Dark Wallet developers Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson have lunched a new hyper-anonymising version of bitcoin wallet.
The new version of hyper-anonymising bitcoin wallet Dark Wallet has been launched.
Dark Wallet’s developers, Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson, provided the wallet with such tools for financial privacy as “stealth” wallet addresses and in-built coin mixing.
After $ 50,000 were raised on Indiegogo, an international crowdfunding site, a collective of anarchist bitcoin developers called unSystem, started to create the wallet.
Jeremy Allaire, a founder of the digital currency company Circle, commented the creation of the new wallet:
“If your goals are to create a sort of shadow financial system that runs in offshore jurisdictions and is attractive for anarchists and criminals, then maybe [regulation] is not important.
Cody Wilson, one of Dark Wallet’s developers, represents an opposite point of view. He said:
“If you have a large division of the world’s population using bitcoin it certainly bodes well for the price […] but I think it bodes better for the technology as a marginal currency, a currency of ‘the other’.”
He explains the use of the word “dark” in relation to bitcoin tools:
“The bitcoin community, with its insistence with neutral euphemistic language, has an ideology of integration, which is kind of scary. We think bitcoin is valuable because it’s not capable of being or shouldn’t be integrated into the current dynamic of capital.”
The Dark Wallet’s characteristics make it impossible for anyone, including government, to regulate and track payments on the block chain.
The feature, dubbed CoinJoin, was first presented by Gregory Maxwell in 2013. CoinJoin combines your payment with another random Dark Wallet payment under one transaction. So it becomes hard to identify whose money it is and where it has gone. The more transactions you make, the less confidence you have that coins belong to the person you send your money to. For instance, after eight transactions coins could have ended up in 256 different locations.
Moreover, CoinJoin can combine more than two payments in the future even if you can find an address. Such Dark wallet tool as “stealth” wallet addresses means that coins sent to stealth address by wallet users are redirected to another address that is hidden from view.
This enables people to use Dark Wallet without the risk of providing a window into their finances.
Cody Wilson hopes that these features of Dark Wallet will become standard for bitcoin wallets. He added:
“Stealth addresses and CoinJoin will become default privacy features for the privacy conscious in bitcoin […] this is an open-source project, there’s the total invitation for people to take this code and make their own of it.”
Wilson, together with Amir Taaki and unSystem group, expects to return bitcoin to its cryptoanarchist roots:
“Everyone is trying to take bitcoin and make it something less than bitcoin. In our mind bitcoin has to move back into the dark.”
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