The developers of Darkwallet, the intentionally controversial and OBPP award winning Privacy Bitcoin client are believed to have abandoned the project. One of the developers, Amir Taaki, is allegedly busy “developing something that requires a lot of his attention.”
Gone dark
Father of the 3d printed gun and cofounder of Darkwallet Cody Wilson stated:
“Amir will be largely unable to contribute for the next few months into even late next year.”
Taaki is “working hard,” he added. “Just developing something that requires a lot of his attention,” as revealed in a recent thread on the UnSystem mailing list.
The nature of this new and very important project is not clear, though rumor has it that it’s related to decentralized governance. However, one thing is clear: this very important project is not the development of Darkwallet as we know it.
In the same thread, Wilson revealed that they are “having trouble locating Pablo,” the Senior Developer of Darkwallet, according to their website.
This certainly dampens the hopes of privacy concerned users who are seeking top notch Bitcoin privacy, though other wallet providers are certainly working to fill that gap.
Privacy rankings
Darkwallet was ranked first during a recent report from the Open Bitcoin Privacy project, which evaluated major bitcoin wallets on a custom privacy threat model. Even though the renegade wallet has not been updated since early January, it still came out ahead of the competition, according to the report which came out in mid May 2015.
Soon after the report was released, Peter Todd -Chief Scientist of Darkwallet- commented:
“Unfortunately the future of Darkwallet itself is a bit unclear to me; I personally have had very little contact in the past few months with the developers behind it. That said, the current state of Darkwallet is reasonably close to a beta release — I use it myself with real bitcoins. Being open-source software, it's quite possible that at worst new developers can take over.”
In response to the OBPP, concerns of stalled development, Dark Wallet tweeted out:
We've upped the anti on privacy, our own included. We're certainly delivering a revolution, when? When it's ready, that is all u need2 know.
— Darkwallet (@TheDarkwallet) May 22, 2015
Below are the wallets that were evaluated by OBPP, in ranking order, starting with the most privacy secure.
Restarting funding for Darkwallet?
Part of the reason that Darkwallet is back in the spotlight lately is a post on bitcointalk.org from an enthusiast seeking to reignite development in addition to the interest from OBPP researcher Kristov Atlas who started the mailing list conversation about reigniting development, saying:
“I've been wishing for a while, now, that this might happen. In the first OBPP wallet ratings report, Darkwallet came out on top based on objective metrics tied to our privacy threat model. It's a project deserving of continuation.”