100 Bitcoin (BTC) Community Members of Wasabi Wallet Make The Biggest CoinJoin Payment Ever

The community behind Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin app focused on privacy, has recently reunited a total of 100 people in order to execute a CoinJoin, which is what happens when a Bitcoin transaction is joint by many people in order to make it a single transaction.

As you may well know, Bitcoin is very far from a private coin. The blockchain is very transparent and open, so you can see all the transactions. While this may be good for some reasons, it is bad for others. People will be able to track your transactions and discover who you are and how you are using your money if they have enough resources.

The CoinJoin is an alternative to this program and it was first proposed back in 2013 by Greg Maxwell. The idea was very well received and it eventually took off. Today, people can already make these special transactions in order to protect their privacy.

If you juggle the numbers of different transactions together, you can protect your identity. Wasabi Wallet made 100 transactions, which make it the possible biggest transaction of this kind. It is hard to say with 100% certainty that this was the largest transaction, though, so you can at least call it the largest known transaction.

The CTO of zkSNARKS, Adam Fiscor, affirmed recently that the biggest innovation of Wasabi Wallet is that never before a service like this one existed. The only other service that was possible to make such a large transaction was SharedCoin, a similar project.

He also affirmed that this was basically the largest transaction you can make, mostly because of limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain, as well as some other limitations. He also affirmed that it was hard to coordinate so many people, so this was indeed a huge effort and possibly the best you can do in a situation like this one.

It was, in fact, so hard, that it took a while before the company was able to get the exact number of 100 people to participate in the transaction.

Could CoinJoin Be The Future?

Fiscor affirmed that he believes in the potential of CoinJoin transactions and that they could be the future of BTC because they give more privacy to the users as it is harder to untangle the transactions done with them. With a large number of people, you can reach levels of anonymity which are very good.

While it may be seen as an exaggeration to have so many people participating in the same transactions, Fiscor affirmed that more efficiency is gained when there are a lot of participants because there are more variables. If there is a “cost” in reuniting so many people, what is gained is basically efficiency.

However, it is also important to take into account that other kinds of technologies might rise to become more popular than CoinJoin and that the authorities might not be very kind while looking at it, too. Recently, the Interpol shut down a prominent coin mixer, which also creates anonymity for the Bitcoin network.

These factors have to be considered when we want to understand the impact of technology.