He says he ran tests and did math and learned that lightning isn't private because 9 nodes control about 90% of pubic capacity. I'd like to ask him to post his methodology and the results of these tests, but he literally says in the video that if you want to replicate his results, just ask an LLM to analyze the network for you. 🙄

This does not seem like serious science. If his "tests and experiments" boil down to "an LLM said pubic capacity is centralized" then I for one am not going to consider this a serious criticism.

I'm trying to piece together their logic, and I think the starting point is this: the sender of a lightning payment gets to see the recipient's invoice, and sometimes the invoice has a "node key" in it that belongs to the recipient. When the thief withdrew stolen money from Blink, he gave them an invoice that had a "node key" in it, and that "node key" belonged to a node with public, announced data on the lightning graph. It's called aegis-ln.

I suspect that was the starting point for Blink's investigation. I believe they figured aegis-ln likely belongs to the thief, and since it has public, announced channels, they investigated those channels. For publicly announced channels, their funding txs are public, so they could check what addresses funded them.

That lead them to a bitcoin address which they call the "collection" address because it collected money from Fedimints. I haven't thoroughly investigated this part yet, but if I'm reading their report right, they seem to allege that this "collection" address was reused in the following manner:

The collection address allegedly funded the aegis-ln node's L1 wallet, which opened at least one LN channel with that money; and after the aegis-ln node's channels were closed, the collection address *also* contributed funds to a an L1 tx *with* the aegis-ln node's money, where the thief sent the stolen money to a new destination, combining funds from the Blink theft with money collected from the Fedimints.

I'm not 100% sure about all of the above paragraph, but that's the picture starting to emerge in my mind. So far, the initial lightning trace appears to be from Blink to the aegis-ln node, and they seem to be basing this so-called "proven" trace (I question the proof) in part on the fact that aegis-ln's pubkey appeared in the invoice they paid -- which, imo, is no proof at all. But it's not the only piece of data they are relying on. Read their essay for more details.

Nah, monero make it worse

The way they "prove" that aegis-ln belongs to the perp is also interesting. They mark this as "proven" and give two reasons in the "how we know" section: the first is that this node showed up as the "node pubkey" in an ln invoice they paid, but that is no proof at all, because proxies exist to disrupt the assumption that "node pubkeys" belong to the recipient. They can be faked, and if that was their only reason, they wouldn't know. Maybe aegis-ln is really just a proxy.

Their second reason is stronger, and involves address reuse by the perp. Allegedly he opened a channel from aegis-ln to someone else using funds deposited to aegis-ln from an address he previously used in preparation for the theft. If that is true it's a much bigger mistake by the perp, and suggests that LN privacy devs still have a lot of work to do. Privacy tools need to automate this stuff so that addresses are not reused. But I haven't verified the site's "proofs" yet so I'm really not sure they are all as certain as they claim to be.

Yes, that is interesting, as is his alleged decision to repeatedly send funds from fedimints to an address he used earlier in the theft preparations. He apparently put funds back into a fedimint again and I suspect he didn't make that mistake the second time, but withdrew to fresh addresses, or lightning channels.

> The government does not own all of this land

They do. The "claim" they make is to have sovereign power over the land -- which is a type of ownership -- and they also successfully enforce their claimed sovereignty over many generations. Regardless of how the current administration's predecessors initially acquired their power, the current administrators are the legitimate sovereigns and therefore own the land.

> Being against taxes does not equal wanting free stuff

It does. Taxes are a form of rent. Demanding 0 taxes is thus a form of demanding 0 rent, which is freeloading.

> inefficient and wasteful organization

You can lament their inefficiency and even try to reform them. But you don't get to withhold the money you owe them just because you don't like how they spend it. It's their money. The renter can't stop paying rent just because he notices the landlord buys too much booze.

If the compulsion is justified then it doesn't change the morality. The right to compel payment comes from the fact that you are on their land, with no right to use it for free.

> landlords don't coordinate with employers to take rent from wages

Some do. Ever hear of Section 8 housing? The fact that most landlords collect rent in a different manner does not change the fact that the government is a landlord who extracts "rent" (taxes) from everyone who lives on its land.