Nostr Web Client

Question: does the Lightning protocol allow you to overpay fees? I'd assume so: checking that the fee is identical to the required fee isn't necessary.

Why am I asking? Because the combination of round payment amounts and public routing can be used to deanonymize payments. Eg if Alice sees a payment of 1005 sats, and Alice knows that the only route that would require a fee of 5 sats on 1000 is to Charlie via Bob, Alice can make a pretty good guess that the payment is intended for Charlie.

Since LN fees are so cheap, it'd be perfectly reasonable for wallets to intentionally overpay fees a bit to increase the anonymity set of where payments might be going.

Related: I recently changed my default tipping settings to be not-quite-round numbers.

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Discussion

Tyler Burns 2y ago

I guess that's also good reasoning for why when constructing lightning channels on your LN node, you should avoid centrality to a degree. That might mean it is more costly for you when path finding payments, but it also ensures a much more diverse path across the network which would make deduction of this type much more difficult.

Tyler Burns 2y ago

Too many nodes take the easy route (no pun intended) and build channels to the biggest and most connected nodes.

Peter Todd 2y ago

I'm one of those node operators admittedly. 😂

It'd be good for LN payment software to have the option of not always using the most efficient routes too.

Tyler Burns 2y ago

For sure. I believe alternative path finding algorithms are being worked on. I think Rene Pinkhardt is doing some work there. Not just from a privacy perspective, but also scalability since as the network grows, path finding can become much more difficult.

MTozoni ⚡😺 2y ago

Thunderhub and/or RTL let you pick the channel to pay from. There's also the option of multi-path payments that splits your total into smaller amounts across multiple channels.

Tyler Burns 2y ago

Ya, seems like MPPs are becoming much more widely supported which is pretty cool.

Bitcoin or Slavery 2y ago

Is 21 a round number?

Peter Todd 2y ago

In Bitcoin, yes. 😂

Peter Todd 2y ago

Tipped you 22 sats, because tail emission. 😁

Bitcoin or Slavery 2y ago

I bet 21 million sats it's never going to happen. You're far too smart to be seriously indulging this lazy idea. I suspect your intention is only to instigate discussion so I don't think you'd take that bet.

Peter Todd 2y ago

Demurrage however has a reasonable chance of happening.

Bitcoin or Slavery 2y ago

Comparatively, yes. Interested to see what fee market looks like post compact proofs/CW and other ideas that may be less controversial than drivechains.

MTozoni ⚡😺 2y ago

Not sure how you would narrow that down. When you receive a payment I don't think you know what the fee on it was.

And if you did, the fee could be from the channel you have, but you have no idea if there was a channel before it that had 0 fees, or if it was through my channel that charged 0 but someone before it charged 5, or if there were a bunch of channels with different fees that added up to 5...

Maybe I'm not digging deep enough into my node, but when I receive or route payments I only know which of my channels sent it, not the total fee or who it's from.