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@ mleku
2025-05-30 11:30:07
no, they are deluded, and fanatical about privacy to the exclusion of more important features of the base layer
privacy can exist in bitcoin applications because it provides for pseudonymity and with lightning, it dramatically narrows the ways in which privacy of transactions can be breached, to the point of it being impossible without running a majority of lightning nodes with the specific purpose of monitoring signal origins, such that you could get enough breadcrumbs to link the movement of a payment from start to finish, and even then, it really can't be done without owning the entire network, which is basically impossible to achieve at this point
if the only way that governments get the ability to breach your payments is by forcing payment processors to get your details (KYC) and demand the massive amounts of data each individual privileged entity in the payment flow, how can this be achieved on lightning when a substantial number of running lightning nodes are using tor to make it impossible to know who the node runners even are?
the monero solution is a very old one that is based on the idea of the blockchain being a payment processing layer as well as settlement layer, and this is just not how you do payment processing
for blockchains to achieve this they have to be so large and centralised that they lose their protection against a small group taking control of the network, the more nodes they have to control, the weaker their ability to surveil it, and that's the whole founding principle of lightning's design - it trades off some of the reliability of payment processing for decentralization, through the use of source routed onion messages that contain instructions for how much sats to move from each point in the process
both senders and receivers control their privacy by contributing half of the path that a payment will send, and typically there is 3-6 or so hops on each side from sender and receiver, they literally cannot know from where it came except for the way that the usual case is to ask the receiver to give the onion encrypted layers of the path to their endpoint
yes, this model has less privacy, but it also tends to have higher reliability, but acquiring that invoice can be done over tor, or even over onion messages themselves, at the cost of a few sats per hop along the way
current state of lightning is that the sender and receiver both typically know each other's network location, but nobody else in the network knows what hop in the path they are conveying a rebalance from or to, only the instructions that reveal the next hop, and the source from which the previous hop sent the instructions
they are stuck in a long ago past where there was so few users of blockchains that it made sense to propose to encrypt the ledger but the cost of this, and the dubious security of it against tracing the payments are very much broken and out of date.
all you have to do, as a lightning user, to get total privacy is use tor to fetch invoices and the lightning architecture takes care of the rest.
they just refuse to get up to date with the best ways to do this and they don't value bitcoin's most valuable, and most powerful meme - 21 million. the end.
the reason why it's important is economics. it makes bitcoin a hard money, which stands in contrast to every other blockchain and all fiat money systems.
they are essentially demanding bitcoin becomes monero, and losing that hard supply and adding complexity to the base layer which just reduces that guarantee and is not possible to even achieve to the degree that they are deluded into thinking it can achieve. just like lightning, if you want full privacy on monero, you have to use tor to send the payments anyway, while you traded off this guaranteed supply and auditability, and don't even gain the ability to far exceed the volume of transactions that can be achieved with partitioning the architecture into settlement and payment protocols.