Dumb question(?): Relays can capture my IP address just as easily, no?
Discussion
They sure can.
Using Nostr for this is a different trust tradeoff. Not a categorically better one (modulo the lack of encryption on the Bitcoin P2P layer).
Yeah they can but bitcoin nodes can be run by chain analysis companies, nostr relays likely aren't.
I read your comments on the commit. Would it not be fairly easy for a chain analysis company to run a nostr node to scan for notes containing bitcoin transactions? If the node seems trustworthy otherwise (they pretend to be a good actor), how would we know not to connect nostr clients to it?
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/476/commits/b77a747c8ab266dd3e6c9c5fcb53c4fd6786aff2
Sorry, meant to type relay, not node.
Yeah they could, but this should be like 0.0001% of the relays traffic, there would be a lot of overhead to do so. Most likely it would end up being a shitty relay because they aren't supporting the use cases actual nostr users want.
Fair enough. It's never a bad idea to have another option to improve privacy, even if the privacy gained is incremental. Thanks!