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
