Wallet Update 0.99.05 - Staggered Ricochet, UTXO tagging, PayNym UX upgrades, and Whirlpool mixing prep

We are pleased to roll out Samourai Wallet update 0.99.05

apk hash sha-256 of version 0.99.05 :

6bc4ad679d041e9d172fc2d91818c9335c0832d591864b617ff3c8b1fe49144f

Introducing Staggered Ricochet

We are very happy to release a long awaited upgrade to Ricochet - our premium transaction designed to increase the plausible deniability of your transactions by adding additional hops of history before the transaction reaches the final destination - This upgrade is called Staggered Ricochet and helps decrease the fingerprint of Ricochet use by hostile exchanges and coin scoring platforms (currently not a known threat, but certainly a possible threat). Staggered Ricochet works by following two simple rules.

Rule 1 - Each Ricochet hop must be in a different block.
Unlike a standard Ricochet which is broadcast using a time based delay, a Staggered Ricochet will broadcast a single transaction hop per block. This means a Staggered Ricochet can take up to two hours before reaching the final destination (depending on the time variance of blocks discovered).

Rule 2 - No transaction in the hop can be broadcast to the mempool at the same time.
One of the clever ways of fingerprinting transactions that blockchain spies have been known to use is monitoring the mempool and using associated metadata including time first broadcast to assist in their address clustering heuristics. To help break that method Staggered Ricochet transactions will not be exposed to the public mempool until they are ready to be broadcast.

Staggered Ricochet is completely non custodial, just like standard Ricochet (you can recreate the private keys of the hops at any time) and is available to enable for no additional charge to any Ricochet transaction. Please be aware that Staggered Ricochet will take significantly longer to arrive at the final destination, so time sensitive transactions should continue to use standard Ricochet.

PayNym helper actions

One of the great benefits of using our PayNym technology is the reliable way to avoid reusing addresses (a privacy concern) with the ability to cryptographically generate addresses on behalf of your counterparty  without needing to communicate with them (a user experience concern). We have started to explore these concepts by adding convenience actions to the newly added Transaction Details screen for PayNym based transactions.

“Pay Again”

For outgoing PayNym transactions from your wallet - transactions you have sent - you will be able to initiate direct payment to the wallet with the address pre-filled. You can see how this type of functionality can be developed to encompass reoccurring non custodial payments without impacting your privacy.

“Refund”

For incoming PayNym transactions into your wallet - transactions you have received - you will be able to initiate a return payment back to the sender wallet with the amount and address pre-filled. You can see the power such a feature can enable with a little development, especially for dynamic street merchant use.

UTXO Tagging and Whirlpool prep

We have added the ability to tag any UTXO with a custom value. This can be useful for noting UTXOs that you may want to avoid spending, or the need to add any additional meta data. These tags are local and will be lost if you restore from mnemonic + passphrase, so you should restore via your automatic encrypted backup whenever possible. You can currently tag UTXOs from the Unspent Output list and will be expanded upon in coming updates.

For TestNet users: we have added in PSBT support to compliment upcoming Whirlpool mixing and other post-mix transaction types such as 2-Person STONEWALL and Stowaway. Bleeding edge testers will be able to manually compose collaborative testnet Stowaway transactions using the tools found in Settings. We anticipate advancing this to MainNet in the next releases.

Thank You

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