Please exercise caution with this highly misleading podcast:
Stephan Livera Podcast • Spark: A New L2 for Bitcoin with Kevin Hurley | SLP700 • Listen on Fountain
In this episode, Kevin Hurley, CTO and co-founder of Lightspark, discusses the Layer 2 solution called Spark, which aims to enhance Bitcoin's scala...
The most dangerous element of Spark is actually revealed in this podcast. You just need to listen carefully.
Early in the podcast, Livera equates a Spark Service Provider (SSP) with an LSP (Lightning Service Provider). Hurly replies that it is "something like" an LSP. This is incredibly dangerous misinformation.
And:
24:34 Hurley "... to your question of, like, how many operators there are, currently there are two operators.. we are about to announce a third one, that will be added, and we expect that there will be many, many more...."
Look at that phrase "that will be added."
This is an huge red flag.
The LSP standard is OPEN. It's based on a public specification, which you can find on the BLIPS repository:
GitHub
GitHub - lightning/blips: Bitcoin Lightning Improvement Proposals
Bitcoin Lightning Improvement Proposals . Contribute to lightning/blips development by creating an account on GitHub.
Anyone can run an LSP. There are dozens of LSPs. If one goes down, you can easily switch to a different one. LSPs do NOT know the IP address where payments originate from, or where payments are going.
By contrast: The SSP standard is CLOSED. ONLY LightSpark can run an SSP, and may or may not decide, at some point, to "add" other SSPs.
(LightSpark has not released their server-side SSP code -- likely because if they were to release it, it would show very clearly that the "self-custodial" marketing they are doing around Spark is an obvious scam. To get your funds out of the Spark "ecosystem" -- onto the Lightning Network, you have to allow LightSpark to custody your funds on one of the Lightning Nodes that they control. I do think that regulators aren't stupid, and will ultimately catch on to this, and, next time there is a Democratic administration, LightSpark will be shut down, or just have to KYC all their users. But I digress...)
The critical point is this: As long as nobody but the Marcus family can run an SSP, this means that ANY usage of Spark requires USING WEB SERVERS CONTROLLED BY THE MARCUS FAMILY.
The companies that quietly sold out their users to LightSpark -- currently Breez, Joltz, Wallet Of Satoshi, Cake Wallet, Blitz, and more coming soon -- are allowing LightSpark COMPLETE visibility into both their user's transactions AND their user's IP addresses. This is just so dangerous.
There is one more very misleading section of this podcast:
33:15 Livera "... I know with Phoenix, which is a well-known lightning wallet... the team at ASYNC, I think it was a similar kind of thing for them, where they said, yeah, obviously, ASYNC is the Lightning routing node, so obviously they know your payments.. but eventually the idea..."
This is horribly misleading. When you send a Spark transaction, since all of these transactions go through Spark, one company (LightSpark), has FULL visibility of both the entry and exit points of the transaction.
When you send a payment to a Phoenix wallet, you do so across the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network has been CAREFULLY designed from the ground-up for privacy.
Even if Phoenix runs the ACINQ node, and that node is the "last hop" in an inbound payment to a Phoenix user, please be assured that Phoenix has NO WAY of knowing WHERE that payment came from, and CERTAINLY has no idea of what I.P. address originating the payment.
Comparing the proprietary Spark API -- controlled by one family -- to something like the Lightning Network..... Steven, please reconsider what you are doing. This is dangerous for Bitcoin.
