Trick an LSP into thinking one wallet is the sender or recipient when it's really some other wallet.
What is this?
This is privacy software for the lightning network. It has several goals: (1) lower the barrier for people to route payments even if they only have a cell phone that is off most of the time (2) make it easier to manually add such people to your routes on the lightning network (3) disrupt the assumptions LSPs use to guess the senders and recipients of lightning payments are.
How to try it?
This is only proof of concept software and it is easy to lose money with it. So don't do so unless it's for science or entertainment or something.
That said, just click here: https://supertestnet.github.io/lightning_blinder/
Demo
Why this is cool
This protocol enables a bunch of cool features:
- The LBC software is very simple and can use any lightning backend that can send LN payments and receive LN payments. That means anyone can run LBC on top of basically any lightning wallet and charge fees for the use of this blinding software.
- People who want better privacy than they can get from a regular LSP can use one or more LBCs as a kind of "LN routing vpn," enhancing their privacy.
- Lightning Blinder ruins the heuristics LSPs use to identify recipients. The LSP will think they are forwarding a payment to person A (the LBC) but the money is really going to person B (the LBR). Thus they can no longer reliably trace a payment to the correct recipient, as long as the recipient is using Lightning Blinder.
- LSPs cannot tell if you are using Lightning Blinder. The only thing indicating that is the information appended to the original invoice, but LSPs do not see that information, only LBS does, and he has no reason to share it with the LSP.
- Wallets thus get a privacy advantage without even using the software. Because of its undetectability, if even a small percentage of people use Lightning Blinder, LSPs can no longer be sure their heuristics work for anyone, because they cannot detect who is using it and who isn't.