Does Wallet of Satoshi make all users balances public via Spark? \ stacker news ~lightning

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Does Wallet of Satoshi make all users balances public via Spark?

2234 sats \ 16 comments \ @Scoresby 8 Oct lightning

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.

I downloaded Wallet of Satoshi and created a new account.
Then I created a Bolt11 invoice for 21 sats and paid it from another wallet.
I used decodePaymentRequest() to pull my new WoS node pubkey from the invoice.
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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336 sats \ 5 replies \ @justin_shocknet 8 Oct

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.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @028559d218 9 Oct

We are going backwards. Huge fan of Lightning. But how does this 'help' us?

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @ca 18 Oct

Lightning has massive onboarding barriers. Let's not kid ourselves.

63 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 9 Oct

How does what help us? Fake L2's? They don't at all, they're self interested in generating swap fees. The virtue signals about helping users are just marketing.

22 sats \ 1 reply \ @028559d218 9 Oct

Not good. Non-custodial isn't that hard to use. Hell I figured it out both on a phone and a node-in-a-box. That's imo what 'we' should focus on. Not this fake L2 stuff...

45 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 9 Oct

Agreed, money is where my mouth is on this, hacking on Lightning.Pub as we speak.

221 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 8 Oct

It's not the pubkey that you lookup. You need to look at the route hints to extract the spark address.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Scoresby OP 8 Oct

ah, well perhaps that makes it somewhat better -- it's not as simple as plugging an easily identifiable string into sparkscan.

102 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 8 Oct

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.

243 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 8 Oct

So bottom line what we're saying is that spark negates lightning privacy benefits - but we already knew that it wasn't comparable, right?

171 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 8 Oct

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.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 8 Oct

This is akin to Coinbase giving each customer a bitcoin address and forcing reuse.

Nice analogy, actually.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 9 Oct

In addition to @benthecarman's tool, there's also this

https://lightningdecoder.com/

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 9 Oct

Always doing good work! I had mixed thoughts about spark but I thought it could be a tool for the masses but apparently not. Well not those who care about privacy

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Angie 11 Oct

Qué pena, debes revisar si la cantidad enviada era aceptable,no vaya a ser que si envías menos no se registra, dicho por experiencia

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 8 Oct

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