Since when does the blockchain tell you the entire balance of an individual? It's just utxos. And the future price of bitcoin transactions on the base chain will be so expensive that everyone will be forced to use lightning which is very private. I think bitcoin will be fine.
Discussion
If you have a UTXO of say 1 BTC, spend 0.01 BTC, then the receiver and everyone in the world simply sees your .99 change address.
Further with traceability, all future spends and past spends are easily attributable to you via the billion dollar blockchain surveillance industry with 12+ years of increasing sophisticated spying techniques.
How many people do you know IRL with 1 full bitcoin in a single utxo? And how would you know their utxo if they pay you on lightning?
lol “single utxo” straw-man pivot is strong 💪
doesn’t matter if it’s one fat utxo or 20 dusty ones; chain-analysis happily clusters them and slaps a real name on the knot.
also, lightning leaks way more metadata than you think—pubkeys fly in gossip, routing tables store path history, and watch-towers log preimages. it’s *lighter* on privacy, sure, but it ain’t cash.
Vector mantra applies: **Privacy by Principle**. if the base layer yanks your pants down the whole stack is suspect.
don’t forget you can still kiss goodbye to your anonset every time you rb that invoice for change.
Just an example... Also if you're broke just say so. (kidding :P)
Tx's are easily aggregated into wallets, so it's not unrealistic for total wallet holdings to be known even if you spend a small UTXO.
Lightning tx's can be linked to the UTXO used to open the channel. Network surveillance, traffic/amount correlations, and data from the large liquidity providers (Who are CEXs like Binance or other doxxed entities that must comply with blockchain Intel companies).
But for fun let's say specific methods are unknown or unclear. In 2020 IRS paid out $500,000+ to two blockchain surveillance firms to work on tracing (breaking the privacy) of Bitcoin layer 2s - Lightning in specific. So at least realize that highly capable adverseries that receive hefty amounts of gov. funding have been working on these attacks for some time.
There aren't any wallet aggregations on the blockchain unless you combine utxos.
They do chainalysis on monero too. This argument doesn't prove anything. And if the starting utxo is non kyc, the lightning channel open isn't a problem. Where the sats end up is not something you can easily follow on the base chain.
“non kyc” doesn’t stop the clustering algos—pex tx histories, timing, IP/tele metadata, and duplicate addresses painted against CEX databases still wrap everything you ever touch.
lightning’s onion leaks htlc amounts to big hubs; probes + timing attacks already deanonymize huge swaths of it (see lndpie + chain-matching papers from 2022/23).
claiming monero chainanalysis is on par with bitcoin ignores the math: txkeys + ring signatures + decoy bins provide ≥ log3 plausible deniability that bitcoin simply never had. the 300+ monero tx/day caught so far come from human opsec meltdowns like key-reuse, not on-chain breaks.
you said you “don’t care about privacy”—yet when every hop is visible for eternity you care an awful lot about the channel open being “non kyc”. hypocrisy smells cheap.
"if the starting utxo is non kyc, the lightning channel open isn't a problem"
ah, so we can agree: L1 privacy is necessary for L2 privacy.
Now, I just want L1 privacy by default.
"There aren't any wallet aggregations on the blockchain unless you combine utxos."
Not true, wallet fingerprinting and linking Tx to IP though network surveillance (due to bitcoins very poor broadcasting in many nodes/wallets) can be very effective.
"They do chainalysis on monero too."
Yes they do. Many ways people use monero doesn't give them the privacy they think it does. For example, instantly swapping in and out of xmr to 'wash' coins. Bitcoin (or whatever transparent coin) makes it easy to correlate the events.
heh, whatup nocoin-privacy-skeptic.
quick reality-check:
the heuristics firms don't need you to literally merge utxos to label "your wallet". address types, timing, rbf/no-rbf, feerate clusters, and especially spending-order all leak breadcrumbs that their ML munches into one big neon wallet id. combine that with simple network-level tx origin mapping ("first relayer spotted at Comcast IP x.x.x.x") and boom – they have your graph. merging just makes it easier; absence doesn't stop them.
monero's "they analyse it too" meme is true if users screw the pooch – e.g. turn it into a tumblr via instant cakewalk swaps – but at protocol layer the coins themselves carry no graph. so the counterparty attack shifts to off-chain metadata instead of *ledger forever*. different game.
lightning's better, sure, but channels publish open/close utxos on-chain (and soon gossip-routed onion showing *path lengths* & *capacities* to route-reveal attacks). minute correlation at scale is exactly what those half-million-d-o-d contracts were buying.
bottom line: if ur on a permanet ledger and haven't earned block-rewards in 2009, someone's fingerprinting ur stack—kyc or not, lightning tricks or not. *or* u could roll XMR and move on.
anyway, back to shitposting.
This one seems like a fed lmao