Oddbean new post about | logout
 Look, if the FBI or other 3 letter agencies want to find out all your financial activity they'll probably be able to no matter the source of money you're using. What I'm saying is that LN is good enough and its getting better. There's unannounced channels, multi part payment and trampoline routing. More recently (and yet to be fully rolled out) are bolt12 and blinded paths. Then there's also all the ecash mints which give an anonymity set of all the users in the mint.

There are other tools too. Coin joins like join market and wasabi (joinstr also in testing phase). There are state chains and UTXO swaps. There's liquid, there's silent payments and there is payjoin.

There will be more too. I'll admit that it is slow but eventually there will be privacy focused wallets that do a lot of this in the background giving the user the "landing" your meme suggests. For now there's some hoops to jump through.

I don't really have a problem if people want to hold bitcoin and whenever they need to spend they swap into XMR for the payment. I just don't think its necessary and you definitely don't want to be holding it for too long. It also doesn't guarantee absolute privacy (especially for noobs).