A 20 BTC (USD 180,000) bounty for the CoinJoin privacy implementation for Bitcoin has been awarded to privacy-centric Bitcoin wallet Wasabi and CoinJoin solution JoinMarket.
The bounty, co-held by Bitcoin core developers Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille and bitcointalk.org owner Theymos, was awarded in a joined Bitcoin transaction earlier today to “several individual contributors directly as requested by the winning projects…”.
In his public announcement of the award, Wuille posted in the CoinJoin discussion thread on bitcointalk:
“this is to announce that we’re awarding:
* 10 BTC to JoinMarket, for the first practical CoinJoin solution, and continued research into progressing this domain.
* 10 BTC to Wasabi, for building a more end-user accessible solution and larger adoption.The remainder of the funds is left for future solutions with more ubiquitous impact on the ecosystem.”
Theymos posted the first response to the announcement, citing JoinMarket was a pioneer of “a lot of CoinJoin science” and a comprehensive wiki article on privacy). He also credited Wasabi as “the first wallet that implements CoinJoin in both a highly-usable and sound way”.
TIL first coinjoin bounty paid out without fanfare, https://t.co/P3plp5ZVJh 10btc each to @joinmarket and @wasabiwallet projects, apparently the payment is… joined. https://t.co/dQSTZKj1Np ofc! also bitcointalk thread https://t.co/ONjbZKUkXh
— Adam Back (@adam3us) May 30, 2019
Wasabi is one of the leading Bitcoin wallets that implements the CoinJoin method to increase privacy features of Bitcoin use. In summary, it joins a Bitcoin input in a transaction with many other different inputs, making it more difficult to identify spenders and recipients, therefore increasing Bitcoin privacy. It has seen increased use over the past year and is touted as a good alternative to centralized “mixers” or “tumblers”, services that “mix” inputs with random ones to obfuscate transaction trails.
Theymos also notes that default fungibility for Bitcoin was the end goal of technologies like CoinJoin, and personally hoped to see future research and development focus on improvements to the Wasabi wallet for more user-friendliness, integration with other wallet clients such as Bitcoin Core, ConJoin with more decentralized methods, and usable products for improving privacy in Bitcoin daily use.
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