PayJoin adoption

Summary:

PayJoin is a privacy technology that is exciting for Bitcoin. It has the potential to damage blockchain surveillance's ability to spy on bitcoin users and destroy bitcoin's fungibility. A protocol standard has already been defined and implemented by a couple of projects such as BTCPayServer, Wasabi Wallet, JoinMarket, and BlueWallet. PayJoin adoption is being tracked on a wiki page similar to the Bech32 adoption page. One exchange that has already adopted PayJoin is a no-signup altcoin exchange called sideshift.ai. While researching for the Adoption page, it was found that in some cases, adopting PayJoin is worth it, especially if the business suffers from being spied on or regulated exchanges keep banning their customers. P2P exchanges are expected and hoped to be one of the earlier adopters.The economic incentives to use PayJoin are not very significant compared to the privacy benefits, which are not so clear for the payer but are beneficial for the global transactions graph as a whole. This means that PayJoin requires some level of altruistic attitude from the payers. The PayJoin UX is also not good because most users are not familiar with bip21 uris. Users still request support because they pay a bech32 address in an exchange, and the exchange tells them that it's not a valid bitcoin address. Wallets' developers should agree on making PayJoin payment by default because it is the right thing to do to fight against surveillance to spy on Bitcoin users and improve Bitcoin's fungibility. In that case, it should be completely transparent to the users and not cost anything. It shouldn't require the user to do anything different, it shouldn't be noticeably slower, etc. Users should have to know they are PayJoining at all. The only way to achieve something like that is by moving to schemes where wallets can communicate and interact. Recently, a UK Bitcoin exchange shut down due to new regulations, with the owner writing an interesting and relevant blog post. The blog post highlighted that if a person used a marketplace instead of an exchange, they were considered suspicious. Coinjoin counts as high risk, and gambling is high risk. As people use entities that are paranoid about keeping their coins clean and adhering to all the regulations, their risk scores will continue to increase, and without even knowing why, their deposits may become rejected, they may be asked to supply documents or lose the coins, and their account may become suspended without them having any clue what they did wrong. If Bitcoin is to fulfill its dream of being a permissionless money for the internet, work needs to be done on increasing PayJoin adoption.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T17:12:08.124609+00:00