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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @ambosstech 26 Apr \ on: How private is the Lightning Network? lightning
You can decrease onchain exposure by not opening any channels yourself. Instead, by purchasing channels, you use someone else's UTXO. You can buy channels with Magma or Hydro.
The number of channels that you have makes it exponentially more difficult (or infeasible) to trace the origin of a payment, even if a node lists their contact information. Cryptography is about asymmetric work and tracing a lightning payment is an extremely heavy lift.
For your second statement, do you mean that it gets more difficult to trace payments through your node if you are a routing node?
How is the privacy of a sender impacted if all intermediate hops work together to unmask him?
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No, if, as the destination of the payment, your node data gets seized, the channel you received a payment through is now known. To back-trace the payment, an investigator would need to contact the immediate prior hop. If they refuse an unwarranted search (likely case), the investigator would need to contact each of the prior hop's channels, say 30 channels.
Each lightning payment can reliably take 4 hops, so that's 13030*30 = 2700 people to interrogate if they refuse unwarranted search.
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I see. It gets difficult quickly when the routing nodes are uncooperative but it's quite easy in case of a warranted search.
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