I mean, I work in an industry where I see fraudsters making off with people’s money all the time. Usually by pretending to be people who they aren’t. This results in the loss of billions of dollars from individuals, businesses and payment processors. The idea that they costs wouldn’t go up in a world where everyone presented themselves as anonymous or pseudo-anonymous to each other, strains credulity for me. And if fraud losses go up, then prices and effective transaction costs will, too.
Discussion
If you pretend to be me, how would you spend my sats if I’m running my own Lightning node?
I'm not sure I'm following the point of the hypothetical?
You’re claiming anonymous or pseudo-anonymous actors bring in more fraud risk, correct? So when dealing with Lightning how would you introduce more fraud? I thought it actually might reduce the fraud you mentioned, that of when a retailer is paid with a fraudulent transaction by someone pretending to be someone else.
Relying on payment technology, rather than ID technology may actually do a better job at reducing the fraud, because you can’t pretend to be me and buy gas with my sats if I’m running my own Lightning node.
Stick with the e-commerce use case. In person payments are one thing. Obviously, cash is an anonymous system, and that works fine for in-person retail payments. But go back to the diamond ring example. How do you safely buy something like that anonymously, without extreme risk of rugpulls in the form of non-delivery of goods or services?
A bills of lading model is the best I’ve been able to come up with for this problem. Know third party carriers facilitating the anonymous transactions for a fee.