

So what what coin join will do for people that have bought by a KYC source is like, like I touched on earlier, it gives forward looking privacy. So again, the exchange government, whoever has got that record, they know because they've gone through that identification process that of how much Bitcoin they own.

But anybody following on chain wouldn't know after the cut after it's been to coin join through a coin join sorry, where there was sat to be in hell, they wouldn't know what addresses they were held at.

So it is an improvement, but for me, the ultimate would be to buy from a non KYC source, such as Bisco hodl hodl or even locally if you know people locally buying buying with cash, because you're starting from such a better place there, where, you know, the sats that you own then are immediately not tied to your identity.

So if you were to throw them through a coin join then, you know, the only person that would know you had those sats was the person that sold them to you. And then if you've gone through a coin join, obviously they can't follow you either.

So you're just in such a better place so yeah, I would urge to go non KYC first because you're just starting 10 steps ahead. However, I live in the real world, and I know that most people aren't going to immediately go I like Bitcoin let's log into Bisch and buy myself in my Palace KYC Sats.

Unfortunately the UX and stuff isn't there when compared to some of the most common exchanges so, so they've bought they've got it on their hardware wallet and then they want to coin join is that is that where we're up too much.

So, so from what you've just said I think you raised some really good points there.

And, and I completely agree that it's almost like best practice now if you're in that situation realistically would be to probably sell those sats back on an exchange and then buy non KYC and then go through the, you know, go through the coin john and all the rest of it.

But, you know, a lot of people will say well you know then I've got the fees of doing that and maybe the point's gone up and maybe they're worried about the tax and, and then the worried about well okay what if I sell then and then we have a sudden run in price

and then I don't manage to buy them through a non KYC exchange and that there's lots of things where people would worry and so I would say that, you know, probably for 80 90% of people listening to this now they'll say look.

Okay, it's not perfect, maybe going forward I'm going to go non KYC but you know they already know that I've bought I don't want to be messing around with attacks, you know I don't want to be making mistakes so I'll just keep what I've got.

And going forward I'll go no KYC but what I've got, I actually want to break these links and you know it's not perfect but let me break these links and so that people can't track me and know what I've got going forward.

So for those people, what's their next step. Yeah, I think just one final point to echo there is that that is probably the best option for people to take you know those that have already bought KYC that don't want to deal with the tax.

Just put you know put that coin join it yeah by all means you know it's going to give you some forward looking privacy get it and get it into a storage solution that's worked for you I you know a cold card or something like that.

And then just sort of keep those completely segregated for cold storage and just start dipping your toes into no KYC and just start using that approach moving forward.

So as long as you keep those two pots of Bitcoin you know you KYC and you know KYC completely separate and you know you're sort of that you're still in a better place than you were before.

And so that'll probably be a happy medium you know you don't have to deal with any tax or anything like that so so for those people what's the what's the next step. And so obviously first step is to download Samurai wallet and which is unfortunately Android only so sorry iPhone users.

You can have to shell out for a cheap Android phone looking for you they are pretty cheap these days. You know you can pick one up for less than 100 pounds really. And again with this so you know you can get a used one for less than 100 quid on eBay or a used one or you know you can get you can get one for for not a lot of money.

But kind of again best practice on this. I'm saying pixel three and flash graphene on it and follow one of the follow one of the videos Matt O'Dell's gun done one and a few other people have done them.

That would be what 250 quid and sort of days messing around. Yeah I think obviously that would be the ultimate but again you know coming from the real world are most people going to do that no.

I just want to coin during some sat just to gain some forward looking privacy.

If that's the case then you know a 60 quid Android phone that they leave in their top drawer just for Samurai wallet is going to be more than enough you know obviously graphene a graphene phone with you know the Google if I'd is going to be you know the ultimate setup but it's not

that easy to do for the for the — true the more me. So yeah you're 60 quid Android phone is going to do the job perfectly like I say you know. So get yourself a Samurai wallet and so the first step would be to send in a small amount of Bitcoin.

The reason I say a small amount is it's always good with any new tech that you're not used to just to try it out with a low amount of risk first off. So we'll pull the coin join implementation by the Samurai team has three mixing pools, three sizes of coin join basically.

That is 0.01 or 1 million sat pool. They have a 0.05 pool which is 5 million sat and then they have the big boy whale pool which is 0.5 Bitcoin which is 50 million sat. So what I would suggest is transfer just a little bit more than a million sat into your Samurai wallet which works just the same as as any of the transaction would.

You know you just scan the QR code or copy and paste the address in like you would any of the transaction. Just wait for that to confirm onto the blockchain which is you only need one confirmation into your Samurai wallet before you can start mixing.

So you would then once those funds have mixed you can hit the blue button in the bottom right hand corner which would open up the the wall pool service. And then you can just select basically which UTXO's which pieces of Bitcoin you want to mix.

Now you can combine multiple ones or you can just mix you know using the example that we're talking about now you're probably just going to have one UTXO of 0.01 vibe or something like that.

So you pick which of those UTXO's you want to mix and then pick the pool that you want to enter which in our case is going to be the 1 million sat pool. You'll then get a bit of a summary of the fees so the fees just probably worth touching on with Samurai and the fees are completely fixed.

So it doesn't matter if you send 10 Bitcoin in to the 0.01 pool or if you send 0.01 into the 0.01 pool you would pay the exact same fee. The coordinator fee it's known as which is basically the small fee that the world pool coordinator takes for putting these transactions together.

There are obviously a coin join is a is a non chain transaction so there are some very small minor fees involved. But again you know they're for most people they're going to be negligible to be honest with you so you are with world pool incentivized to coin join more at once because you pay less of a fee as a percentage.

Like you say they'll always fix no matter the the thick purple size no matter how much Bitcoin you send into them but even with that incentive I was still always urge people just to try a little bit just to start off just to dip your toes in and get comfortable.

And then you know once you're happy with the process that's when you can start throwing throw some more sat in and saving on those fees. But even with that said you know the fees aren't astronomical.

Yeah what are people looking at fee wise. So fee wise, let me just pull it up. I know you sent me this telegram bot that works out which was pretty cool but just just like on average between what sort of.

That's not a spot now Max. Oh here we go here we go right so the the poor fee for the smallest pool for the 0.01 pool is 50,000 sat. The poor fee for the 5 million sat pool is 250,000 sat.

And then the pool fee for the big boy Paul the 0.5 Bitcoin is not 0.02 which is 2 million sat so as a percentage if you're putting in just above the pool fee at the pool size so 0.01 your percentage is going to be higher or much higher than if you were mixing you know 10 times as much in the same pool because that fee is completely fixed.

Yeah and if people are doing large amounts you know it gets it gets below 1% doesn't it? 10% or you know so anyone who's listening now like again the way you explained it is absolutely right.

But when I was listening before to people talking about this and talking about oh it's you know 100 million sat here and it's this and it's that especially when you're first getting involved.

It is very difficult to then calculate that back into okay well how much is that as a percentage of what I've got and you know it takes time to mess around with that so for anyone listening if you're doing a you know a reasonable amount so you've

you know if you're doing like a Bitcoin or more than that these fees really are very very reasonable and it's not it's not something that you should really shy away from if you're doing smaller amounts it's slightly more expensive and maybe you do this test

first and make sure that you're happy with it and comfortable with it but if you're doing a larger amount they really are in my opinion very very reasonable for what you're getting. Yeah absolutely and something else with the fees as well is that you're not just paying for one mix.

You know as long as you keep your mixed UTXOs in your Samurai wallet in the post mix section of your wallet which is kind of the where your Bitcoin sits after it's been through its first coin join.

You're eligible for free remixing so you know you could stay there forever and get thousands of remixes and you're still you know you only pay the fee once.

So the way that that works is that new people coming into the pool so people are mixing for the first time that they're adding their Bitcoin into world pool and they're the ones that cover your fees so if you're remixing your basically you're known as a free rider so you've

already paid your fee and then any subsequent mixes that you get after that are completely free and all of the costs are covered by the newbies coming in. Okay so so let's just talk about so someone who's got one Bitcoin let's say they send it in there I don't know exactly but it's you know less than a percent to do this.

And then they've had their remix and you're saying that from that point once they paid for that remix just constantly their privacy is getting better and better and better over time and there's no more cost.

Exactly yeah it's just it's there building on the anonymity set which is basically that you can look at it as the size of the crowd that they're hiding in basically so so what what do I mean by that is that obviously the all the outputs of a world pool transaction

are identical and they are always the size of the pool so either 0.5 not 0.1 or 0.5 and obviously the more remixes you have the more denominations of that size you are sort of mixed in with and that you are hiding amongst

it. So you can I always like to think of it as have you ever seen the beef a vendetta with the mask? Yeah what a great film anyone existing who hasn't watched it check it out and I think you will understand better quite how important Bitcoin is and how it can help us because

after watching that I was like oh my god how I like it to daily life at the moment isn't it? Really that and 1984 you know read 1984 and watch that film and after that I think there's no turning back you're just like Jesus this is why this is just so incredibly

important. Yeah. So just bringing it back to coin join. Yeah so every remix that you have builds that anonymity set it builds the size of the crowd that you're hiding in so it just makes it you know exponentially harder after every remix for anybody trying to track you because

it's just basically again referring back to that the the mix diagram there's just so many more paths that they need to try and track to follow to try and say well is this max is this max and so on and so every remix is built on that and it's completely free.

I can't stress that enough you know a lot of people are coming to the telegram chat and they're eager to get their sets through one mix and then send it all back to to their cold card or to their cold storage wherever that is.

Whilst I kind of understand why they might want to do that is you know that they're missing out they've already paid that fee they're missing out on all of this extra privacy gain that they might get by just leaving it there remixing for a little bit.

But like say I completely understand where some people might be anxious that you know it might be a they might have a lot of money in there to them and they might have better peace of mind wanting to get that off to a cold storage.

What's the ideal then so you've already paid for it so you might as well get the most out of it what if someone doesn't want to leave it remixing or they they actually want to send it somewhere.

What would you say is the perfect anonymity set or you know how many remixes would you say is reasonable and good way where you'd feel comfortable yourself sending it off you know is it is it one is it five is it.

Yeah I think there's there's there's three schools of thoughts here so so number one is one mix in Whirlpool is is enough to break deterministic links so that is like I said before that is enough for anybody looking at that transaction to not know

input one is the same entity as input five or four they can't tell because of the equal amounts. So that that one mix is enough to give you forward privacy that anybody looking at a Jane doesn't know exactly which one is yours.

Generally speaking in the telegram chat most of the experienced guys say just to be on the safe side you know it's free wait for three mixes. And the third school for which is the one that I kind of fall into is this is free let's just leave it remix in there forever.

Right. Well that's that's for me personally you know I've only I've got an amount that I am comfortable that's not in a super secure cold storage you know buried in a bunker underground that you know I'm just comfortable with that because I've been around

the guys that are building this and I've been you know playing with this tech for you know quite heavily for you know a fair bit of time and I'm comfortable in its security and things but I completely understand where people would you know be anxious to get that off so

I would say for most people three is a good target to aim for if they absolutely really want to sort of get it out of Whirlpool and get it sent off to someone else.

But how how to do that and the best practices I'll come on to in a little bit I just want to cover off some of the other approaches that you can take to to make using Whirlpool so we've covered off mobile mixing so the great thing about Whirlpool is that you can just get yourself

an Android phone and you can send some sat into it and gain some privacy and mix and you can do that just using the phone nothing else and there's nothing else like it there's no other services that offer that.

And so the barrier to entry here is very very low. I think that draws a lot of people in but the downside with mobile mixing and sorry mobile only mixing is that Android likes to kill background activity.

So it's difficult to gain a lot of remixes on your phone because the app has got to be open and the Whirlpool services got to be running for you to be eligible to be selected for a remix which is done completely at random.

So some days you might get two and some days you might get ten it's completely random but having just your phone on is probably going to be a bit of a pain because you're going to need to keep waking the app up and then you might need to go into the settings of the phone to stop it sort of killing the service in the background to save

battery and stuff. Everything's kind of optimized to sort of work against Whirlpool running 24/7 on the phone so it's not right it's the mobile only is designed for like a quick mix before you want to spend.

And it absolutely excels at that you know it's your first mix always happens almost instantly especially in the smaller pools.

That could be almost someone who just wants to send to someone else or spend their money it's like best practice would be just well at least get one mix through there just to break those links and maybe it's not perfect but you can do that from a phone pretty much instantly.

So if you wanted to take it to the next step you could get Whirlpool GUI which is desktop application it's not a standalone wallet you need the phone wallet to link to this desktop app but what the desktop app allows you to do is you can think of it as a carbon copy of your phone

but it just gives you greater functionality to sort of view how many mixes you've had to start mixes to change your mix target so do I want one mix do I want 10 do I want infinity mix as you can alter that within this application whereas you can't do that on the phone

and also let's say you install it on your MacBook you know you're much more likely to leave you can leave your MacBook running with Whirlpool open and then you can go and switch your phone off if you want with Samurai wallet on it and because that app is open on your computer

you will be eligible to get those free remixes that you know that builds your anonymity set and that's much more palatable than trying to keep a phone awake 24/7 which is quite difficult to be honest with you so

as long as you've got that desktop app again which is like a carbon copy of your phone wallet and you'll be eligible for those remixes and it just gives you you know it's a really easy to use interface and you can see when mixes are happening you can see how many you've had you can see where the

funds are in the different sections of your wallet so are they in the deposit are they in the post mix or the in pre mix which is where they're sort of waiting to be mixed so that will kind of be like the next step and that's available for Mac Windows Linux or all the popular distributions

and then finally which is kind of the ultimate really is what's known as Whirlpool CLI which is basically a command line interface that runs on a single board computer which we covered off in our Node podcast

so like a Raspberry Pi or something yeah it comes packaged with most of the popular Node implementation so obviously it comes on Roni Dojo it comes on the Nodl and it comes on my node as well so basically it links to your phone and you can also link the desktop

so you can use all three of these together so let's say that you started a mix on your Android phone because the all three of these are linked together the CLI again it's just a copy of your phone wallet it would see that initial transaction

say okay thanks very much I've seen that because I'm and the CLI and I am on a computer that is always on 24/7 I'm going to take that now and I'll just deal with it for you so I'm going to be constantly speaking to the Whirlpool coordinator saying look I'm here pick me for a remix

if you're sort of in it for the long term and you want to get a maximum amount of privacy and loads and loads of remixes the CLI implementation paired with the phone wallet obviously and the GUI is like the ultimate stack to gain the most amount of remixes

it's just always on it's always listening and you're in the perfect position and to be picked for all of those remixes completely free yeah so that's the ideal one and I think that should be the one that everyone sort of strives for

but what's quite nice about this is that there's the three different options and that you don't have to just go all out and go all I'm going from nothing to running the node and having the GUI and having everything all set up you can literally start this from just a phone

once you've got comfortable with this you can say oh well actually it would be nice to have this just constantly running in the background without having my phone on without having my laptop on it's just running off my node and I actually quite like that there's those steps

yeah like I say the only absolute bare minimum for this is the Android phone like you can build on that from then on in just one other piece I wanted to kind of touch on given the recent Twitter drama shall we say about obviously if you are mixing only with the phone wallet on the Android phone

you will be connected to summarize backend server which is dojo so for them to generate your addresses for you to receive to for you to mix and for you to then to sort of serve your balances and process your transactions

you are going through there dojo so there is there's an element of trust there obviously all they see is addresses they don't know you know there's no name sign up or email address or anything like that when you download samurai wallet it's just the case of

an entity and they see your addresses that's it if that is a risk for you you should absolutely run your own dojo and again you know I think we touched on this again with the no podcast so if you wanted the ultimate privacy stack you should be running your own dojo

which again comes on all of the popular node implementation so running dojo would probably be the ultimate for the samurai users but you've also got not all and you've also got my node which come with that with an implementation of dojo which again just increases that privacy a little bit more and just reduces the trust on any third

parties but if you're just starting out it's absolutely not necessary but it is recommended long term if you want that ultimate privacy

and that's what you've sort of helped me set up you know I run a my node you've helped me in the background with these sort of things and I'm not a technical guy but once it's set up it didn't take us long and

it's really really nice it's really slick and I'm now in a position where I just know whatever's happening these things are remixing and I don't have to do anything like since you helped me with that I haven't had to do anything

that's yeah that's the really powerful bit of having that CLI implementation it just does all of the heavy lifting for you you can just set it and forget it you know you could say right I want 100 remixes and you know that's it that's all you have to do you know you might want to check on it maybe once a week

check that hasn't put any hiccups or any you know occasionally these raspy pies might crash and they might need to reboot but other than that you can just set it up again leave it going that's really nice and so you know we're talking about three is kind of

an acceptable amount one is fine as well if you're just sending something on but ideally you'd want three plus when we're getting to those sort of numbers where you know you can set it to I think on mine it shows sort of infinite 150 25 10 5 3 2 and 1

so you have it on info and you've left it on there and and now you're hitting 100 remixes how good is that you know we talking something's gone through there it's gone through 100 mixes

if someone really wants to track you what are their chances of actually having any luck with that is it literally you get to the point where it's like that they can't yeah I think well yeah basically they can't and all they would be able to come up with is a list of thousands of potential

outputs that might be yours and that's all they could get to basically you're free one in the crowd exactly everybody that's in that crowd that has practiced good post mix bending again which will cover off in a sec you know you're hiding amongst all of them the more remixes the bigger the crowd you're hiding in the more transactions

you've gone through they could only come up with a big massively long list in the example you used of 100 remixes they could just come up with a list of max could be any one of these 10,000 people because what you're going to remember is you know there's five outputs

of a Whirlpool transaction it's not just every remix that you have that increases your anonymity it's every remix that your the other four people in that mix gets subsequently assist you as well so it grows exponentially with every single mix that each of your

call of Whirlpool partners so to speak if they remix you gain if you remix they gain and so on and so forth and it just keeps growing and growing and growing yeah that's really cool I like that set up I like the fact that you pay it once and then you

have the opportunity to just continue it gets better and better over time I think that's a really nice way that it's set up yeah it's like you say I'm not I'm not going to get into all the Twitter drama stuff but fun in a little bit

I know there's always bit like you know you're much more technical and get much more into this stuff than I do but there always seems to be a beef between all these different implementations and they're always having a go at each other and there's always something going on I've never seen

something like it it seems to be the hardware really teams seem to go at it with each other a little bit but it seems that this is like just constant beef I don't know why yeah I think one thing I will say and then it's something

that I massively respect from from the Samurai devs and their followers is that they have very much got a fuck you attitude I suppose and that they you know they don't bend the knee for anybody they know what they want to achieve and they're not going to let anybody

down in their way to do that and I think competition is healthy and for me it seems very one sided at this stage there's a wealth of research done by the team the OXT research team they've done research into multiple different implementations

mainly related to wasabi and although they have done a couple of pieces on joint market as well and for me the writings on the wall there is systemic problems with the wasabi mix and I wouldn't with their implementation

there's just too much evidence for me for me to ever advise anybody that uses that and that's coming from somebody who the first mix I ever did was with wasabi so I am very much a wasabi refugee as the samurai

and I'll just briefly cover off you know some of the stuff that sticks out for me is that the wasabi team they used to have a static fee address so every single round of fees that they took all went into that same fee address it was fixed

it now after much shouting from various people but what that meant was that there was only you know there was like one hop if you got any malicious actors plus token being a prime example if you were in the same mix as plus token guys you're in very close proximity

to their funds and that there was people that got banned from exchanges for that exact reason they got their accounts flagged because they gone through wasabi and they were linked with the plus token scam there is systemic address reuse in the wasabi implementation

you know and that's one of the basics of Bitcoin privacy one on one is do not use reuse addresses it's terrible privacy the one thing I didn't cover with the the samurai set up is that when you initiate a mix that's called the TX 0 what that does is it breaks down

your chosen UTX O's into the pieces of the right size to go into the pool that you've chosen and then it completely segregates the change of that transaction because that is ultimately they call it a toxic or toxic change

because that is the little bit left over that is still tagged to your previous entity the pre world pool so that's the bit that still sort of tied to you so samurai completely segregates that and you've got to try very hard basically it actually hides it from you

so still completely in control of it it's still your Bitcoin you can spend it whenever you want but you have to sort of market as spendable if you want to add it to any future transactions so it's built in that it's really hard to fuck that up

wasabi doesn't do that so the change from each mix stays in the mix so it's very easy to completely screw things up again and include your premix change with your mixed outputs

again it's just links the entities together again which is kind of the whole point of the coin join is to separate those links and completely remove the deterministic links of the transaction

and then the last one which I'll be honest I unfortunately use this one when I was back in 2017 is they've still got a send or button or a send max button I can't think how they've worded it

you could do five rounds of mixing in wasabi and you could then you've got loads of little chunks of mixed Bitcoin with some level of privacy they then have a button built into their user interface that allows you to send them all together into the same transaction

to say what are most people going to do they're going to send it to cold storage yeah merging it all back together again completely you know wasting their time and I did that I fell for that because I just thought well oh if it's in you know if it's in the interface it must be saved to do

and unfortunately most people that are new to this coin join game like I was back in 2017 or early 2018 whenever it was if you give somebody the option to do a single transaction to get all their money all of their Bitcoin back into their cold storage where they feel it's safe

they're going to do it yeah they're going to do it and that's completely you know they've just wasted all that time and all those fees for nothing you just would because you're like well why would I send multiple transactions when I can save on the fees or to send it as one bang

like it's yeah it's exactly what I'd have done yeah so I think again that's one of the beauties of Samurai is that they've built their user interface to make it hard for the user to fuck up basically so they segregate the pre-mixed stuff

and then they've got the post-mixed spending tools that are you know that allow you to spend and maintain your privacy and just the way it's structured just makes it hard for you to fuck up basically aside from the fact that the structure of the mix is completely superior

hmm interesting well you know and that's kind of why I said to you today let's just focus on Whirlpool because on Samurai because from speaking to you and everyone that I really trust in this space have told me the same thing

and you know a lot of people like join market but I think it's it's a little bit more difficult to use and there are trade-offs there but I've been really happy with Samurai I've been really found it pretty simple to use

and let you say that there are things in place to stop you doing what you would do and make a mistake doing and and that's really important because if we're to expect everyone to start using this or the average user to start using this

they're just not going to do it unless it's simple and that's what helped me back so it's great to have these sort of tools available and the more people who do it in my opinion the stronger Bitcoin becomes

I think just one fact I know I said I wasn't going to get into it but I think it's important to mention on the Wasabi bit is that they recently announced I forget the name of it but it's basically Wasabi 2.0

I haven't got the details but also would say is people are listening to this that are using Wasabi is ask yourself why are they building a completely new implementation of coin join why would they be doing that sounds like a theorem

that's a good point that's a very good point what I found weird is we're not weird but a lot of people seem to use Wasabi sort of instead of Electrum and they use that instead of Electrum but then they might do their mixes elsewhere

is there going to be anything down the line where you can sort of use Samurai and not have to use Electrum so you kind of have a setup where you've got your world pool going you've got everything in there and then you've got that linked to your cold

is there a way of doing it like that way all your keys are kept on that and then that's your interface that watches transactions going through so you just have Samurai your node and your cold card for example

all I will say is Ronin Dojo watch this space keep your eyes peeled and your prayers will be answered okay all right that's exciting but nothing more can be said about it for now no no like I said it's that sort of stuff not even in active development

yeah but it's on the roadmap okay that's cool well yeah I think you know from that we sort of covered why it's important to coin join and I think the best for most users the best implementation of it and the best ways to use it three different options

are sort of starting with a phone and ending with have it ever have everything running through your node and running all the time and I think the main takeaways there are you know try and get a minimum of three remixes if you can you've already paid for it so you might as well

anything else that people should be watching out for when they're starting with this anything else that they could trip up on or you know I think we're going to go on to once it's been mixed what to do after that point

yeah I think that's the next natural step for us to cover is is the potion expanding tools which again is pretty much unique to samurai I think sorry to whirlpool I think join market does have some form I think they can do pay joins but we'll cover off the samurai tools

so post mixed spending is a sort of general tool sorry a general term for the transactions that you make after you've gained some privacy and you've been through the whirlpool coin join so I'll start by saying that

so you've got a couple of UTXOs pieces of bitcoin that have been mixed you know you've got that base level of privacy now it's very very easy if you can now make a transaction and merge those back together and potentially link the two back together

one thing I want to drive home is that you know it's for people to remember is that the equal amounts are sort of what give you that privacy and if we're just blindly merging transactions sorry if we're blindly merging these pieces of bitcoin together

without using these post mixed spending tools we're leaking a little bit of that privacy and sort of potentially giving people a thread to pull on if they're watching the chain gives them a thread to pull on to go or hang on these two UTXOs equal this amount and that's sort of the same as what went in two blocks ago

so it just let's say it gives them a thread to pull on and so the post mixed spending tools are basically just different ways to form transactions in a way that maintains and preserves and sometimes actually increases your privacy

after you have been through the whirlpool service so there's three main ones well there's actually four I guess there's three main ones which I'll cover our first and then the single UTXOs spends so the first one is called a stone wall

what stone wall is basically is a fake mini coin join that the wallet creates on its own using only the UTXOs within the post mixed section of your wallet so let's say you've got 10 pieces of bitcoin all 0.01 and you want to spend

you want to go and buy something from a store online that is 0.03 bitcoin so it's you know a small chunk of your total post mix what the stone wall algorithm will do basically is it will pick more than three of those pieces of bitcoin and create a fake mini coin join

so that anybody looking at that transaction that stone wall transaction on a block explorer they would look at that and think oh that's a coin join you know there's more than one person there so we don't you know I'm not entirely sure how much is being spent or you know where it's being spent to which who owns the inputs who owns the

outputs a little bit like whirlpool but it's only using your own inputs that is switched on by default so if the wallet can do it it will do it a couple of things to remember with a stone wall is that the more UTXOs that you've got in your post mix wallet the better

so if you've got using that example you've got 10 chunks of 0.01 and you're trying to spend 0.1 so all of it it's not going to be able to make your stone wall because it's going to have to join them together

so the general rule of thumb is to spend half of your balance it's like the easy way to trigger a stone wall because that kind of guarantees that the wallet has enough UTXOs to choose from to create a transaction worthy of being classified

a stone wall and you know giving that those increased amounts of entropy mm-hmm yeah that makes sense the next one sorry were you going to ask a question? No that makes sense

yeah okay I will make I will ask a question what if that person isn't spending and actually that person has put in their 0.1 and they've got 10 0.01 different UTXOs and they now want to just all

they want to do is send that to cold storage what would they do then would they use a stone wall or they can't use that or what would they use instead

yeah so I've actually got an article on this which I'll send you the link to which covers it sort of in a lot more detail and I'll be able to now using that example that they've got 10 pieces of 0.01 they will definitely be able to create a stone wall that will generally be just under half of the balance so let's say note point note 4

so they can send that that will create a high entropy transaction that people looking at it on J won't be able to be sure what's going on there

let's say that leaves you with 0.06 that you got two two more options now you could do another stone wall for just less than half again if the wallet can do it it will it just depends on the UTXO mix and also you know it won't ever combine UTXOs that have been seen together before again just to preserve your privacy

so stone wall as many times as you can first when you get to the point where you can't stone wall anymore and you still want to spend the remaining amount out to your cold storage because samurai wallet offers coin selection you can basically just click on each piece of Bitcoin that you've got left over

and you spend them one by one into a into a fresh address of your cold card or your cold storage so you could just send them one by one to different addresses if you're going to do that I would urge you to do it in not do it sort of one after the other

because there are sort of timing knowing what's known as time analysis attacks so if you're just doing one by one straight after the other and they're all sort of similar amounts somebody might be able to glean from that these might be the same the same entity again we're getting

a very much into the weeds of tinfoil hat stuff now but you know to be on the safe side it's definitely possible but yeah so if you're doing it's cold storage stone wall as much as you can and then spend each UTXO one by one into a fresh different address each time of your cold storage

but again please I urge people listening to this to go and read the article I'll link in the show notes for you now because there are a couple of other bits to consider but what will be here for all night if I go to all of the new ones

yeah the next sort of post mix spend tool is called the stone wall x2 the x2 just signifies that there's two people taking part in this so a stone wall very much like the original sorry stone wall x2 very much like the one I've just covered which is just called stone wall is again

this is actually a mini coin join and what you do is you collaborate or you're in cahoots with another samurai user who offers up some of their inputs as well as your own so you could mix me and you could mix our inputs

so what that does again is it just increases the confusion of the transaction graph and anybody looking because they wouldn't know that there's two people taking part in that they might think there's three they might think there's one again they just can't be sure so again it just increases that little bit of

deniability again and for anybody thinking listening to this thinking well I'm gone why if I'm helping Max do a stone wall x2 why am I putting one of my funding hit funding it but what it does basically is I wouldn't actually pay anything

I would get back everything that I put in I'm just sort of helping you I'm giving you a couple of pieces of my Bitcoin to sort of throw in the mix just to confuse that transaction graph a little bit it would still be the total balance if you're the one that's paying and integrating this stone wall x2 it would still sort of come out of

your balance okay and so fees wise for obviously we've had the fees to do the mix and then it's infinite remixes after that now we want to send it to cold storage we want to send it out of samurai what are the fees for a stone wall or a stone wall x2

just minor fees samurai doesn't take any cut of those whatsoever so it costs no more to do a stone wall than it would a normal transaction or is it just that it costs slightly more because the way that the transaction is set up but there's no fees from samurai

yeah I mean as with any Bitcoin transaction generally the more inputs you've got the larger the size of the transaction in terms of bytes so you're taking up marginally more space on the blockchain so that you will have again very minimally increased blockchain fees

but yeah in terms of what would the samurai team get from that nothing at all it's just the minor fees okay so it sounds like that's well worth doing then definitely definitely I would urge you know this is one of the secret weapons of samurai wallet that nobody else has got is these post-mixed spend tools and it's just it's a way for

you to if you want to spend from samurai by using a coin join or a fake coin join and again it's just the perfect way for you to maintain

or even increase your privacy on chain when spending out of samurai wallet but the last one which is my favorite is called stowaway this is a samurai's implementation of pay to end point or pay join it's all kind of the same thing this is just their version of it so a stowaway would take place between two samurai users so you couldn't

pay to an external wallet currently and this is just a samurai to samurai thing so if we went out for dinner I paid and then you wanted to pay me back using samurai wallet match we could do a stowaway transaction and a stowaway transaction basically has both you and I even know you're sending to me I would give you some of my inputs

to include on the input side of the transaction so what that does is it completely destroys the common input ownership heuristic which we covered off earlier so the two main benefits of a stowaway transaction are

the actual amount that you were paying me would not be seen on the blockchain because we're both putting inputs into the transaction so let's say you were sent a 0.01 the likelihood is you would not see if you looked at the chain you would not see the amount 0.01 so

you have no idea how much is being sent again a bit like the assumptions that the chain analysis firms make is that they could only come up with a number of assumptions so it could be this much being spent it could be this much being spent

they also won't know who the recipient is because there might be four outputs and they wouldn't be able to tell who is actually the recipient in the transaction because of the way it's constructed

the last thing is because a stowaway looks just like any other Bitcoin transaction when you look at the chain it completely screws with the whole transaction graph because it looks like a normal transaction it means that any other actual normal transaction could be a stowaway

so basically since the implementation of a page join or stowaway these firms can't be sure whether that's a stowaway and we're not sure who's been or is it just a normal transaction with two inputs two outputs one's the change address and one is the recipient address

it there's always that doubt now ever since this was released that a normal looking transaction might be a page join so it helps everyone's privacy yeah wow okay that's really clever

the way that the three have just covered Stonewall X2 and stowaway the way that they're done is basically by the sharing of QR codes so you don't have to be in person I mean it would be easier if you're in person to do this but basically what we do you would instigate the transaction on

one phone whoever's sort of starting the transaction and wants to pay and then you would just pass back and forth I think it's three maybe four QR codes so you just scan it with either phone and the wallet builds the transaction for you in the background then it puts all the UTXOs together in a way that's going to confuse the

transaction graph and then it's just broadcast to the network like a normal transaction is yeah so you can do it remotely I've done quite a few stowaways with people on Telegram you let you just share the QR codes back and forth or again you can do it in person which would be

easier but it's not necessary and with this stowaway stuff are there any more costs from Samurai or is it just a similar thing where okay maybe it costs a little bit more to put this transaction together however there's no cost from Samurai or is there any more cost

no more cost the only two things that you'll pay for for for directly to Samurai over the minor fees are your warport fees and then finally they have a feature called Ricochet which is basically a transaction that you can instigate from your wallet so you let's say you're sending from A to B the prime example but you're sending to

you've been through coin join and then you send it to an exchange

now if you send you know you've done your warport transaction and then you send in directly to an exchange that you've got sort of one hop on the blockchain for them to look back and see that you were taking part in a coin join which they might not like because point you're in transaction

they've got an easy to spot footprint you know if it's got five inputs five outputs the likelihood is it's probably a warport transaction now they might not like that so where Ricochet comes in is is it adds I think it's for hops between your Samurai wallet and the destination address

so what that does basically is it just makes it that little bit harder for the exchange or the chain analysis firm that's working for the exchange they've just got to check back so many more hops to see if there's any history of what you're trying to send them that they

don't like it increases the the work they've got to do and how much it costs and the computing power it takes could they do it yet absolutely at the end of the day it's just it's just for hops so if somebody's looking at it and they could trace it all the way back to a warport transaction of course they could

it just increases the the work that they've got to do if they were specifically targeting you basically so and to this day I don't think there's anybody that's used a ricochet transaction and sent to an exchange or to anywhere that has been flagged or had their account locked or frozen or anything like that

all the known instances have been related to Sarby as far as I know anyway so it's just an extra tool for that and there is a fee for it off the top of my head I'm not sure what it is I don't think it's a lot I think it might be

could be 200,000 sat potentially but again I apologize if I've got that wrong I'm not entirely sure I've never not actually done one

okay all right it's something I'd probably look into that sounds interesting and I think with all this kind of stuff if you're going to go and take the effort to do this you might as well do it and do it properly and do everything in your power to make it difficult as possible

for anyone to track you there's no point in half asking it so I guess use all the tools that are available and do it the best you possibly can before sending it to cold storage wait 10 years and be a happy boy

let's think over all in all just to summarize you know they seem to samurai guys with willpool and post-mix spend tools they just seem to have all of the bases covered you know they just make it that much more difficult to balls it up really

you know be it being open and frank could you merge all your inputs all your post-mix inputs using samurai wallet yes you could but there'd be plenty of warnings before you do that and it's not made easy for you but at the end of the day it's your Bitcoin you're still in control of it

you can do with it whatever you want you know that's that's it's a non custodial wallet so that's the way it should be but they have built the guide rails very high to make it difficult you know for you to fall off so to speak

perfect and so for anyone who's listening to this now they get the idea that you know they're thinking you know actually I want to try this but maybe they still have some questions maybe they want to dig in a little bit deeper can you just point them to wear on your website they're going to find this information and articles to dig a

little bit deeper

yeah so where the first protocol I would say is Bitcoin Q&A.com/coinjoin that covers off the basics of you know what is coinjoin why do we need it how does it work what are the different types etc etc after you've done that I would say head into the article section I've got one for just for samurai wallet you know the basics of the

features that it's got that probably be the good ones to look at first

I've also got one step-by-step guide I'm doing your first coinjoin using samurai wallet on your phone literally a handhold originated from a tweet thread that I made back in March and that's literally it's got screenshots in it tells you every single button press that you need to do to get from zero to a whirlpool mix

the next final one then I've got one called whirlpool and post-mix spending frequently asked questions that basically covers most of the stuff that we've kind of talked about today there's a couple more bits added in there and there's also the transaction graphs that we've spoken about a couple of times

so that's where those images are located and they're from KYCP.org which is like a transaction viewer where you can see the sort of entropy that each of your transactions have got so check out those three articles and also I would say hop into the telegram chat as well

one for samurai wallet again I'll give you that link max to put down in the show notes. Yeah I'll add all of those in and it's definitely worth people having a read through because you know it is a little bit confusing and it is a little bit stressful all this stuff

but I think once you've read through all the articles and you've sort of had a play with it you realize that actually the interface is very good and not only is it worthwhile doing but it's actually not as hard as you initially think so

yeah and anyone who's listening to this definitely go and check it out. Like I said earlier just you know starts more just start with just over 0.1 Bitcoin to cover the fees and the minor fees and you know follow the guide that I've got and just just dip your toes in get comfortable

with it. Once you're happy with it you know you can start throw some more stats in there but you know there's no great rush for it, this mix is happening all the time so just take your time and get comfortable. Perfect.

All right well this has been brilliant and I think you know this series I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say you know how helpful it's been especially with the node one that seemed to really hear and people were more happy after listening to that and didn't feel like it was just them being on the sidelines

because I think a lot of people were and I'm hoping that this does the same I'm hoping this helps get more people involved in coin join and feel a little bit more comfortable so thanks again for helping with this and yeah we will definitely be speaking

in the future and if there's any other bits that people say oh well I've got to this stage where I'm now running a node and I've got my wallet and I've coin joined and they have any other questions and they reach out I'll be back in touch so that we can go through

these things. Yeah Maxis thoroughly enjoyed it, it's been a great chatting to you and absolute pleasure as always. Awesome. All right well yeah thanks again and we'll speak again soon. Cheers Max. Cheers.