Lightning is interesting as well. It has a similar privacy strategy to Monero. Lightning transactions break up information into lots of tiny pieces and spread them around so that it is exceedingly hard to reassemble all the pieces. But not impossible!
If you were able to grep the logs of every lightning node involved in a specific transaction you could pretty trivially identify the sender, receiver, and amount.
Even bolt12 transactions with route blinding are not immune to this attack. Fortunately it's a very difficult thing to accomplish and not worth the effort for the small amounts of value transmitted via lightning.
Peter Todd (nprofile…eg3s) gave a brief talk complaining about lightning node logging practices because he understands this property of lightning. If node operators purged their logs on a regular basis then that information goes away forever. Unfortunately this is not the default behavior. Hopefully that changes.
vnprc
npub16v…umhgd
2026-06-05 18:54:29 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…hfnj
Author Public Key
npub16vzjeglr653mrmyqvu0trwaq29az753wr9th3hyrm5p63kz2zu8qzumhgdPublished at
2026-06-05 18:54:29 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Lightning is interesting as well. It has a similar privacy strategy to Monero. Lightning transactions break up information into lots of tiny pieces and spread them around so that it is exceedingly hard to reassemble all the pieces. But not impossible!\n\nIf you were able to grep the logs of every lightning node involved in a specific transaction you could pretty trivially identify the sender, receiver, and amount.\n\nEven bolt12 transactions with route blinding are not immune to this attack. Fortunately it's a very difficult thing to accomplish and not worth the effort for the small amounts of value transmitted via lightning.\n\nnostr:nprofile1qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uq3kamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wvf5hgcm0d9hzuum0vd5kzmp0qqsve2jcud7fnjzmchn4gq52wx9agey9uhfukv69dy0v4wpuw4w53nqr8eg3s gave a brief talk complaining about lightning node logging practices because he understands this property of lightning. If node operators purged their logs on a regular basis then that information goes away forever. Unfortunately this is not the default behavior. Hopefully that changes.",
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