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Jan 29, 2023Liked by DarthCoin ₿⚡️

Hey thanks for the guide. Was wondering: under Blixt section, why open 3x outbound channels and not just 1 to your own node?

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Jan 30, 2023·edited Jan 30, 2023Author

No, it says "one with each": your node, Blixt node, another LSP. It doesn't make sense to open 3 channels with your own same node.

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Sorry I think my question was unclear.

Why 3x 1M Sat channels with 3x nodes instead of 1x 3M Sat channel with your own node?

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Reasons:

- with 3 channels you can use MPP (multi-part payment)

- with 3 channels, you have redundancy, if you use only one and that node peer is not available or doesn't have good routes, your payments will fail. If you have 3, I doubt that all 3 will fail in the same time.

- on some channels you could have outbound liquidity, on some you will have inbound. More options to play. Be smart. Think like a bank.

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Interesting, thanks! This confirms the issues I was having with only a single outbound channel from my private spending node.

Follow-up questions for you:

How much trust are you placing in the Blixt node and the "any other good node" from a privacy perspective? Those nodes can see 1) when you are making payments and 2) the amounts, but they can't see the recipients. I assume they can also see your IP if you aren't connecting over TOR or a VPN. Anything I missed?

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No, your "vision" about a node is wrong. They can see shit.

When you open a channel with any node, they see only a UTXO, they don't know who are you.

If you make payments through their nodes, they do not see where you are sending, LN is using onion routing. That means, for them is just a routed tx.

Tor is not giving you any "protection". Is just a mumbo jumbo.

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Hrm. I'll need to do some testing with Blixt specifically (happy to report my findings if you're interested), but I'm pretty sure that, in general, your peers can see your node's IP address. So if A opens a channel to B, then B can see A's IP address or .onion address. It is a P2P network after all... how else is the underlying network connection established between two nodes?

So I don't think it's correct that they only see a UTXO. If I run `lightning-cli listpeers` on my lightning node I can see the IP address (or .onion address) of each peer that has connected to me.

This is my understanding anyway, happy to be corrected on this.

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Lightning seems very straight forward and simple to use without custodians or permission

I personally like that unannounced channels remove any plausible deniability for payments going through them and can still be probed and discovered by malicious actors anyway. Very cool feature.

It's the sovereign private currency of the future

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