this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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It's more complicated than this, and it gets more complicated every year, especially with lightning. It's certainly not monero in terms of privacy, but it's not the same Bitcoin it was 10 years ago where this was more or less true.
Trust me on this. I know what you're thinking, "Blindly trust an internet stranger? No thank you." That's good, but this time, you should listen because you care about your privacy.
It's not different enough to matter... yet.
Identifying users was still trivial as of 2 months ago, which is the last time I brushed up on implementing smart contracts. Bitcoin Lightning came out somewhere around 7 years ago. Unless something fresh and hot hit the market within the past 60 days, and has been implemented, do not, I repeat DO NOT trust your privacy to bitcoin, especially if you're doing something your governing body disapproves of.
Monero's privacy protections are still a generation ahead, but still not a big headache for the good ol' 5-Eyes. Probably not for the 14-Eyes either, but who knows what they know.
I assume you're talking about blatantly illegal transactions, like trafficking or drug deals, but if that's not part of someone's threat model, is Bitcoin still reasonable private?
As in, if we remove state-level actors from the threat model, is Bitcoin still safe enough? I'm more interested in not getting doxxed for my choice in VPN, email service, etc if I choose to run for office, and Bitcoin is accepted by enough places to be useful enough.
I am talking about anything that might become a skeleton in your closet, when political winds change. If you:
The likely-hood of you becoming a big enough thorne for governments is small, but they are ultimately the key holder to your privacy. That should be your threat model.
De-anonymizing crypto users is not illegal. Posting it is illegal, but finding out what you purchased for a smear campaign? Totally fine in most western countries. Advanced persistent threats would be that future's threat model. It is not hard for large political organizations to hire teenage nosy geeks to dig up OSINT dirt. Your level of risk tolerance is your choice. If it's too much hassle, it's too much hassle.
That said, the largest governments in the world have signed a cooperative agreement to share and process data they are currently collecting, regardless of the legality of collecting it.
Purchasing privacy coin, using TOR(Yes, in caps. They don't get to set the rules on acronyms.), doing anything "out of the ordinary" will likely warrant investigation into your affairs. Once they have that data, their track record of protecting it is not so good. "The Pentagon", "ANAO", and this one doesn't even mention why the UK suddenly needs a new task force with Russian advanced persistent threats "on the horizon".
Everybody else: If you just don't want your neighbors to know you have a fetish, knock yourself out with lightning and have the package gift-wrapped.
Also note that lightning is an off-chain centralized approach. It loses a lot of benefits of decentralized layer 1 like bitcoin and monero. Privacy at a centralized entity is like having no privacy at all.
Look up a network map of lightning, it's not centralized at all. Payments typically route through multiple hubs, just as many Bitcoin nodes may be involved in processing a main chain transaction. Anyone can run a lightning node, and you can choose which nodes you want to use, if you want. There are thousands of them to pick from.
The lightning channels are secured by the main chain. There is no centralized party who can rug you.