Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

I'm going to address only (c), I hope that's fine. Think about OCEAN. They have bolt12 payouts. In order to use that, you just register your offer with them. Every share you submit is linked to that offer. They will try to pay you right away but if your node is offline, they simply write to the DB that this specific offer has made. Say 250k sats since the last payout. They MUST track whichiner has earned how much reward. There is no basically other way. Except! If each miner receives ecash instead of that db entry, the miner can withdraw to a bolt12 offer of any wallet they want without ever having to register it. The miner doesn't need an account. It doesn't need accounting either. The pool simply issues ecash for valid work and miners withdraw whenever they like to whatever destination they like. There is no way to link *THE SUBMITTED SHARES* to the withdrawal if done right. That's simply not possible with ordinary accounting. To (b), yes thats right but it's also trivial to fix using VPNs... It's not part of the problem I care about.

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Replies (2)

Matt Corallo matt@bitcoin.ninja 11 months ago

Indeed, OCEAN’s approach leaves a long trail in the DB. I addressed this a bit more in the note below, but I think in practice the (bulk) withdraw you’d do with ecash would end up having similar privacy issues as today’s approach. You obviously can’t withdraw each single sat by itself (the fees would dominate, even on lightning), so you bulk-withdraw in batches. You’d have to have every user have the same bulk-withdraw randomization logic, with fresh BOLT12 (or different ecash mints) to withdraw to each time (otherwise you’d have clear fingerprints in the withdraw batches). And even then I’d bet with enough BOLT 12 blinded paths you’d be able to cluster most withdraws :/. This just isn’t as simple as you’re thinking. I agree there’s a world where on an extreme margin this could improve privacy, but it’s a really tiny margin and a pool motivated to go look would probably be able to see through almost all of it :/ View quoted note →

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Rusty Russell rusty@rusty.ozlabs.org 11 months ago

If everyone withdraws every time, privacy gain is minimal. But (despite the obvious risk of a rug pull) using your ecash mining funds as a regular wallet to pay *other* things is a win. There's already something of a trust relationship, I guess BTW, @calle is there a standard way/protocol for a mint to announce a shutdown schedule? So wallets can (ideally automatically) move funds off?

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