A Battle Between Bitcoin Wallets Has Big Implications for Privacy

Bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai announced last Thursday that its primary competitor, Wasabi Wallet, is the target of an ongoing network attack.

"As the Wasabi team has described it, the goal of the Wasabi mixing technique, is to hide your in a 'sufficiently' large crowd," Samourai wrote in its blog post.

Samourai says evidence of Sybil attacks on the Wasabi network dates back to January 2019.

Wasabi has issued its own statements refuting Samourai's claims, while also issuing allegations of their own against Samourai.

The core design of both Samourai and Wasabi actually has more in common than most realize.

Speaking to CoinDesk, the co-founder of Samourai Wallet, who goes by the initials SW, said that at one point in time, Samourai and Wasabi were the same application.

Samourai's implementation of ZeroLink has a different pricing mechanism than Wasabi, though this is not the only difference between the two wallet applications.

Wasabi's Adam Ficsor, who goes by the alias nopara73, counters that divvying up costs later on in the process is actually more "Cost-effective" and points out that anonymity using Whirlpool can always be broken given that Samourai relies on a centralized, backend server to process users' extended public keys.

Experts say there is no clear winner between Wasabi and Samourai.

Loaec, who uses both Wasabi and Samourai wallets, said that for users still deciding on which side of the bitcoin privacy wallet debate to land, there isn't one right answer.