Users will prevent third parties from monitoring their addresses by conducting community transactions. The latest update also improved load times for the app and a Tor-based service.
Samourai Wallet team introduced Version 0.99.96 of its Samourai Wallet this week to the Bitcoin community. It is an update that focuses on improving the privacy of transactions, incorporating new ways of sending bitcoins with the Coinjoin protocol.
In a press release, the Samourai Wallet team highlighted the launch of its new privacy tool, called ‘Soroban’. This privacy tool is an independent encrypted communication project that works on the Tor network.
The new layer allows wallet clients to establish communication with each other outside of the blockchain, keeping and protecting every shared piece of information as secret data. Soroban entered into the private transactions of Samourai Wallet as «Cahoots»; this means in Spanish «confabulation» or «buddy».
A function that the company created in 2018, and incorporated into the operation of the wallet last year, with the new communication service, will allow users to negotiate bitcoin transactions and payments directly, without leaving traceable data on the blockchain.
In this way, with the introduction of Soroban, Samourai Wallet now enables private transactions to execute its functions in a faster and easier way.
This will bring advantages to two particular services: Stowaway (Stowaway) transactions, better known as PayJoin, which are also used by other wallets such as Wasabi or the BTCPayServer service, and the StoneWall transactions
Samourai Wallet will bring better “cops” and “stone walls”
The Samourai Wallet directive points out that Stowaway transactions “look like normal bitcoin transactions”, but are about Coinjoin operations between different users of the wallet.
The sender and the receiver would be collaborating to transfer an amount of money without third parties knowing the total amount, for which the negotiated amount is not registered in the blockchain, and the transaction is executed without intermediaries.
On the other hand, Stonewall x2 transactions are a Coinjoin operation that works thanks to two people and go to a third party outside of the Samourai Wallet system. The sender would collaborate with a third party (another Samourai Waller user) to send bitcoins to an external wallet. That is, private transactions can be executed even outside of Samourai Wallet.
By implementing Soroban in both transactions, users will no longer have to use multiple QR codes to transfer bitcoins with greater privacy all negotiation will happen through the Soroban tool, ensuring the entire operation. The team expects this change to reduce transaction time from 1 to 5 minutes to just 10 seconds; this is a very significant improvement.
To understand this new update in greater depth, it must be taken into account that Cahoots transactions are collaborative operations, where two or more people can participate to send information outside the blockchain.
That is, they are inspired by privacy protocols, such as CoinJoin, to make it difficult to monitor addresses and transactions on blockchain networks. The statement notes that Cahoots’ goal is to “undermine the common property heuristic”, where all money leaving an address belongs to a single individual.
Experts in the study of blockchains often use this principle to identify the monetary movements of an individual and even the identity of this person.
Anyway, when a transaction carries the money of several people mixed, it is much more difficult to know how much money goes by a single address and if the total amount belongs to a single individual.
In this sense, it is almost impossible to determine what are the movements of an individual on the blockchain; thus increasing the privacy of its users.
In addition to these changes, the developer team stated that the loading times of the app were also improved in this latest update, as well as simplified the functionality of their Paynym tool. A series of bets confirm that Samourai Wallet continues to be one of the bitcoin wallets with the higher interest in privacy services for its clientele, along with other projects such as Wasabi.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
