Sender can of course see the payment and can follow it wherever it goes from there.
Other observers just see donators sending funds to an unknown address randomly. Avoid asking for fixed amounts because you can always guestimate based on amounts.
When/if you spend funds together, you WILL reveal the connection to everyone's payments and COMPLETELY break sender privacy, putting your donors at risk. You MUST coin-join them first to avoid this.
Imagine a donor is known to be a supporter of yours. I track his payments and see one that looks like a donation based on amount, I send a donation myself around the same time. I later see a coin-join with both our payments. How many of those inputs could have also been donations that I could trace back to other identities? Is it finite enough to pursue?
It isn't perfect, Lightning is better IMO for private donations.
It could still hide a lot of your donations. Imagine you receive £1M over 1 mo from many small donations. Maybe we track known donors, but you only use money as you need it so we can't see everything.
It is only when you move donations that we can see anything useful and even then, only if you do something silly like consolidate them without coin-join and then withdraw it from coinbase.
It certainly isn't perfect, but it does feel more like cash-like privacy where it is inconvenient to track people and often fruitless, but if you are highly motivated, there will be breadcrumbs.
AFAIK, you must run a node to receive donations privately this way, I may be wrong about that, but you need to scan and query the blockchain quite intensively to find your payments because there is no XPUB afaik.
Big Barry Bitcoin
npub1pk…tpxa6
2024-09-15 06:37:24
in reply to nevent1q…fysf
Author Public Key
npub1pktmatjk0l8vn3jhfuwxaasjd65kn4ye9sce3egup7k993f8fg2q5tpxa6Published at
2024-09-15 06:37:24Event JSON
{
"id": "81059a3dc2abb839643dbf71d59a7240d50f71318eb93229cc32b45d8545df38",
"pubkey": "0d97beae567fcec9c6574f1c6ef6126ea969d4992c3198e51c0fac52c5274a14",
"created_at": 1726382244,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"4890fcbeda2a923042af7f5e5992e11d7b722ee3608352b8132502080ebc378f",
"",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"f8d42124a72ed89896247ad912f47dd76ac6b6cdd10fe178f5e04acfead0d4a2"
]
],
"content": "Sender can of course see the payment and can follow it wherever it goes from there.\n\nOther observers just see donators sending funds to an unknown address randomly. Avoid asking for fixed amounts because you can always guestimate based on amounts.\n\nWhen/if you spend funds together, you WILL reveal the connection to everyone's payments and COMPLETELY break sender privacy, putting your donors at risk. You MUST coin-join them first to avoid this.\n\nImagine a donor is known to be a supporter of yours. I track his payments and see one that looks like a donation based on amount, I send a donation myself around the same time. I later see a coin-join with both our payments. How many of those inputs could have also been donations that I could trace back to other identities? Is it finite enough to pursue?\n\nIt isn't perfect, Lightning is better IMO for private donations.\n\nIt could still hide a lot of your donations. Imagine you receive £1M over 1 mo from many small donations. Maybe we track known donors, but you only use money as you need it so we can't see everything.\n\nIt is only when you move donations that we can see anything useful and even then, only if you do something silly like consolidate them without coin-join and then withdraw it from coinbase.\n\nIt certainly isn't perfect, but it does feel more like cash-like privacy where it is inconvenient to track people and often fruitless, but if you are highly motivated, there will be breadcrumbs.\n\nAFAIK, you must run a node to receive donations privately this way, I may be wrong about that, but you need to scan and query the blockchain quite intensively to find your payments because there is no XPUB afaik.",
"sig": "b39a70d76219afb0c9a57a1b5dc28e99aa47ebe510053b49bbb908f24753cb0e593974d3c11d5bc333fe55681c1cac4c0375cf0918f1c8e23967b0c1ee1caabb"
}