I long wanted to write a comprehensive blog post to introduce Breeze wallet, ironically I’ve never got there and now I have to outroduce it, if that’s a word.

I am working on TumbleBit, a trustless Bitcoin mixer and a couple of months ago I asked the Stratis team to help us out build a dedicated wallet for it. The idea was simple: they would handle the marketing and the user interface, while I would work on the backend, in exchange their own cryptocurrency: Stratis would be integrated. We called this wallet Breeze Wallet.

Everything was progressing well, their marketing was great, they found a great way to build beautiful user interface, and I finished a functioning backend of the first iteration of the wallet.

But the differences between our visions became apparent when one day I woke up for this announcement:

Which I found vague, but it’s something about implementing the tumbler server and decentralizing the tumblers. I think running tumblers without technical expertise would lead to bad user experience, but also it would be a lot of work to add the server functionality to the wallet. Also decentralizing the tumblers is an anonimity set nightmare.

I was not aware of this announcement and it promises people things those might not be possible or I think is not a good approach to take.

I called this announcement out publicly:

Because I previously had bad experiences with some marketing teams and I warned them in the very beginning to not go wild with it, or “I will be the first one who calls it out publicly.” I was not bluffing.

Before you’d think something bad about Stratis I would like to note that I think they genuinely think this is the right way to go and its my communication fault that I was not able to convince them it is not the right way.

But who knows, maybe I’m just thinking too little?

There is one more component that suggests their way could be the right one: the legal component. However, if you are an obsessed reader of mine you have probably noticed I am relucant to consider legal arguments, and keep my debates within technical and moral frames.

Neverthless, I have to move on.

HiddenWallet

As you have probably figured out already I’m not going to just run away from it, while they continue to build Breeze, I’ll continue build my years old pet project, called HiddenWallet, remove the “pet” part, focusing on solely the technical and anonimity aspects.

So buckle up, those who were excited about Breeze, now be excited about HiddenWallet AND Breeze, because they’ll not give it up either.

I’m grateful to meet such great people at the Stratis, I learned a lot and I’m sure they will be able to meet their goals without me. I’m sure either one of us or both of us will bring TumbleBit to the masses. Of course they are free to use any of my past and future code.

The competition is on!