Vlad on Nostr: Every time someone recommends the Liquid federation as a privacy solution for ...

Every time someone recommends the Liquid federation as a privacy solution for Bitcoin, something inside of me dies

Liquid only has opt-in confidential transactions – meaning that the amounts being sent are hidden. But the sender and the receiver of the transaction are still public.

This could be good enough if Liquid had CoinJoins going on. But it’s a ghost town that almost nobody outside of Blockstream builds on, and as a federation it’s also permissioned: a majority of federation members can decide that CoinJoins are harmful to the network’s adoption due to law enforcement/regulatory issues and then no more CoinJoins will get mined.

For fuck’s sake, just drop the purity pretense and use the best tool for the job. Litecoin’s MWEB is great and most merchants/exchanges have no issue accepting payments from the privacy pool. Zcash is also listed on lots of exchanges and offers the most advanced privacy in the space. Monero is private by default and the black market favorite, using tech that was first proposed for Bitcoin (ring signatures, dandelion++, bulletproofs, confidential transactions).

And yes, Lightning has decent privacy for sender + amounts. But it takes much more effort to set up correctly, has lower liquidity & significantly smaller network effects compared to the others (compare the number of exchanges & payments processors, it’s grim).

There’s a reason nobody is using Liquid and many altcoins are orders of magnitude more popular and also decentralized. Unless you’re under Blockstream’s paycheck and must promote it as part of your job, just stay away.