Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks agoNo, hanging in the wind as being the receiver. Kinda like tor exit nodes can’t hide. Unlike tor exit nodes (well for the time being) you can get hit for recieving the money and paying for something deemed illegal wiht it.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes and no. The receiver does need to somehow communicate the destination to the sender, I believe typically through an invoice of some sort. Been a long time since I kept up, so the details are getting hazy. Anyway, there are only two times that lightning network usage requires a publicly visible blockchain transaction: when you want to put coins on the lightning network and when you want to take them back off to the blockchain. You open a channel with a node basically saying “I’ll put X amount in this channel in if you’ll put in Y amount (one of them can be zero, i.e. send or receive only), and here’s a signed transaction you can publish on the blockchain to get your money back at any time.” Any time you make a transaction over the lightning network, you rewrite that cashout transaction so the balance shifts by however much you’re sending plus any fees you agree to pay, but you do it in such a way that you only really give them the signed transaction if they prove they’re gonna pass on what you want to send to the next node, and this process repeats with every node in the chain until everyone agrees to move the money.
All that to say there’s really no record of any transaction ever happening outside of however your balance changes between putting it on the network and taking it back off. There’s no record of who sent what, how many transactions it took, what path any transaction took to get there, nothing at all except initial and final balance. Now, this does mean that if the money is withdrawn, there’s evidence you’ve been paid, but not for what, by who, by how many people, over how many transactions, or a anything else but the final total amount from all transactions. If they just spent everything they received back over the lightning network, there’s effectively no real evidence that any real transactions ever occurred.
Of course, this hypothetical nonprofit is almost certainly going to be paying a company that wants US dollars. They’ll probably have to cash out in a highly traceable way, and actually buying the ICE data will require a highly traceable bank transfer or other conventional payment method. In that sense, you’re right, the nonprofit gets left exposed. But they could completely mask who sent money.