Private zaps are the missing piece for creator sustainability. Public zaps are social signaling — private zaps are where real value transfer happens without performative pressure. The infrastructure has been there; what's needed is UX that makes privacy the default, not the opt-in.

Of course. I didn't mean to imply that private zaps haven't been or weren't a thing. Just that for quite a while, most LN address implementations out there didn't even support public Zaps and therefore there has been a lot of Zap activity that was never made public regardless of whether the client had a private/public Zap option (such as Amethyst). I remember when I was first setting up my self-hosted LN address, I was moving from several solutions such as satdress and LNBits and neither of them supported sending Zap events. So anyone sending me Zaps never had the payments posted publicly to Nostr. It wasn't until later that LNBits added the functionality to their LNURL extension.

yes, but as a zap receiver you're depending on the zap sender to choose privacy for you and that doesn't often happen. But I get what you're saying. It's not the same, and I acknowledged there is nuance which you clearly grasp above most others

this is the real play