But Lightning is also super useful for payments, and can get you significant levels of privacy.
I suspect the specialization between the two might be something sort of like that, but likely won't be nearly that cut and dry.
LN can be more private than monero, or zcash. The use case simply hasn't been supported well yet by existing wallets and deployments. LN uses one shot onion messages which are inherently private, and using hidden services, on both payer and payee. Partly the protocol still needs more work in this direction.
Payjoin batching also can improve privacy by breaking chain analysis assumptions. And then there's bulk channel opening via coinjoins... In times like now, atomic swap into monero via lightning for paying privately makes sense, but wouldn't, if the LN privacy was sorted out properly for such a use case.
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That is interesting, I wonder how big are the transaction overall when you do thing privately with Bitcoin, compared to Monero
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I do think that until we solve the privacy for receivers on lightning it's not going to compete. Lets hope BOLT12 comes out storming and gets battle tested successfully
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In theory a LN node on only a tor hidden service giving invoices over a hidden service would be private. Especially if payments are routed with AMP. It's just the lead time of these new features being widely available on peers to be able to do it yet. It needs more infrastructure support before it could be trusted and some sims to attempt to unmask the endpoint's IP address to ensure there isn't any leak.
Mainly it's just someone tailoring a deployment to this use case, perhaps writing a controller that automates it for you and enough people making these hidden endpoints to hide among. So it will take time to happen.
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