El Salvador's Chivo Wallet Is Flagging CoinJoin Transactions From Wasabi
Mike Peterson, El Zonte's Bitcoin Beach founder and pioneer, shared his colleague's experience of using Chivo wallet on his show Live From Bitcoin Beach.
CoinJoin is a type of collaborative bitcoin transaction that can provide additional transactional privacy to users. While this type of transaction can break the probability analysis used by surveillance firms to track transactions, the use of coinjoin is obvious on chain since transactions include multiple inputs and outputs.
It is important to note that while operating custodial mixers has been deemed illegal in certain parts of the world, that has not been the case with non custodial collaborative coinjoin transactions.
Certain exchanges have flagged CoinJoin transactions in the past.
- "I like the integration with the banking system, it makes things really good but I think Chivo is under the same pressure and stresses from the US government and these other things because we had a lady that works with us, she had her wallet basically frozen - shut down. They were concerned about transactions that I had sent her from the Wasabi Wallet. The fact that it came from Wasabi Wallet - they flagged it on their end... I sat on a meeting and I'm like - privacy is a right, it's important for Bitcoiners."
- "If you're going to flag transactions that come from any wallet that makes privacy or CoinJoin an integrated part of that procedure, then you're gonna defeat what was trying to be accomplished."
- "We as Bitcoiners need to keep putting pressure on Chivo, on the government, on these people because they are getting pressure from this other direction."
- "We weren't even talking about huge sums of money...I was like - really? You guys are worried about these trifling sums of money going through this wallet?"
- "They're so risk adverse and so afraid of being flagged or accused of aiding money laundering. The sad thing is though, if they allow that pressure to direct how this plays out, they're just going to recreate the broken banking system."
- According to the Salvadoran government, Chivo wallet has over 4 million users in El Salvador.
