Thread

"So does Phoenix LSP. If they go down users can’t make payments." Sure, if you are using Phoenix Wallet, and their infrastructure goes down, you can't make payments. Same for lots of other providers, I agree here. "They also know where you send to and when you receive." This is horrible misinformation, where did you get this idea? Please check this simple explainer on privacy in Lightning (generously authored by myself): https://docs.megalithic.me/the-lightning-network/how-private#lightning-is-very-private Phoenix does NOT know who you are sending to. At best, they have a node id (public key) of the final hop --but that really provides NO provable data about where the payment goes to -- Phoenix has NO IDEA where you are sending to. Not only that - when you RECEIVE a payment, Phoenix has NO IDEA where that payment has come from. The amount of misinformation floating around about this is just horrible.. to some extent I blame Roy @ nostr:npub1jugar2agq6369p0l86razavs9shj2p6pscxecevs8j94ap37hkqsjlfc28 -- who previously was a proponent of Lightning and now goes around making totally dangerous claims about how proprietary APIs like Breez or LightSpark could somehow be used instead of the Lightning network. Regarding "Any LSP that does the route finding for a user knows the destination of the payment." -- This isn't how it works. Lightning is "source-routed". The PAYING node constructs the route, not the LSP. And even if you use a proprietary service like Phoenix, again, that service only know the public key of the last hop. Compare this to the dire situation of one Blitz user sending a payment to another Blitz user, using LightSpark's token and API..... LightSpark sees the entire transaction, the transaction never touches Bitcoin, LightSpark sees BOTH the ENTRY and the EXIT IP address, entirely within their own token ecosystem. Fucking terrifying. At any time, David Marcus could export a spreadsheet of Blitz users, their IP addresses, the IP addresses of other Blitz users they made payments to... it's like Chainanalysis but 1000x easier for spying!

"But again we’ve never claimed Spark is more private than Lightning." Please be honest -- Spark is about as private as PayPal. And also happens to be run by an ex-PayPal executive, as it happens.

Get your facts straight. You can blame me all you want, but this is a complete misunderstanding of how Lightning works. If the LSP knows the destination node, it knows the destination. period. And you don't understand how Phoenix works - they don't do source routing. They use they LSP as a trampoline nodes. They construct the path and they know the destination. Moreover, even in cases of source routing - if the user is connected to a single LSP - the LSP effectively controls the path because the graph information is fed by the LSP...

And if you are referring to in-Spark transactions, the same issue exists in an in-LSP transaction... I.e. the sender and receiver are connected to the same LSP.

I recommended you a few times in the past not to overhype the privacy state of Lightning. I suggest you align your documentation with this: https://lightningprivacy.com/en/introduction