Nostr

Technical question here:

Doesn’t #lightning make mixers obsolete?

Say I open a channel and initiate a loopback transaction to a different wallet. Wouldn’t I then send the money through the onion routing and receive it somewhere else, making it impossible to trace… all at a lower fee than a mixer? Then one could just close the channel and do whatever with the new wallet…

Don’t have the need to do that, just wondering if my understanding is correct.

Please bear in mind though, I’m not a coder… just an idiot trying to learn…

#bitcoin #plebchain

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

BITwise 🐳 >>= RIGHTish 2y ago

👀

#[0]

Derek Ross 2y ago

I may or may not do this exact thing. 🫂

YODA travels 2y ago

So my thinking may or may not be right. Would there be any increased/decreased risk in comparison to mixers?

Derek Ross 2y ago

For my purposes, it seems fine.

Seth 2y ago

Great question! I’m a simple pleb, and not sure how to do a loop back transaction , but interested in learning about this 🤔

YODA travels 2y ago

I don’t even run a node… yet. 😂 not really possible when you’re living on the road… but I want to learn as much as possible for the future. 👌

Moon 2y ago

I have had this exact question for some time but of course I would NEVER do anything like this…I think #[2] or #[3] might have an answer if they are amenable…

Scott 2y ago

#[3] is far more knowledgeable but the short answer is that the privacy afforded by this approach is incomplete at best. And depends on how thorough a user is. If you do this and then close the channel the amount could likely be matched across balances and timing to assume common ownership. All of chainalysis is just assessing the probability that funds have changed hands. There is also the fact that your counterparty in the example given would have really good clarity on where funds were and where they went.

YODA travels 2y ago

I get that if you matched the amount you could guess what the origin was but the counterparty wouldn’t know where the funds came from, would they? From my understanding they only know they are the receiving node and the one prior to it.

And I would believe it to be very hard to match two similar amounts that happen roughly at the same time to eachother, wouldn’t it? I have no idea about chainanalytics tho… 😂

Moon 2y ago

Careful out there Pleb - sounds like feds are in “make shit up mode” with chain analysis as the cover these days. So it probably wouldn’t really matter if you were being targeted, unfortunately.

This is worth a listen:

https://fountain.fm/episode/14846820073

YODA travels 2y ago

Aren’t they always? 😂 good thing we’re not based on the US… but we also haven’t required any privacy enhancing method so far. Just interested to learn. 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for the link, l I’ll give it a listen. 👌

Moon 2y ago

TY🙏🏿🤙🏿⚡️#[5]

Moon 2y ago

TY🙏🏿🤙🏿⚡️ #[5]

Scott 2y ago

If you open a channel direct, yes. If not, there's some value in that abstraction. However, the timing analysis would still apply as someone somewhere opened and closed a channel and the closing balance might match the amount looped out. It's a nonzero improvement in privacy but far from perfect.