In this interview, I talk to researcher Christian Decker and infrastructure engineer Carla Kirk-Cohen. We discuss the current state of privacy on Lightning, potential vulnerabilities and most likely solutions.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:08:00 How private is Lightning?
00:16:36 Onion routing and privacy
00:23:40 Implementations and consensus
00:31:50 Spamming, more "attacks" and solutions
00:41:51 Probing, and more vulnerabilities
00:58:05 TOR, Pubkeys, and the future

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****

“Lightning is built on top of the main chain, so you are bringing your on-chain privacy with you, although there’s a transactional increase in privacy...if you send a UTXO from Coinbase to fund your channel, Coinbase knows you sent that to fund your channel.”
— Carla Kirk-Cohen

Location: Remotely
Date: Monday 19th July
Company: Blockstream, Lightning Labs
Role: Researcher, Infrastructure Engineer

The Bitcoin blockchain is an open public ledger, thus building privacy solutions on-chain is challenging. However, the Lightning network’s design is a massive improvement in privacy as the tradeoffs are different.

Lightning removes transactional friction with significant security and privacy assurances today. But what are the potential attack vectors, and how might they be mitigated?

In this interview, I talk to researcher Christian Decker and infrastructure engineer Carla Kirk-Cohen. We discuss the current state of privacy on Lightning, potential vulnerabilities and most likely solutions.