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Does Wallet of Satoshi make all users balances public via Spark?
1728 sats \ 8 comments \ @Scoresby 4h lightning
I saw @theinstagibbs post this on X:
I wasn't familiar with what he was referring to, but later in the thread he says:
Aha! It's a Spark thing (again - #1020261). Having put some effort into trying to learn about Spark (#1020579), I'm surprised because this is first I've heard about its public-ness.
My feelings of surprise were strong enough that I decided to test it out.
  1. I downloaded Wallet of Satoshi and created a new account.
  2. Then I created a Bolt11 invoice for 21 sats and paid it from another wallet.
  3. I used decodePaymentRequest() to pull my new WoS node pubkey from the invoice.
  4. I went to Sparkscan and searched for the pubkey
This is where I got stuck. It did indeed find a wallet and displayed a balance, but the balance was listed as 0 (it reads 21 sats in my wallet).
So, either Sparkscan doesn't update very frequently or I did something wrong. I suspect the latter.
Anyhow, it seems to me that the verdict is out on whether this is possible (but given that instagibbs is much more skilled than I, odds are in his favor). I'm curious if anyone else wants to give it a try.
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202 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 2h
It's a Spark thing
It's a fake L2 thing.
Ark, Spark are both centralized exchanges... there's inherently a server, "coordinator", with full insight into everything.
Any ingress/egress via Lightning has 0 privacy because they're executing a swap for you (and taking an exorbitant fee).
They're surveillance tools and using scam narratives for distribution.
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102 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 4h
It's not the pubkey that you lookup. You need to look at the route hints to extract the spark address.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby OP 4h
ah, well perhaps that makes it somewhat better -- it's not as simple as plugging an easily identifiable string into sparkscan.
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102 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 4h
Eh there's not much difference between calling something like decodeSparkPaymentRequest and decodePaymentRequest.
If someone in possession of one of your bolt11s wants to know your balance and transactions, they won't need new skills to do it - just the right tool.
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222 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 4h
So bottom line what we're saying is that spark negates lightning privacy benefits - but we already knew that it wasn't comparable, right?
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 4h
We knew it wasn't comparable to noncustodial lightning, but I assumed that Spark customers would retain the privacy of a custodial service. That is, I thought Spark would know about balances and transactions - not anyone curious enough to look. This is akin to Coinbase giving each customer a bitcoin address and forcing reuse.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 4h
This is akin to Coinbase giving each customer a bitcoin address and forcing reuse.
Nice analogy, actually.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 4h
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