Samourai Wallet Releases Privacy-Enhancing CoinJoin Feature

Samourai Wallet has unveiled a beta version of Whirlpool, a CoinJoin service that enhances transaction privacy.

The company previously said that Whirlpool would be released to operate on Dojo, a much awaited bitcoin node built to work with the wallet.

Samourai, a leading wallet service, is providing an easy-to-adopt layer of financial privacy for mainstream bitcoin users - and is emerging as one of the first companies to provide this technology.

CoinJoin is a process of anonymization that utilizes various privacy-enhancing software tools.

The Whirlpool framework is a fully modular CoinJoin implementation that has been developed through a "Heavily modified" fork of the ZeroLink theory, according to the company.

As noted in previous CoinJoin experiments, the challenge in garnering a mass of participants necessary to conduct blind transactions quickly can be difficult.

It took several hours for 100 users of the privacy-centric bitcoin app Wasabi Wallet to gather and collectively execute a CoinJoin.

Apart from the human challenge of organizing a CoinJoin, there are also built-in restrictions on the bitcoin network - such as the limit on the amount of data that can be included in a single transaction block - that limit the viability of CoinJoin.

Some bitcoin enthusiasts believe that some forms of privacy and bitcoin's built-in transparency are mutually exclusive.

"Bitcoin Magazine also noted that CoinJoins may also increase the overall fungibility - a crucial attribute of money that ensures all units are identical - of the bitcoin network, by removing the tainted history of bitcoins previously used in illicit trades. By making bitcoin untraceable, CoinJoin diminishes the possibility of merchants refusing to accept"dirty money.