Replies (19)

Norm E.'s avatar
Norm E. 1 year ago
Super Testnet, did you ever know that you're my hero? 😃🤩😎🫵🎼🎵🎶
Norm E.'s avatar
Norm E. 1 year ago
Might need to write a song about it, friend 😃🎶
Cody's avatar
Cody 1 year ago
But isn't there a pretty cheap(by NSA standards) way to surveil the entire lightning network and track movements and amounts of sats in and out of every node? Isn't this a weakness of the current gossip scheme?
I don't know a cheap way to surveil the *entire* network. I've heard people wonder if the NSA can watch basically all internet traffic by purchasing packet info from ISPs and 5-eyes countries. If they can do that, then they can probably surveil all LN transactions too. Apart from that, if I wanted to surveil as much of the network as I could in a cheap way, I would try to use binary payment probing (a technique pioneered by Rene Pickhardt in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00333) to get regular snapshots of the balances of the top 50 routing nodes. His technique can get you a balance snapshot every 20 seconds. This isn't a weakness of the gossip scheme (balances aren't gossiped), the weakness comes from the fact that probing to see if a payment will go through is free, and tells you information about whether a routing node has enough *capacity* to forward your payment.
Cody's avatar
Cody 1 year ago
Cool, thanks for the explanation!
I want to congratulate @Kevin Ravens₿erg ⚡️ ☁️ for finding an LN transaction and posting it Let's see info he learned: - sender? Himself -- assuming he sent from a self-custodial wallet, he even knows the address or channel of the sender, wow! - recipient? He knows the recipient's communication pubkey, node, and node name -- though not learn the address or channel that received the money - Amount? 69 sats - Fee? less than 1 sat That's a lot of info! More than I'd get from analyzing a monero transaction. Reading this back, it sounds sarcastic; it's not, I am being genuine: this really is more info than I'd get from analyzing a monero transaction, and it motivates me to work on making LN better. Thanks Kevin!