Day 3 of asking monero people to just *show me* an LN transaction so I can see what info they can glean from it
Can you see what channel or address *sent* the money? Can you see what channel or address *received* it? Can you see the *amount sent*? Can you see the *fee paid*?
So far they can't even *show me* a transaction on LN -- let alone any information from it
Calling nostr:nprofile1qqs0npwnpyvheqz7zuvuwvv9k460c0hyqlturds40hhfn34vufvehwcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkchsknr3 and nostr:nprofile1qqs27aqdrx96hwx8hqks53ccav65hvlk47dfscumsh22tncnw89t4pgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dslku2wh -- maybe yall can help?
Discussion
But isn't there a pretty cheap(by NSA standards) way to surveil the entire lightning network and track movements and amounts of sats in and out of every node?
Isn't this a weakness of the current gossip scheme?
I don't know a cheap way to surveil the *entire* network. I've heard people wonder if the NSA can watch basically all internet traffic by purchasing packet info from ISPs and 5-eyes countries. If they can do that, then they can probably surveil all LN transactions too.
Apart from that, if I wanted to surveil as much of the network as I could in a cheap way, I would try to use binary payment probing (a technique pioneered by Rene Pickhardt in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00333) to get regular snapshots of the balances of the top 50 routing nodes. His technique can get you a balance snapshot every 20 seconds.
This isn't a weakness of the gossip scheme (balances aren't gossiped), the weakness comes from the fact that probing to see if a payment will go through is free, and tells you information about whether a routing node has enough *capacity* to forward your payment.
Cool, thanks for the explanation!