history of crypto scams:
2010-2015: random altcoins
2015-2016: ethereum
2017-2019: ICOs
2020-2022: defi
2022-2023: NFTs
2023-2024: inscriptions
2024-2025: fake L2s
2025-now: stablecoins
Running spark
the good news is, even if we do get a plugin system we can still argue
I am having a discussion about downsides in this thread: https://x.com/SuperTestnet/status/1917338559217823862
Some of the anti-filter people say that enhanced filters would harm the mempool because the current crop of spammers would start bypassing the mempool and submitting their transactions to miners directly, which makes the mempool inaccurate a less accurate indicator of what transactions are actually waiting to get mined. That can have downstream effects on fee estimation.
I support stengthening the filters in bitcoin core for the following reasons:
1. It's too easy imo to put arbitrary data on the chain
2. I observe that it has bad effects
3. I want to disincentivize it further
4. Filters seem to make arbitrary data more expensive
I suspect my time is better spent improving bolt11 rather than building ecash or cashu
> Problem is there are thousands of channels open by Phoenix, which can't route
They can
> they will probably not live swap their non routing wallet to your blinder
There's no way to tell if they do or don't. The fact that it's possible for them to route undetectably means any of them might be doing it. Acinq has no way to know.
It's more provate to have an LSP than not to, for the same reason that it's more private to use 6 tor relays to browse the web rather than the default of 3. The obfuscation method used by onion routing protocols uses improves with more hops between the sender and the recipient, and LSPs count as an extra hop. So it's better to have one than not.
> is an apples to oranges comparison
True, but nonetheless, they can be compared, as evidenced by the fact that you and I have both compared them in this thread
> the end user knows exactly who they sent money to
They shouldn't. If I trade my btc for xmr on fixedfloat, they should not know who received it. Ideally they should not have any useful info about me that they can share with authorities. Who I am is none of their business; they should only know, did I pay the right amount, and if so, how to give me my xmr. The recipient should be as hidden as possible from the sender so that they have as little information as possible about him or her.
And in fact, lightning hides the recipient better than monero. It doesn't show the sender which address received the money (neither the channel nor the htlc). An invoice doesn't tell the sender anything about the recipient except a pubkey which is for communication only (it never holds any money) and often does not even belong to the recipient. If the sender logs this information and shares it with authorities, they don't get very much from it, and in particular nothing they can use to watch the blockchain to see where it moves next. Lightning "receive privacy" is much better than monero in this regard.
I would certainly like to see lightning on monero and I think I know a way to do it, though it's not pretty -- you'd have to make a bunch of presigned transactions for every block a txo "might" get mined in at an unknown point in the future.
But bitcoin is the better blockchain to build lightning because of its small block size. That's the only way I think is sensible for keeping a blockchain decentralized. Monero is garbage money because it is centrally controlled and designed to centralize further as usage increases. Blocks get bigger -> nodes get harder/more expensive to run -> regular folks stop doing it -> the rich control the network
Bitcoin is designed to last. Monero is designed to die fast.
"FCMP fixes most of this"
Lightning is already ahead of monero on privacy tech. If they eventually get around to adding support for FCMP (next year? year after?) I look forward to find out if FCMP even does what it claims to do.
But even if it does, it will still be worse than lightning.
FCMP accomplishes a similar goal as lightning (make the payment info look like something *anyone* could have made -- LN does this by making it an indecipherable encrypted blob, FCMP does this via a much larger zero knowledge proof).
But FCMP's method is much less efficient way. Not just because it uses a far greater number of bytes, but also because every payment goes on the blockchain, and you have to *pay for* all of those bytes. It costs a far greater amount of money to use FCMP than it costs to use lightning, and for all that cost, the effect you get is roughly the same: people can't tell who sent the payment anymore.
Lightning is better than FCMP.
I will take this as a mix: part compliment, part insult
In the finnish example they didn't know his ip address at the beginning. The only thing they could do was send money to him using his DNM website and then wait for him to do something with it. They did that, and when he sent the monero to an exchange, they recognized the address, contacted the exchange, asked them what account he sent the money into, got the KYC info for that account, and went to his house to arrest him.
That is an example of a situation that lightning fixes: they can send him money but they can't see when it moves next. So they don't know he sent it to an exchange, don't get to read the exchange's address off the blockchain, don't know to call them, and don't learn his KYC info.
It does matter. The trace started by sending money to the perp and waiting for him to send it to an exchange, who they then contacted. They needed to see the transaction on the blockchain to know who to call. With lightning, they can't do that. They can't do step 2 -- the step where they watched the blockchain to see when the money moved, alerting them to check if it was sent to an exchange, who they could then get info from to find out whose account it entered. They wouldn't know it ever moved, or where, so they wouldn't know to call someone, or who to call.
Lightning would help a lot.
For one thing, the most popular monero wallets (Cake wallet, moneroj) don't send transactions to their peers, instead they connect to a random node from a list of RPC servers and send it in plaintext to them. Lightning wallets, by contrast, (1) encrypt your transactions and (2) only send the encrypted blob to a single node whom you have a channel with. That's way, way better.
For another thing, monero wallets reveal the recipient's address to the sender. They automatically log that information and if the sender is an exchange or other public entity, they can be subpoena'd and begin tracing the payment. Lightning wallets, by contrast, do not reveal the recipient's address to the sender -- not the channel, not the htlc, not anything that actually holds the money. They only get to see a public key that is used strictly for communication, and thanks to trampoline routing, it is quite common for that pubkey to not even belong to the recipient. That's way, way better.
For another thing, monero wallets list all possible senders in every transaction (unencrypted btw) and put that information on a permanent ledger. Lightning doesn't do that. So if a person is being targeted and uses monero to send their money to a centralized exchange, the exchange's address will show up in that transaction and -- if the exchange discloses their addresses to the police, as many do -- the police can subpoena them for information about what transactions sent them money. They can then show them a list where the target's address shows up as a possible sender in each transaction, which is very good evidence that he sent the money. The target can be caught that way, as happened in this finnish case: https://cointelegraph.com/news/finnish-authorities-traced-monero-vastaamo-hack
Since lightning wallets actually encrypt the sender and do not even share the encrypted blob with the recipient, it would help a lot if the guy chose lightning instead. The police would not see a transaction going to the exchange on the blockchain, would not know to contact them and ask them for more info, and even if they did, the exchange would not have any info to link the sender's wallet to any particular account. That's way, way better.
That depends on how good the sender is at blockchain analysis. In the attached video, Chainalysis provides several examples of transactions where they *could* identify where the money eventually ended up.
E.g. at 26:55 they trace it from Morphtoken to the Columbian guy's wallet
At 30:43 they trace it from the Columbian guy's wallet to ChangeNow or Liquid Exchange
At 32:49 they trace another payment from the Columbian guy's wallet to Exodus Wallet
At 35:08 they do that again, except they aren't sure if it went to Exodus wallet or a mining pool
At 36:51 they trace another payment from the Columbian guy's wallet to centralized exchange, except they aren't sure if it went there or to a merchant point of sale page
And it was at that point that they nabbed him, because he accidentally leaked his ip address while using his wallet to pay that website
Churning leaves a trail on the blockchain which analysts can try to follow
Trampoline nodes don't leave a trail on the blockchain, which makes the lives of analysts much more difficult
there are plenty of articles that cover how chainalysis finds their perps
I'm just asking for one where they did it without finding the sender
In every case I'm aware of, they find the sender first (often, they themselves *are* the sender, e.g. in the Finnish case I provided), then start tracing the payment once the recipient moves it -- they try to find out if he sent it to an exchange, or batched it together with his other payments, or did anything else useful with it