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There's a lot of talk about using lightning to scale Bitcoin by allowing payment channels, But Bitcoin has a lot of properties that don't easily translate to Monero.

The primary concern for me seems to be that opening a payment channel itself would leak info, I.P. address, send address to the processor, I2P can fix the IP address issue, but leaking send address could allow processors to censor tx's.

Is my thinking correct? is there something I'm missing, how can Monero maintain it's permissionless and fungible nature using payment channels.

To be clear, I'm not talking about on just blockchain privacy, my problem is how can we insure privacy off the chain as well, opening a payment channel implies off chain communication via lightning, In a Alice <-> Bob <-> Eve payment channel the assumption is that Bob pays Eve on Alice's Behalf, but that implies all 3 parties required to share info off chain about amounts, receiver, etc.

Daniel Hill
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Note that the Lightning Network spec is still in flux with compatibility only for Bitcoin and Litecoin currently being developed. Monero is not compatible with the Lightning Network (lacks script support, has different timelock model, multisig works differently, etc), therefore this question makes little sense today.

That being said, the Lightning Network protocol (for Bitcoin) will enable Onion Routing which will help aleviate the IP address concern.

Subaddresses should aleviate the concern about addresses being "leaked" as they can be single-use.

There is some concern about how a long-lived payment channel might allow greater passive surveillance (transaction correlation) than is currently possible in Monero's on-chain transactions, so we'll have to see how this unfolds.

Note: if you are interested in something "like" Lightning then that may be feasible in the near future. Still, none of this is currently the focus.

Jonathan Cross
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