LN privacy question \ stacker news ~bitcoin

15.1k sats \ 18 comments \ @ubernatural 22 Mar 2023 bitcoin freebie

I often read that the lightning network has good sender privacy but since public nodes can be contacted and possibly pressured to share the details of their part of the transaction, a motivated attacker could backtrack the transaction from the receiver to the source utxo, right?

Does having a longer path increase your privacy lowering the risk of the nodes colluding to reveal the originating utxo?

Is there a tool where you can specify a minimum number of hops for a transaction? So far in my experience my node will always pick the shortest path (usually 2-3 hops) and I never found a wallet that lets me chose longer paths.

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7999 sats \ 7 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 22 Mar 2023

Yes, you're right in your understanding. I don't think anyone let's you configure min hops unfortunately.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @benthecarman 22 Mar 2023

Zeus lets you specify a first and final hop, so theoretically could enforce at least 2 hops in between

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

What does it mean final hop? When I try to use that function Zeus only proposes me my channels. I was expecting to be given a list of peers the receiving node is connected to.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @benthecarman 23 Mar 2023

Might be a bug

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @tomlaies 22 Mar 2023

I mean ... that sounds like a routing contraint that should easily be able to be implemented

8012 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 22 Mar 2023

Yeah we will probably have something like that in our wallet Mutiny

7394 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

Great! I can't wait for it

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 22 Mar 2023

Zeus, Thunderhub, RTL - (these are node management apps) will let you set the number of hops when YOU SEND a payment from your node.

But not when you receive!

Mobile wallets are doing this automatically for the user, to minimize the fees and find a quick path for the payment.

14 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

I'm using Zeus, Thunderhub and RTL but I never found out how to configure the minimum amount of hops in the path? Where do you specify that? I can only chose the first outgoing channel and a maximum fee I want to pay.

I'm on LND by the way. Maybe it's related to that? I should probably try c-lightning

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @quark 22 Mar 2023

You can also do splitting in multiple paths with several hops each one. I think that's pretty good.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

Privacy wise I don't think it really helps though. It's probably even worse since having more transit nodes increases the risk that every node will cooperate in at least one path.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @moel 22 Mar 2023

Don’t “trampoline” payments route through different nodes on purpose? Or maybe I’m thinking of blinded path here 🙄

I think multiple implementations have this on their road map.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

Blinded path is a proposed solution to receiver privacy from what I understood.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @ffdd1225 22 Mar 2023

I do not know for LND but I heard that core lightning do it by default in the sense that it try to obfuscate the transactions also using shadows nodes that are not on the path to the receiver. Doing that has of course some disadvantages one of which is probability of higher fees due to longer path and more failed payments. ;-)

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

Do you have a reference for that? I never heard of shadow nodes so far.

A solution to this problem is to route all your LN transactions through a public node that you secretly control so that you can be sure that it will never cooperate with other nodes to harm your privacy as a sender.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @ffdd1225 22 Mar 2023

that's because it was shadow route :-) you can find an explanation here; https://voltage.cloud/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network/what-are-the-differences-between-lnd-and-cln/

under privacy.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ubernatural OP 22 Mar 2023

Thanks! I will try out core lightning