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?
Discussion
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