Oddbean new post about login | logout Lightning? 🤷♂️
Lightning is non-existent on Darknet Markets for good reason. It isn't completely private. Even if you run your own node and aren't on custodial wallets or LSPs like 95% of users (almost no privacy) - Receiver privacy is terrible, and hidden balances can be discovered by probing. Opening and closing channels also leaks data on chain.
Didn’t know it was possible to make sense of those things. Wouldn’t it be pretty hard to actually follow the sats between a few nodes?
That same argument was used in 2009 to claim bitcoin was "private enough". What we learned in my generation is that it just wasn't. Monero solved this topic completely without acrobacies or doubts. It solved it so well that the US gov. even placed a bounty to break that privacy. No such bounty was ever placed for Lightning or any other coin claiming to respect our privacy.
How would you get monero without any other coin or fiat? Just mining it? And if it’s that private who guarantees that the supply hasn’t changed?
Other coins and fiat lacking privacy/anonymity has nothing to do with Monero. But yes, you can mine Monero if you want. A p2p coin swap to Monero with another crypto just looks like address1 sent to address2 on the other coin. Third party correlation between both chains is not possible since you can't see amounts and addresses on Monero. So no one knows that a swap even took place. While with Bitcoin it is possible and fairly trivial. The person you swap with can also peek into your full or partial balance. Also not possible with Monero. You can also get Monero by mailing physical cash p2p which is private and anonymous. No third party knows you received Monero at all. That is not true for Bitcoin and most other cryptos where everyone in the world can see the blockchain. The supply discussion is a separate argument. Pedersen commitments guarantees supply, and the first time a coin is mined the amount is briefly transparent as it enters into circulating supply (so you can manually count if you want to). But if this still worries you, continue saving long term with Bitcoin, and only use Monero to spend/receive where possible.
You can't mine monero profitably anymore. Usually what you do is to use your hardware to mine some other coin that is profitable at that moment using nicehash: https://www.nicehash.com/ And then convert that money to monero for permanent value. Zero KYC.
All depends. First step is always running your own lightning node (which the vast majority don't do). But even after that there are a lot of caveats. Here are a few links with the technical details: bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/state-of-bitcoin-lightning-network-privacy https://abytesjourney.com/lightning-privacy/ https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/develop/16_security_privacy_ln.asciidoc#attacks-on-lightning https://lightningprivacy.com/en/introduction "We identified 27,183 private channels, discovered hidden balances, and showed how a passive adversary can infer payment endpoints with very high probability." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.12470.pdf