Please try this tool I just made:

Onchain Zap Forensics

Let me try to make my point once more: 1) Address reuse is actively harmful for the whole Bitcoin network. 2) On-chain privacy is very, very hard. 3) Lightning privacy is NOT hard What (3) means is that I can spend the zaps that I have received WITHOUT getting into trouble further. I can spend them at a merchant or whatever, and nobody will know. On-chain makes that way, way, way harder. On-chain is traceable. Further, nobody knows the current balance of my wallet. I might have spent everything. Or maybe I haven’t touched it. Switching to on-chain makes every user naked, and thus plausible deniability flies out the window.

I don't need your balance. All I need is your cash flow to see if you are worth anything.

Plenty of people have a lightning address that isn't theirs as their zap target.

Thank you Gigi 🙏

It doesn't matter. On nostr, they are all doxxing that lightning address and those transactions (which is what almost everyone does here). Of course, they can have other lightning wallets and those are not affected. Similarly, we are not doxying people's main Bitcoin wallet. It's only a wallet for nostr. Everything else is user education to hopefully not mix funds or keys.

It matters. It matters a lot. Providing and normalizing the use of long-term footguns is not the way. Building stuff that actively harms the privacy of all on-chain users (that's what address reuse does, remember?) is not the way.

Then we should never have created zaps in the first place.

Anyway, I know that you're gonna ship it anyway but this is too important for me to just shut up about. I hope that a more sane approach will win in the end. Silent Payments, for example. I'll go touch grass now.

Zaps don't promote on-chain address reuse. Are you even trying to understand what I'm saying?

I appreciate the debate. And I hope someone creates a silent payment implementation that can actually work and don't just defer privacy to a trusted monitor provider.

Sure. But they take something very private and turn into something VERY public for the sake of memes. Any attacker can save those events forever in such a way that they don't even need the chain. In fact, it's even better than the chain because now they can sell databases of past zaps that no one else can find because they were deleted. We created the incentive to sell our info and create that marketplace. It's really bonkers if you think about zaps from a privacy perspective. Every decision we ever made made lightning worse than on chain transactions.

Btw, I softened wording here and added a comparison table.

Yes, but even if I use a dedicated wallet for on-chain zaps, I still need to fund that wallet somehow for future use — not every user earns sats directly on Nostr. With a Lightning wallet, nobody can see the transaction flow outside the Nostr ecosystem. But with an on-chain wallet, I don`t have that option. From my point of view, just because Lightning zaps aren`t perfectly private doesn`t mean I want something much worse and completely doxx my transaction flow to Nostr for the sake of convenience. Also, as a user, I was able to control whether I wanted to receive zaps on Nostr or not at all (by setting or not setting a Lightning address in my Nostr profile, or changing it whenever I wanted). But by adding this feature (on-chain zaps), anybody can send funds to me against my will.

Just create a new oc wallet receive some oc zaps, every now and then make a swap oc-ln let it shake for a few weeks in your ln node over tor then swap ln-oc back.

@Alex Gleason strikes me as a polyandrist and nudist IRL

I mostly agree Vitor, but it depends on what you mean by "everything". A zap is a public record that one person made a payment to another person The question is whether the public record should also (implicitly or explicitly, it doesn't matter) point to the on-chain transaction That appears to be the real issue you all are discussing, and the issue would still exist even if each payment was to a different address Define "Noisy Payment" as a Silent Payment, but with a public event linking to the txid. Would that be a fix for onchain zaps, because it avoids address reuse; or equally harmful because the public can still see all the transactions?

Legend.

lmao

Let's do it.. send a NIP on which way to do it that actually works. Right now a bunch of people are talking but nobody is doing shit. We need actual proposals/implementations from people that know what they are talking about.