S5 E6: Nopara73 on Wasabi Wallet, P2EP, Samourai & Bitcoin Privacy

Nopara73, creator and lead developer of Wasabi Wallet, has recently regained his inspiration to look into new coin mixing techniques. On the day that we recorded this interview, he was very excited about all the great ideas he identified in cypherpunk literature, and how he spent a lot of time reading into Chaumiam ecash privacy tricks.

And yet another invention that gets Nopara excited is the integration of Pay to End Point (P2EP): a direct mean of payment between parties that has the potential to make blockchain analysis obsolete. Needless to say, the Wasabi lead developer expects it to get integrated in his wallet in the near future.

During this interview, Nopara also takes the time to explain the origins of Pay to End Point (P2EP), why it’s very similar to an original Bitcoin design by Satoshi, and how it can help with privacy in general. He also distinguishes between PayJoin (an implementation first developed by JoinMarket) and P2EP in terms of scope and technology.

Though he does criticize Samourai for their anonymity set and hardly believable claims about users running Dojos, Nopara does acknowledge their two contributions to Pay to End Point: Cahoots and Stoneaway. Nonetheless, he doesn’t recommend users to use the wallet itself, but credits the advancements that the developers have made in the field of Bitcoin privacy.

The Wasabi wallet creator also acknowledges his service’s fragility to censorship resistance, but expresses positivity in regards to open source software development. He certainly appears to be happy about recently hiring cryptographer Istvan Seres and confesses that he considers his own work in the field of Bitcoin privacy as much more than a series of chores – according to Nopara, his work intersects the field of art.

Other topics from this unique podcast episode include the way he changed his mind about supporting hardware wallet integrations in Wasabi, why sidechains are unlikely to fix Bitcoin’s privacy, and why Samson Mow was right about preferring the Pay to End Point (P2EP) name instead of PayJoins.

In the end, Nopara offers more insights on his personal future plans and confesses to have had his mind blown by Michael Goldstein’s presentation from BitBlockBoom 2019 (where he distinguished between rhetorics and dialectics, according to Schopenhauer’s ideas from “The Art of Controversy“).

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Episode Time Stamps:

00:00 – Introduction

02:06 – What are CoinJoins and how are today’s mixing services different from the tumblers of the old days?

03:55 – What is P2EP (Pay to End Point)?

5:30 – What are the origins of P2EP?

08:20 – PayJoin and how it originates from BustaPay

09:20 – Samourai’s Cahoots or Stoveaway transactions, and why they’re PayJoins but not PayToEndPoints

11:02 – Why P2EP has more potential than PayJoins

12:00 – Cool negotiations that can be done between parties when sending Pay to End Point (P2EP) transactions

13:50 – Why P2EP helps a lot of bitcoiners’ privacy, but not everyone’s

14:15 – CoinJoins vs P2EP in terms of efficiency to reach privacy

15:00 – Why P2EP doesn’t directly improve your privacy, but tricks blockchain analysis

16:30 – CoinJoins are identifiable

17:45 – Is Wasabi Wallet censorship resistant?

19:42 – The 3 issues of building electronic money, according to cypherpunk literature

22:10 – Bitcoin privacy vs fungibility

23:05 – Wasabi’s new mixing technology

25:40 – Which desktop and mobile wallet does Nopara recommend to a newbie?

27:40 – Discussion on Blockstream Green 

28:31 – Wasabi vs JoinMarket vs Samourai 

29:48 – Don’t use Samourai

33:30 – Why Wasabi requires more BTC to enter CoinJoins than Samourai

36:30 – What is planned for the Wasabi Wallet UX?

36:50 – Wasabi hired a cryptographer named Istvan Seres who is as knowledgeable as Greg Maxwell 

38:10 – What is next for Nopara?

40:50 – Wasabi getting involved in Pay to End Point with BTCPay Server

41:50 – Can Liquid improve CoinJoins? 

43:55 – Will Bitcoin privacy happen in side chains, or should the base layer get fixed? 

45:30 – Wasabi’s hardware wallet integration 

47:58 – Was Samson Mow right about CoinJoins being tainted correct? Is it justified to speak of Pay to End Point as opposed to PayJoins? 

49:34 – P2EP and PayJoin need new and different names?

49:58 – Who can we trust, what should we verify?

52:30 – Bitstein’s presentation from BigBlockBoom where he referenced Schopenhauer’s “The Art of Controversy” to distinguish between rhetoric and dialectics 

Enjoyed this episode? Donate to the Bitcoin Takeover project!

50% of donations sent to this address are going to be sent to the BTCPay Server project. Hopefully, they will keep up their great work, offer us P2EP ASAP and also keep on innovating in the field of Bitcoin privacy. They’ve already made BitPay obsolete, now it’s time to take on Chainalysis.