What Is Samourai Wallet?
Samourai Wallet is a Bitcoin mobile wallet for Android that keeps your transactions private, your identity masked, and your funds secure.
Samourai is built and maintained by privacy activists who have dedicated their lives to creating software that Silicon Valley will never build, regulators will never allow, and VCs will never invest in.
It is currently only available on Android, but the Samourai team tweeted back in April of 2018 that an iOS wallet was in the works. However, progress is still yet to be seen there.
iOS wallet is in the works gentleman.
— Samourai Wallet (@SamouraiWallet) April 26, 2018
Apart from the mobile wallet itself, Samourai has a variety of tools that make up its ecosystem to provide you with a robust, privacy-centric experience while interacting with bitcoin.
Beyond Samourai Wallet, Samourai also offers:
- Sentinel: Sentinel is a watch-only platform that enables you to safely manage your offline and cold storage bitcoin. Without having to connect to any device, Sentinel still lets you use bitcoin to its full potential.
- Whirlpool: Whirlpool is Samourai’s native CoinJoin software that lets you mix UTXOs together to obfuscate true ownership, meaning your transactions can remain private and untied to your identity.
- Dojo: Dojo Node is a full Bitcoin node that Samourai released in 2019. Dojo seamlessly connects to your Samourai Wallet to ensure that you manage your own transactions and that they only run through your node, ensuring they remain as private as possible.
Why Is Samourai Wallet Important?
Two words: Privacy and security.
Privacy on a global level is being eroded. In our world of big data, almost everything you do online is being monitored and monetized without your knowledge. Some Bitcoin companies in the space are aware of this and are actively working to fight back. If privacy and security are important to you, we think you’ll like what Samourai has to offer.
There is literally no other wallet in the entire Bitcoin space that is as dedicated to producing tools that empower Bitcoin users all around the world with more privacy and security. Every wallet provider should strive to provide the type of tools that Samourai is building.
As such, Samourai serves as a “benchmark” of sorts for other Bitcoin software and hardware looking to support true financial sovereignty. By building out products that extend beyond one aspect of privacy, bitcoiners are better suited to protect themselves by not having to rely on tools from a bunch of different companies and counterparties. Samourai is free and open source (FOSS) and makes it easy to get comfortable with its products and thus empower your own privacy measures with bitcoin.
Using Samourai Wallet
Using Samourai wallet is not all that different from using other wallets for basic transactions. That being said, as soon as you’re far enough down the rabbit hole, you’ll realize that large centralized institutions violate your privacy on a regular basis, and may want to take advantage of the additional tools that Samourai Wallet offers.
Let’s look at all of the privacy-enhancing features and tools that Samourai offers.
11 Awesome Samourai Wallet Features
Bitcoin can have a pretty steep learning curve. We are constantly working to help educate and onboard new users into the best tools in the industry, but some of the features found in Samourai can require the user to have an intermediate understanding of bitcoin.
If you don’t understand all of these features and why they are important, just keep researching. You will soon understand that they are some of the most important developments in the entire Bitcoin space.
However, even without a thorough understanding of bitcoin, you can still learn to take advantage of these tools anyway with just a little bit of effort.
1. Samourai Sentinel
Samourai Sentinel is a read only tool for watching addresses that may or may not belong to you. It does not store any private keys on the app, so there is no risk of someone compromising any of your private information.
Sentinel is a great tool for keeping an eye on your balances without the need for any private keys on your device.
2. Full Offline Mode
You may not always have access to the internet when you’d like to, but you may still want to send bitcoin. Samourai has a couple of options to spend bitcoin in a secure offline environment:
- TxTenna: Samourai has partnered with the mesh network device GoTenna to enable offline transactions via a mesh network connection. Instead of sending bitcoin directly from your wallet, you sign a transaction and broadcast it with the TxTenna app. The protocol then sends this transaction between GoTenna users to arrive at an internet-connected destination, and then it broadcasts the signed transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain. In this sense, TxTenna allows for sending transactions without a connection to the internet.
- Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT): Samourai Wallet supports Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT for short), another unique Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP). BIP 174 is a proposal for transactions to be signed offline and broadcast to the network at a later time, thus enabling tools like Samourai to take advantage of them and provide great privacy tools for Bitcoin holders.
- OPENDIME Support: OPENDIME is one of our favorite hardware wallet devices. Once loading an OPENDIME with funds, you can spend it offline just as privately as cash. Samourai allows you to plug in your OPENDIME to your Android device (via an OTG cable) to verify that the device and the balance at the address are both authentic.
3. Smart Miner Fees
Sometimes the congestion of the mempool is higher than other times, which causes miner fees to increase. In order to ensure that you include your transaction in the next block, Samourai designed “Smart Miner Fees” to give you more control over how much priority you assign to your transactions.
When network congestion increase, you may want to increase the miner fee attached to your transactions if they’re urgent. If you plan ahead then you can simply include an adequate miner fee to ensure inclusion in the next block.
But what happens when you have already sent a transaction and it gets stuck waiting for confirmations because you didn’t include a large enough miner fee?
Don’t worry. Samourai has got you covered with two different tools to handle such a problem. With the transaction priority tool, you can change your miner fee, or fee bump, after you have already sent your transaction using one of two methods: Replace-By-fee (RBF) and Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP).
4. Batch Spends
Batch spends are a great way to save on miner fees when sending to multiple addresses. Instead of creating a transaction for each address that you want to send to, you can use a batch spend to send to all of them in the same transaction. This type of transaction is often called a “batched” or “multiple output” transaction.
5. Scrambled PIN
Scrambled PIN is a feature that scrambles all of the numbers on your device’s screen. If keylogger malware or some other threat compromises your device, Scrambled Pin will prevent attackers from being able to view the true PIN.
It’s an excellent inclusion for a simple, effective security layer, and we think that this feature should be a standard feature in all Bitcoin mobile wallets.
6. Stealth Mode
Samourai Wallet’s Stealth Mode is a great tool for keeping your wallet hidden from casual observers who have limited access to your phone.
If someone has unrestricted access to your device and some technological know-how, Stealth Mode will not be enough to hide your wallet from them. To protect your wallet from this kind of attack, you need to completely delete your wallet from the device and recover it later using your seed phrase.
7. Remote SMS Commands
Remote SMS Commands is a neat tool for protecting your bitcoin in the event that your wallet is stolen. There are currently 2 remote SMS commands that Samourai responds to; Remote Wipe and Remote Backup.
- Remote Wipe: Remote Wipe is for securely erasing your wallet from your device. If you ever lose your Bitcoin wallet, this is the command that you’ll need to send to prevent losing your bitcoin.
- Remote Backup: Remote Backup is for remotely recovering your seed phrase via SMS. All you need to do i send a simple SMS message to recover your seed phrase.
8. Stonewall
Stonewall transactions help to increase your privacy when spending bitcoin by reducing the linkability between inputs and outputs of a transaction.
Rather than sending a regular transaction, Stonewall makes it more difficult to analyze the blockchain by making it look like a CoinJoin transaction, even though it isn’t.
As Samourai puts it, Stonewall increases the doubt of confirming linkability to your identity since it creates greater entropy as it links more inputs and outputs to your transaction.
These “rings of entropy” represent the transaction visibility to blockchain analyzers:
- Blue is the initial transaction.
- Each shade of red is the input or output transactions linked to this particular one.
With Stonewall, each different color represents a new input or output added to the transaction, thus making it more difficult to determine the true identity behind your transaction.
9. Ricochet
When sending to centralized third-party services such as Swan, CashApp, or others, you may want or need additional layers of privacy to prevent a service from shutting down your account. Instead of sending directly from your wallet, you can send a Ricochet transaction that will send your bitcoin to multiple other addresses before sending to the destination address.
Ricochet payments are more private, but they are also more expensive because they require multiple on-chain transactions. By increasing the number of hops between the origin address and destination address, third-party blockchain analysis becomes cost prohibitive. Just keep that in mind when creating Ricochet transactions of your own.
10. PayNym.Is
PayNyms is a public directory of BIP 47 payment codes. Each PayNym is a type of stealth address that implements BIP 47 payment codes. Rather than publicly sharing a Bitcoin address on your website or social media, BIP 47 payment codes increase privacy by not revealing the addresses associated with the payment code.
So, instead of copying and pasting a traditional “bc1” or other traditional Bitcoin addresses, PayNym’s display as an anonymous nickname, such as “+blackflower” or something similar.
The nickname is the PayNym ID, which is a user-friendly visual mask for the payment code that’s really making the magic happen.
11. Warrant Canary
The term warrant canary comes from a “canary in a coal mine”. Keeping a canary in a coal mine was an old practice used to warn miners of toxic gases that had been released and the mine was no longer safe to work in.
Many security services already take advantage of Warrant Canary, another feature that Samourai Wallet offers. Warrant Canary aim is to warn users if the government served a secret subpoena to a particular service in order to prevent users from interacting with compromised services.
As a warning mechanism for their users, Samourai updates their Canary once a year. If Samourai doesn’t update the canary doesn’t, you can assume that someone compromised Samourai and that the service is no longer trustworthy.
Samourai BIP Support
The open source nature of bitcoin means that anyone can submit proposals to improve bitcoin. Some of these improvements are to the Bitcoin protocol itself while the majority of them are proposals that Bitcoin wallets can adopt.
As far as we know, Samourai has support for more BIPs than any other wallet in the industry.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully our Samourai Wallet review sheds proper light on all the Bitcoin wallet has to offer. For any privacy features you’re looking for, you can count on Samourai to remain on the cutting edge of Bitcoin privacy technology.
Normally we conclude our end-to-end reviews with some suggested features, but Samourai Wallet has everything that a bitcoiner could need to live a financially sovereign life. It’s private, secure and constantly adding new tools that increase bitcoin’s utility. If you are looking for an Android wallet with the most robust features, look no further than Samourai.
Thank You For Reading
If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing it, supporting one of these affiliates, or making a value for value donation so that we can continue to publish more Bitcoin-only content.