> How is that a use case, let alone a non-niche one?
It is a use case because many people get in trouble due to the sender disclosing info about the recipient to the police. E.g. read this case about tracing a monero user from Finland: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19emsfe/finlands_national_bureau_of_investigation_claims/
The Finnish police "made an information request to the [monero user's] exchange." It was an anonymous exchange, so they did not have his identity, but they did have his monero public address and his on-chain pubkeys, because he withdrew from the exchange to his self-custodial wallet. The exchange gave that info to the police, who watched the blockchain to see where the money went next, and traced it to Binance, a KYC'd exchange, where they got his identity info and arrested him.
The first step in this case was asking the sender (a no-KYC exchange) for whatever info they had about the recipient. Since they knew what pubkey they sent the money to, they were able to give this info to the police, and it was very useful to them. So it's not "niche" -- it's a verhy common thing for the sender to log info about the recipient, and among exchanges, it's very common to share that info with law enforcement officers.
Not letting exchanges have that info in the first place is very good for your privacy, and lightning makes this easy: you can give the exchange an invoice with a decoy pubkey in it, so that it doesn't even belong to you, but even if you *do* give them a pubkey that belongs to you, your future transactions don't show up on a blockchain, so there's far less info for them to track.
> is [there] some time where you need to not know where you're sending money?
Yes, the above example is precisely that kind of scenario: the non-KYC exchange in the Finnish case did not need to know what pubkey received their money. Lightning gives us a way to get the money to the right guy without revealing his pubkey to the sender. So why not do that? Why not adopt this superior privacy technology when the alternative is to keep using monero and keep going to jail?
Super Testnet
npub1yx…c399s
2025-05-31 12:09:40
in reply to nevent1q…2dnw
Author Public Key
npub1yxp7j36cfqws7yj0hkfu2mx25308u4zua6ud22zglxp98ayhh96s8c399sPublished at
2025-05-31 12:09:40Event JSON
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"pubkey": "2183e94758481d0f124fbd93c56ccaa45e7e545ceeb8d52848f98253f497b975",
"created_at": 1748693380,
"kind": 1,
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"content": "\u003e How is that a use case, let alone a non-niche one?\n\nIt is a use case because many people get in trouble due to the sender disclosing info about the recipient to the police. E.g. read this case about tracing a monero user from Finland: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19emsfe/finlands_national_bureau_of_investigation_claims/\n\nThe Finnish police \"made an information request to the [monero user's] exchange.\" It was an anonymous exchange, so they did not have his identity, but they did have his monero public address and his on-chain pubkeys, because he withdrew from the exchange to his self-custodial wallet. The exchange gave that info to the police, who watched the blockchain to see where the money went next, and traced it to Binance, a KYC'd exchange, where they got his identity info and arrested him.\n\nThe first step in this case was asking the sender (a no-KYC exchange) for whatever info they had about the recipient. Since they knew what pubkey they sent the money to, they were able to give this info to the police, and it was very useful to them. So it's not \"niche\" -- it's a verhy common thing for the sender to log info about the recipient, and among exchanges, it's very common to share that info with law enforcement officers.\n\nNot letting exchanges have that info in the first place is very good for your privacy, and lightning makes this easy: you can give the exchange an invoice with a decoy pubkey in it, so that it doesn't even belong to you, but even if you *do* give them a pubkey that belongs to you, your future transactions don't show up on a blockchain, so there's far less info for them to track.\n\n\u003e is [there] some time where you need to not know where you're sending money?\n\nYes, the above example is precisely that kind of scenario: the non-KYC exchange in the Finnish case did not need to know what pubkey received their money. Lightning gives us a way to get the money to the right guy without revealing his pubkey to the sender. So why not do that? Why not adopt this superior privacy technology when the alternative is to keep using monero and keep going to jail?",
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