I agree with the first half, but disagree with the second. How do you get to the conclusion that it will be heavily surveiled, while you seemingly agree that routing nodes not get much info to surveil?
Discussion
they get enough information to surveil if there's enough collusion among nodes.
or if theyre all labeled as money transmitters and send info to a 3rd party.
its pretty obvious who's routing most of the payments on LN and it would be trivial for a state entity to pressure them.
I really doubt it. They are doing this with TOR nodes too, but it's still considered pretty private, especially if you just want to make surveillance more expensive, and don't have a body to hide.
They would have to compromise many nodes, and don't forget multi-path payments are already being used, and let 1 TX route over different paths, which will confuse it even more.
It will be probably a cat and mouse game where the mouse everytime find a new hole to hide. Wallets can implement a minimal amount of hops in a UX friendly way where you just click the 'privacy' button, and wallets can blacklist known compromised nodes all together, which creates a market for new private routers.
This cat- and mouse game will probably go until fiat fails, and mass suirvellance isn't profitable anymore. This is my base case, let's see.
#bitcoin #privacy