Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

Vitor Pamplona _@vitorpamplona.com 1 month ago

I find hilarious that people are suggesting we take something extremely private and computationally intensive like Silent Payments and then wrap it in a signed Zap Event that identifies the sender, the receiver and a post for what that payment is about. Zaps were created to deannonimize transactions for the memes. Originally with lightning and now with onchain. Their purpose in this ecosystem is to break privacy. Not that we shouldn't invest in private tools for send money to one another, but a "ZAP" is something inherently public.

Replies (13)

cloud fodder cloudfodder@relay.tools 1 month ago

I disagree this was the intention of zaps, but that is what they were implemented as. Then much later I realized that and was disappointed. It's ok, but saying this is what everyone wanted, I don't believe that.. JB almost immediately tried to fix it with private zaps but those aren't private either. The idea went wild for a bit with everyone pumping it, and now we are here. (A place where we only send dust because it's too public).

Vitor Pamplona _@vitorpamplona.com 1 month ago

There is no other interpretation. We had lighting Tips back in the day.. but we could not identify where they came from or what they were for, so Will created a way to identify them.. Without thinking.. sure... But the intention was to deannonimize from the beginning.

redshift redshift@routstr.com 1 month ago

I'm not entirely against onchain zaps btw, but just wanna point out that silent payments don't have to be computationally intensive btw, since on-chain "zaps" are public anyway, the transaction and thus the receiving address can be public so the receiver won't have to scan at all. Silent payments at least help us prevent address reuse. One thing that bothers me is UTXO bloating. But well, nobody can stop anyone from doing anything.

cloud fodder cloudfodder@relay.tools 1 month ago

There should be no public amount and no bolt11. There should be attestation from the receiver that someone zaps or scams. That way everyone gets their precious 'signal' and not the rest. Ever notice how a hot zapped post tops out? Because the amounts are visible. The social implications are important. Notice that venmo started out advertising publicly who sent money to who, and nobody uses that feature anymore other than venmo itself to enforce it's centralized rules.

Vitor Pamplona _@vitorpamplona.com 1 month ago

Make a proposal as a NIP. I am not sure anyone else will do it and you seem to have good knowledge and knows its limitations.

redshift redshift@routstr.com 1 month ago

No no. I have little knowledge about it, I only know what people have told me. Here's an implementation of silent payments with encrypted DMs. Here's a NIP for silent payments without anyone having to set silent payment addresses in their kind 0: View quoted note → I listened to @craigraw's podcast with Odell recently and know just on the surface. But I believe that it's something we should definitely adopt sooner than later.

robos

Scanless Silent Payments tl:dr: We built a complete silent payment notification system into Sparrow Wallet using Nostr encrypted DMs. When you send a silent payment to a Nostr identity, the recipient is automatically notified via NIP-17 with everything they need to claim the UTXO — no blockchain scanning required. This is a proof of concept and almost certainly has security issues.

View quoted note →

Justin (shocknet) ⚡ thecto@lightning.video 1 month ago

These same people probably use fake L2's for convenience More virtue signaling than thinking

Technical Debt technicaldebt@nostrcheck.me 1 month ago

I don’t think that is the argument people are making. A LN zap is public but what I do with it isn’t. The alternative for the current on chain zaps is to send BTC through a blender.

Vitor Pamplona _@vitorpamplona.com 1 month ago

Yep, what you do is not public. But everybody just sends the zaps back into the network. Right now there is a full trace of most of the bitcoins on Nostr because very few people take the out. It's just a full public record of the Bitcoin circulation among Nostr keys.

Technical Debt technicaldebt@nostrcheck.me 1 month ago

> But everybody just sends the zaps back into the network. We assume that, and it’s most likely true, but we can’t really prove. Similarly we don’t know the origin of these coins either (we can’t even be sure LN zaps are actually real or not). And it could also be said that fat on-chain zaps are more likely to be taken out, so spending those privately would be more important than LN zaps. The real question is, between silent payments and a forced blender on exit (and entry?), which is less worse for UX.

tx0 1 month ago

Maybe the zap data isn't important, the important part seems to be that the destination address is in a DM so only the sender and recipient know who that address belongs to, and how much was sent. Also a wallet could have automatic silent payment coin control so large sends have each utxo go to a new different recipient silent address to not consolidate and link addresses unnecessarily. To consolidate there would have to be some other mixer.

1 replies ↓

Vitor Pamplona _@vitorpamplona.com 1 month ago

Yes

jgbtc jgettbtc@jgett.com 1 month ago

I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. How is an onchain zap any worse than a lightning zap? Either way it's linked to you npub forever, right?