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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.

Hodler 5mo ago 💬 1

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

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Discussion

Hanshan 5mo ago

while its true that Tor also fails against a Global Passive Adversary,LN is tiny compared to Tor and the incentive to disrupt it is greater since it's one specific use-case (untaxed money transmission) that's easily targeted with existing regulation.

so its a much better cost/benefit ratio.

and since I've been listening to people say "LN fixes Bitcoin privacy" for years and years already, hearing "bolt12 and mpp will fix LN privacy" is not impressive to me.

after 7 years people can regularly send $100 privately on LN,

if they use their own node, which only like 5% of users do because it a UX nightmare.

and its private mostly because nobody cares and its not worth anyones time to invest in surveillance.

so yeah, we'll see but the writing is already on the wall.