HanShan on Nostr: I will bet considerable money that the FBI etc have no better tools for tracing ...
I will bet considerable money that the FBI etc have no better tools for tracing Monero txs than the Chainanal ones we already know about.
In short, Monero privacy is solid.
It protects sender, receiver and amount by default and you have to work pretty hard to fuck it up.
in contrast, LN is untested and its privacy guarantees are unknown to end users. Perhaps unknowable.
Can it theoretically be good? Sure.
Is it? Nobody really knows and with the "hub and spoke" geography of LN it's extremely unlikely.
So I wish people would quit pushing it as a reasonable alternative to an actual battle-tested and easy to use private transaction method.
Just use Monero ffs.
or don't,
if you know what you're doing and you want fuck around with LN stuff, fine.
but anyway, know the tradeoffs.
In short, Monero privacy is solid.
It protects sender, receiver and amount by default and you have to work pretty hard to fuck it up.
in contrast, LN is untested and its privacy guarantees are unknown to end users. Perhaps unknowable.
Can it theoretically be good? Sure.
Is it? Nobody really knows and with the "hub and spoke" geography of LN it's extremely unlikely.
So I wish people would quit pushing it as a reasonable alternative to an actual battle-tested and easy to use private transaction method.
Just use Monero ffs.
or don't,
if you know what you're doing and you want fuck around with LN stuff, fine.
but anyway, know the tradeoffs.
quoting nevent1q…y7f0Look, if the FBI or other 3 letter agencies want to find out all your financial activity they'll probably be able to no matter the source of money you're using. What I'm saying is that LN is good enough and its getting better. There's unannounced channels, multi part payment and trampoline routing. More recently (and yet to be fully rolled out) are bolt12 and blinded paths. Then there's also all the ecash mints which give an anonymity set of all the users in the mint.
There are other tools too. Coin joins like join market and wasabi (joinstr also in testing phase). There are state chains and UTXO swaps. There's liquid, there's silent payments and there is payjoin.
There will be more too. I'll admit that it is slow but eventually there will be privacy focused wallets that do a lot of this in the background giving the user the "landing" your meme suggests. For now there's some hoops to jump through.
I don't really have a problem if people want to hold bitcoin and whenever they need to spend they swap into XMR for the payment. I just don't think its necessary and you definitely don't want to be holding it for too long. It also doesn't guarantee absolute privacy (especially for noobs).