First of all, TL;DR at the end. I’m not completely new to Bitcoin. However, there are still some things that I’m still learning and this is getting more confusing instead of clearer.
I downloaded the latest of Samourai Wallet (not from Play Store, but from an online APK I found, as I do not have Play Store installed on my phone).
My first impression was excellent, I must admit. The UI was clean, it was libre software, it had tons of settings and customization options and it was made with a focus on privacy — or that’s what the developers claimed in their, I must admit, beautiful and convincing website.
At this point almost everything was great. But when I did a little research, I started to find not very nice things people were saying about Samourai.
Two or three days ago, they removed some privacy features from the wallet because of stupid and irritating Google policies that everyone here hates. They said they were moving to F-Droid soon with the full-featured app. That was nice, but am I wrong or they could have done this before they were forced to trim the app? Devs already know Google was applying these pathetic policies, they just tried to apply for an exception — as stated on their blog post.
Another thing I found is people (users) openly contradicting the privacy statements made by Samourai — this particular one being the most “extreme”, as it comes from what it seems to be an eminence here. I know Bitcoin is not oriented towards privacy and that privacy is very difficult to implement, but this made me think: why, for example, cannot I connect to a trusted node without having to run a full node myself, specially configure it and use a VPN to connect to it? Why there seems to be an interest in promoting transaction casting through Samourai servers? Also, what are Ricochet, STONEWALL and PayNym? I suppose they are their implementation of different Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, but can they be trusted? Some users in this sub say there’s something shady with this app.
Then, there is this serious claim from a user saying that Samourai Wallet lost some of his bitcoins. I won’t get into details, but it was kind of scary to me since other users told him they were in the same situation.
I want to clarify this situation. With Samourai, it was love at first sight. But it seemed simply too good to be true. I am open to use Samourai Wallet as one of my main wallets, but I think I want to get some feedback “just in case.”
I hope you could give me some advice and orientation, in order to see what’s really going on here and to determine if Samourai Wallet is what it claims to be.
TL;DR: I downloaded Samourai Wallet, tested it and loved it. Then, I did a bit of research and found some “shady” things and now I’m trying to get some feedback and opinions from the community.
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