Bip47
Reusable payment codes.
I’m getting quite excited by this.
But how private are they? What can senders see?
What appears on a block explorer?
#AskNostr
Discussion
Send a small payment to +softmountain942 while the fees are low and we'll test it.
I'll zap you the sats back.
They've been around for a while now. I think lightning has fixed the need for these, but lots if bitcoiners still doing payments on the base layer.
Receiving on Lightning privately and sovereignly is still an issue.
Its not recorded onchain. We just need more people running LN nodes or at least using LSP's.
Let's see what the govt has planned for LSPs and LN nodes. They could easily bring a strong case of forcing them to KYC or shut down.
I am concerned about the dependency we are building on the LN network as a privacy solution, given how hard it is to run a node yourself.
Kind of, but Bolt12 adoption is happening quickly and this allows for much better receiver privacy. nostr:nprofile1qqsq9k04vahllseell55m74n3047y88pzlr0z5yany32st29fapqmgspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9e3xjarrda5kuetj9eek7cmfv9kz7qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucn89u93ntq6 has been using it for months to pay miners
Sender & receiver generate addressess derived from their unique cryptographic connection, so they can see those addresses but not the addresses between the receiver and a different sender.
Give this nostr:nprofile1qqs2vrneurk665gq6a2rke572y7mc8ppwr5wnd60mw8fwxharc8xsycpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0j9cycq article a read to learn more:
Sender can of course see the payment and can follow it wherever it goes from there.
Other observers just see donators sending funds to an unknown address randomly. Avoid asking for fixed amounts because you can always guestimate based on amounts.
When/if you spend funds together, you WILL reveal the connection to everyone's payments and COMPLETELY break sender privacy, putting your donors at risk. You MUST coin-join them first to avoid this.
Imagine a donor is known to be a supporter of yours. I track his payments and see one that looks like a donation based on amount, I send a donation myself around the same time. I later see a coin-join with both our payments. How many of those inputs could have also been donations that I could trace back to other identities? Is it finite enough to pursue?
It isn't perfect, Lightning is better IMO for private donations.
It could still hide a lot of your donations. Imagine you receive £1M over 1 mo from many small donations. Maybe we track known donors, but you only use money as you need it so we can't see everything.
It is only when you move donations that we can see anything useful and even then, only if you do something silly like consolidate them without coin-join and then withdraw it from coinbase.
It certainly isn't perfect, but it does feel more like cash-like privacy where it is inconvenient to track people and often fruitless, but if you are highly motivated, there will be breadcrumbs.
AFAIK, you must run a node to receive donations privately this way, I may be wrong about that, but you need to scan and query the blockchain quite intensively to find your payments because there is no XPUB afaik.
Oh wait, BIP47, I was thinking about silent payments ( https://silentpayments.xyz/docs/explained/ , https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0352.mediawiki ) which IMO is an upgrade to that.
Well, it removes the "connect" step which costs one tx fee and adds data to the blockchain.