Ashigaru Whirlpool
Ashigaru Whirlpool now LIVE!
WHIRLPOOL IS BACK!
After being down and out for over a year, the Ashigaru team have brought back Samourai Wallet's Whirlpool - a popular Bitcoin privacy preserving tool! This is fantastic news! You can read the official Ashigaru blog post linked below.
Ashigaru Open Source Project
Why whirlpool?
In a nutshell, it gives you on-chain protection from those you pay and to those who pay you. This is a major upgrade to your on-chain privacy footprint - not having to reveal too much about where your money goes and where it comes from on the forever public blockchain.
What's new?
It works slightly differently to what you're accustomed to. Here's what you need to know.
It's a Terminal User Interface (TUI) application named "Ashigharu-terminal" that uses your choice of Electrum Server as the backend (see screenshot below). This is a major departure from the whirlpool-cli/gui model, and removes the dependency of requiring a Dojo - it now requires an Electrum Server, a package that is accessible to the likes of Start9, Umbrel and myNode users. It also means that the Ashigaru team doesn't know your master public keys (xpubs). Major win!
The other great news is the new interface is available on all desktop platforms - Windows, Mac and Linux. You will need your computer connected and online if you want to continue remixing. Review your computer's power settings accordingly to ensure it doesn't go to sleep, disconnect the wifi or shutdown when left idle for extended periods of time.
If you've used Sparrow-Server, you'll be quite familiar with this program, that's because Ashigaru-terminal is a fork of Sparrow-Server.
As per industry expectation and best practice, the code is free and open source. You can find all the information here.
Ashigaru Open Source Project
Fee structure
The fee structure and pool denominations have changed slightly. To start off with, there is a 0.025BTC pool charging a 5% fee (0.00125BTC) with a maximum of 20 UTXOs in each Tx0 (free remixing forever, of course). This maximum of 20 UTXOs prevents whales from diving in with large amounts on the first day, degrading anonymity sets. It also disincentivises sybil attacks. There is also the 0.25BTC pool, again charging 5% fee (0.0125BTC), 20 UTXOs max. I suspect more pool denominations to be announced depending on user demand and feedback. You can probably expect the same fee structure: 5% / max 20 UTXOs in a Tx0.
Centralised coodinator
Now on to the question of whether this has a centralised coordinator. The answer is yes, but the Ashigaru team are working on strategies to decentralise this, explained in their blog post. All connections to the whirlpool coordinator run over Tor with no clearnet connectivity possible. Downloading Ashigaru Terminal itself is over Tor. Most of Ashigaru's infrastructure is over Tor. Since we don't know the developers of this software and its where-abouts, it's going to be difficult to shut down.
Getting started
You can find all the links to the downloads and more information from the official Ashigaru blog post here.
Ashigaru Open Source Project
Download links are available here in this announcement post.
I have created a video tutorial guide using testnet coins for your reference. You can watch it here.
Ashigaru Terminal: Getting started video guide
My advice is to take a measured approach to this. This is new software and there may still be bugs. Start small, get comfortable, then level up progressively. Don't expect mixes straight away. It's important to be patient. Randomness of time intervals between mixes plays a role in obfuscating chainalysis. You should find using the interface overall quite responsive.
Conclusion
It is welcome news that whirlpool is back, up and running again. In my opinion, this is the best on-chain privacy preserving technique we have. I'd encourage you to use it. Hope to see you poolside!
