What has better amount privacy, monero or lightning? My answer is nuanced and may surprise you!
Discussion
you!
is monero or What surprise answer privacy, and amount nuanced My may has better lightning?
With Monero, the sender can see how much you receive…so if you reroute a portion of it somewhere else can the sender see where that portion has gone?
(1) Monero doesn't have transaction chaining, so if you want to "reroute a payment" you can't do it atomically. The best you can do is wait 10 blocks and then send some or all of the money to other people, and if the sender is relying on you to do that, he'd better pray you dont exit scam. Lightning is way out in front on this because it natively supports atomic transaction chaining and amount forwarding. It just works.
(2) If someone does the "wait 10 blocks" workaround mentioned above, the sender cannot see where the rerouted portion has gone unless he does some blockchain analytics, and even then, the most up-to-date techniques do not always successfully track monero payments. But they sometimes do.
Pretty much agree with Super Testnet as far as I can see (assuming you're not using custodial wallets or LSPs which changes the privacy assumptions). If you want to obscure where the senders payment went from the sender on Monero send your entire balance back to yourself a few times. At random times preferably.
It is actually more nuanced than the fueding factions usually make it out to be.
What amounts are hidden for each one and who sees them depends. Monero fees are exposed to the general public, but hides the actual transaction amount between sender/receiver from everyone else. Lightning exposes at least partial fees and amounts to limited third parties - routing nodes - but hides fees and transaction amount from the general public.
I think the best privacy, in concept, for digital cash would be hiding everything completely using a ZK scheme + offchain (to reduce exposing what little information is left). I don't think either Monero or Lightning meet that yet, but they're both constantly improving.
Fascinating thank you. Never heard of this zero knowledge proofs stuff.
The imperfections with lightning and monero are there for a reason I guess and it’s so cool to learn the directions they are heading in.
Some have passed the point of no return
Have I?
Don’t get me wrong here. It’s fine to explore privacy, there’s definitely cases of use.
LN is convenient for small amounts (with a decent privacy)
But what we really want is fungibility without compromise and this is monero only
I'm confused. You say Monero exposes the full amount to the sender. But the sender has to type in the amount they're sending to another address, so of course they know how much it is.
What am I missing?
nothing
he's just making the point that, on LN, you can have payments to different receivers *without the sender knowing.
they just pay an invoice and where the sats go isn't visible to them.
what you are missing is that he should not know how much of that money the recipient receives
imagine you are buying a new music album for $10
you type in $10 and hit send, and the merchant gives you your product
but what if the merchant *didn't* receive $10? What if $5 of it went to the merchant, $3 of it went to the original artist, and $2 of it went to the producer? That's none of the sender's business and the sender shouldn't know about it
He should just know "I sent $10 and I got my product"
He should not know how much the recipient receives
On monero, he does, and that is bad for recipient privacy because it exposes information about the recipient that the sender should not know
Lightning is better: the sender does not know how much the recipient receives, because lightning allows us to atomically split a payment among different people
well
this is a step up from the "Monero partially encrypts the amount" line of horseshit you used to be trying to sell
Monero partially encrypts the amount because it leaves the fee unencrypted
😑
The fee isn't going to the receiver though if were talking about sender/receiver in a transaction it's going to miners. The amount being sent to the receiver is fully hidden. But yea if were talking about a purely privacy perspective the fee being exposed isn't ideal.
Not sure how there could be a fee market for blockspace without it being transparent though. Maybe there is some clever a way to do it but not that I know of. Transaction ordering would have to be a best effort of "first seen" or at random afaict.