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So what next? All node operators should start blacklisting IP addresses from these countries to stop receiving transactions from them? In fact, don't run a node at all in case you accidentally process some illegal transaction? Since when did we start censoring ourselves and our fellow bitcoin users in order to appease the whims of national governments?

This is not the way. And to anyone affected by this, you can of course use Tor to bypass such stupidity.

Edit: Just to be clear, Matt isn't actually pro-censorship. He is making a statement against LNURL, but in a very poor way in my opinion. Even if you think LNURL is awful, using a position of influence to post instructions on how to censor people is a poor way to go about it, especially when so many people now assume this is his real position.

1st who the fuck is Matt Corallo? Some Bitcoin Core developer who thinks being the 10th contributor is an achievement and not what he has actually done for Bitcoin. Well encouraging censorship immediately undermines his 'contributions' imo. Ok I understand he has contributed to btc it is just this attitude that I am worried about and it frustrates me that we have people who are known in the community for their contributions encouraging censorship. It worries me it could leak into development

Some day I hope people realize how disgraceful it is to limit a certain person because of political motives.

Next we will have suggestions of auditing transactions just in case you process a illegal transaction and we end up where we started. Banks controlling everything and still processing transactions. I do not know why people are obsessed with businesses and processes which censor the end user.

Any one suggesting we censor ourselves does not believe in Bitcoin for the right reasons and I think they are probably in it for other motives that are not advocating freedom.

Haha "Jail times and Fines" Maximum times all of such people talk about transparency and user privacy and suddenly when they realize people are getting the power of spending in their hands they impose such statement on the name of misuse of power and privacy.

Just one word is enough to explain all "dual standards"

No, only American node operators.

Since said national governments will arrest you for failing to comply with their latest batch of unjust laws even if said laws border on contravening both the nation's own constitution and various international human rights agreements? You're acting like this is a new problem.

This reminds me of a forum user who wondered if miners could be held responsible and liable, when they validate a block that includes transactions related to the drugs or weapons trade. This to me is the antithesis of what Bitcoin is supposed to offer the world.

I wonder where this kind of questioning will lead us, I also wonder if one day there will be a question of analyzing transactions in the mempool in order to cancel them (like double-spending before validation in a block) when they include blacklisted addresses. I must admit that I wouldn't be surprised if someone proposed this, but I would be extremely surprised if it was realistically feasible. As I know, only the sender can do double-spend, so it shouldn’t be possible no ?

It would clearly be harmful, if not fatal, to the decentralization of Bitcoin. I don't really know how realistic such a scenario would be, but I imagine that as long as a majority of nodes are not owned by institutions or governments, we'll be far from it.

It's fairly clear he dislikes LNURL (https://nitter.net/TheBlueMatt/status/1631917406003286017#m) and wants people to use other solutions instead, but advocating censorship on LNURL is not the right way to go about expressing that.

If one government can force all its citizen to start censoring other bitcoin users with threats of fines or prison time, then any government can do the same.

Fair point. It's not a new problem for the average user who gives up their privacy, security, and sovereignty to sign up to a centralized exchange, but it's quite a different thing for a Core dev to publicly tweet instructions on how users can start censoring each other.

It's not possible to double spend someone else's transaction, but it is possible for miners to simply refuse to include any transactions they deem "blacklisted". There have been a couple of short lived attempts of mining pools doing this in the past, but unless such mining pools achieve 51% of the hashrate, they are powerless to stop other mining pools from picking up and mining these transactions which they are choosing to censor. And any individual miner with any shred of decency will not continue to mine for any pools which supports censorship.

If someone is living in a dictatorship that would fine or jail people for running a bitcoin/LN node then maybe they should be the ones running their node through TOR or stop using bitcoin altogether. The number of countries US has sanctioned is far higher than just 5 and things are going to get worse the weaker US dollar gets specially as bitcoin adoption grows globally while more countries join the "dedollarization" bandwagon.

In any case, is it just me or do core devs/contributors go nuts after a while to the point that they even go against the very basic principles of Bitcoin? There certainly is a pattern here with Andresen as its pioneer. What the hell is happening behind the scenes to these guys :D
Has "someone" with a 3 letter name been targeting them?

I'm not entirely aware of American's stand on blocking those countries to services; have they made a blanket ban on accepting the services or connections of people from those countries?

I can sort of understand the reasoning behind him being concerned. He suggests that it isn't worth risking the jail time or fines, but he doesn't necessarily support censorship, because lets face it for the majority of people they don't want to risk jail time or fines over something like this. I know there's an argument that being scared into complying, and then using his position to convince others is support censorship.

Given his position as a Core developer though, it's a odd one.

To be fair, most governments do censor their citizens. Whether, that's Bitcoin or something else. China, is known for censoring certain social medias, and news sources. It's no different for the US.

Technically, if mining is illegal in the country that they reside in; yeah, it would be illegal, and therefore they could be held liable for breaking the law, if they are validating blocks. Although, I'm not aware of many countries that have outright banned mining. However, it's potentially something that could happen, obviously it wouldn't be right, but usually censorship isn't anyway.


The thing is; if there isn't enough people that care, and kick up a fuss it'll likely lead to this. I don't know if the government would be threatened enough or if they'd just prefer to regulate Bitcoin so that they can profit from people using it, but tighter restrictions will likely be put in place around the majority of the world. Mainly, for them to profit from it.

Excuse me for my lack of knowledge, but why and since when is it illegal to accept payments from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba if you live in the US?

Second, what does an IP address reveal anyway? Lots of lightning nodes don't use their local IP addresses, but go with a VPN. Hell, most nodes don't use the clear net anyway.

I doubt the number of people "resisting" really matters to oppressive regimes. If their perceived threat is big enough, they won't hesitate. There are already certain sanctions US government has in place involving bitcoin such as the list of bitcoin addresses that OFAC has placed under sanctions lol.
The only reason they aren't (or better say can't) enforce it is because bitcoin is decentralized so they have little to no power here. They may only put some pressure on domestic centralized exchanges.

Well well well, I think it's time people start dumping core nodes, because if one of them has this kind of behaviour and none of the rest are opposing and getting rid of him, could only mean they'll have no other choice to comply in the future with the same censorship mindset.

Or maybe he is acting this way intentionally to damage the rest of the team? In either way having him involved in development is no longer a good idea. I'm already a core hater just reading the comment, imagine if this gets adopted, will be the downfall of bitcoin until people start dumping such dev team and everything will go back to normal again.

It's great to have such people around, they could open our eyes before it's too late. Now chop chop Americans, listen to this man, let's do more FUD, we want cheaper coins. Lol.

I don't know exactly, how to run a node with tor?. are we must download the tor browser first beside the bitcoin wallet?

what I have experienced before, too many browsers rejected me just to open a website and warn me I came from a restricted country. so when I look at the TOR relay,  France as (guard), Germany, and the last one is USA (restricted country).

maybe TOR can't bypass it if always make the random relay.

Here is a guide: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Setting_up_a_Tor_hidden_service

But you don't need to do that as I said if the US regime decides to place such restrictions, those running the nodes in US would be at risk not the rest of the world. Keep in mind that it would be trivial to get these nodes to relay certain transactions that would get them shut down by US authorities and the node operators arrested. So they either have to try so hard to hide or stop running nodes altogether.

Can't the use of Tor somehow be detected? In my experience accessing casinos, it can. Couldn't the same thing happen in this case?


You can set it up so that it looks like your connection comes from only one country. Let's say from Colombia you can access the site you want, be it a casino or whatever, but they seem to detect that you are using Tor in some cases.

turn on the news. or google "sanctions"

firstly bitcoin  has not needed to ban ip's of any country. however when it comes to lightning routing.
a lightning router is a payment facilitator/money service thus has to abide by money service business rules and payment facilitator rules

if you dont know things. learn them

AFAIK, that would be possible, just as coin mixed and joined transactions can be detected. But, you would not have any trouble running a node through Tor, Bitcoin is privacy inclined and encourages users to resist censorship of any form.

This document provides a good summary of ongoing US sanctions against other nations (in particular, from the bottom of page 3): https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/-/media/files/nrf/nrfweb/knowledge-pdfs/220606-overview-of-us-sanctions-laws-and-regulations.pdf
For full details you can use this site: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information

Although if you click through all the links in the sidebar of the above link and take a look at the SDN and non-SDN lists, you can rapidly see just how impossible it would be for a Lightning node operator to comply with it all.

If bitcoin is going to be forced in to submitting to the rules and control of whatever government happens to be the most powerful at the time, then is it really any better than fiat? If the US government decided all bitcoin must only be held in wallets under their control with full KYC (i.e. a bank), do all US citizens just roll over and say "Well OK then, I don't want to risk a fine."?

Absolutely. Which is part of what makes bitcoin so powerful. We absolutely cannot lose that.

No, he is making a statement against LNURL. As I pointed out above, he isn't actually pro-censorship.

This advice is pure bullshit. It might be slip of the tongue or speaking without reasoning but it is a big blunder. Bitcoiners should not pay the price for the poor judgment of politicians. I think bitcoin forbids censorship because it promotes freedom. This censorship will have so many negative consequences on small businesses and individuals as they rely on bitcoin to invade economic sanctions. The politicians are just a few persons but this censorship will affect thousands if not millions of people. Government should tackle their problems and leave bitcoin out of their punitive alternatives.

Yeah, I think you can block whomever you want, deny what your principles deny, but then advocating others do the same and blanketing everyone from there (yeah, depending on my ToR or VPN, I'm even some days Iranian, or Russian, or whatever, I don't check) is poor judgment, at the very least ignorant.

When do "unlawful" people ever go through straight channels anyway? That non-blacklist IP connecting to you, do you ever really know who's behind it?

Who is he to make such conclusion, bitcoin shouldn't be limited to some countries due to whatever is the problem. Soon, the government might come in and think they can change bitcoin to a centralized system, but they will get it wrong. I call this injustice.

Thank heaven that there is Tor which will make his point or judgment useless because with Tor,you can become invisible and not scared of any threat of jail sentence and bla bla bla. Bitcoin is a censorship free project.

I am wondering who is going to follow him if someone doesn't dislike a specific country for any personal reason. I don't think people hate a specific country for whatever reason. I never saw a racist in person. These kinds of people are racist. Bitcoin is supposed to be financial freedom for everyone and we do believe it.

I don't know how many users use nodes only to receive their transactions. Most Bitcoin users don't run nodes just for wallets. When I need to make a payment or anything with Bitcoin, I have unlimited choices. You won't be able to censor Mr. Matt Corallo.

According to who? You? Just because lightning nodes facilitates payments, it doesn't mean those intermediaries are responsible for the payment. Lightning nodes know absolutely nothing about the payment, other than the amount they're moving. They don't know neither the receiver nor the sender. This is exactly like telling me that the Bitcoin nodes are responsible for all Bitcoin users' transaction, because they propagate every single transaction. Or that miners have legal responsibility for every transaction they mine.

They starting to test this kind of limit right now so that they can even use it in some other places in the world. We really need to have some convenient way to counter this childish act because right now, it's really obvious that they trying to put bitcoins transactions in their hands and they are deciding whether to allow transactions from certain places or not. This is not how bitcoins created and everyone should be freely received bitcoins from anywhere in the world as long as they never came from a stolen BTC. I hope they will never gonna extend this kind of nonsense and make it hard for us to even send or received bitcoins in the future.

That's how it starts. They don't go all the way from the start. Gavin wasn't nuts in 2010, he slowly went crazy, visited CIA office, started proposing weird things for bitcoin, abandoned bitcoin development and eventually claimed the obvious scammer CSW is the real Satoshi! :)

As I said above, it seems like core devs go nuts after some time. Another case is Mike Hearn who dumped all his bitcoin and said "bitcoin has failed and is dead" back in 2016. lol

try to read some laws..

heck your girlfriends just last year were trying to claim that BITCOIN devs, nodes and miners were payment facilitators .. but here is the thing:

a. bitcoin devs dont take a commission for personally being involved in accepting a payment on one side giving it to another using their own value for a commission
b. bitcoin miners dont take a commission for personally being involved in accepting a payment on one side giving it to another using their own value for a commission
c. bitcoin nodes dont take a commission for personally being involved in accepting a payment on one side giving it to another using their own value for a commission

yet a lightning router does

try to learn a few things that differentiate bitcoin from lightning. stop assuming that lightning is bitcoin


oh and the funny thing by being a payment facilitator but without knowing whom your processing a payment for becomes another red flag and makes your routers a increased target for regulators to slap you around even more

the very fact that you admit you love and use Lightning makes you a target for them

if you cared about your own risk awareness of things that can affect you personally. you should drop the group mantra and salespitches and start to want to independently do your own research for your own risk awareness..

I assume the alternative would be BOLT12, which does not require hosting your own server and includes blinded paths and onion messaging over Lightning, which I understand means that payments can be anonymous and therefore impossible to block based on IP or country of origin.

But yes, I agree a far better way to go about things would be to encourage the use of BOLT12 rather than share details on how LNURL users can censor other users.

The bottom line is that we just don't know yet. The definition of a money services business (at least in the US) is so deliberately vague that it could absolutely apply to Lightning nodes if the government or other law makers want it to, just as it could apply to regular nodes or miners if the government want it to. None of this has been tested in court, so until either it is tested in court or some new clarifying legislation is passed, we don't know which way things will go.

^
funny part is OELEO is trying to say
play ignorant. continue as before and just wait for the knock at the door when you hear "we have a warrant"

its like criminalising drugs. being told that being a dealer will get people in trouble and then someone comes along and says "we dont know, the only way you will know is when they start hauling people off to court, so continue being a dealer"

not the right kind of advice you want to tell people.

well goodluck all those that will continue being lightning routers.

If you think your government will start criminalizing people for running Lightning nodes, what makes you think they won't start criminalizing people for running regular nodes or for mining?

If I am a routing Lightning node, then all I am doing is updating the balances of my channels with my immediate connections. If you think that is going to be made illegal, then why would verifying and broadcasting "blacklisted" transactions or mining said transactions in to a block not also be made illegal?

Is your usual anti-lightning bias just clouding your thought process? Or are you just back to your usual nonsense of everyone being a good little citizen and doing exactly what your government tells you at all times, because as we all know, governments have never acted against the interests of the individual. ::)

you keep assuming lightning is the same model as bitcoin
its not.
the way people get paid and make payments in lightning is different to bitcoin
subtle hint.
payment directly to the destined end recipient.
vs
using routers (taking in value, giving out value for third parties for a commission)


lightning value thats deemed to come into your custody or assigned to you. where you then move balance to someone else on behalf of other people for a commission
is different to how bitcoin works


now go to the regulators websites. look at the laws being drafted and already put into law
and LEARN

learn how lightning works and how its different to bitcoin
then you will have the reason why regulators treat lightning differently to bitcoin

oh by the way Scam Bankrupt fraud (sam bankman freed) was 'just moving balance between' his subsidiaries and didnt keep good logs of his customers names/locations.. and yea he played ignorant to the law too

.. and look how that ended

This is so stupid as calling Tor relays responsible for the activity they route, even if they know absolutely nothing about what it is and where it goes. Point me to the law that affiliates lightning nodes likewise.

With the exception of course that, in contrast with lightning node operators, Sam has illegally taken about $10 billion in FTX customers' funds. Yeah, what a great analogy.

first of all relaying data in tor is different then using different balances in lightning to route

tor data map is different than lightning balance borrowing

also bitcoin does no play borrow the balance game to shift value around. lightning is not like tor or bitcoin

dont play dumb by pretending you dont know how value transfers in lightnings onion packets. and then cry when you get called dumb for acting dumb


you want to pretend in lightning

A pay D is direct communication of A paying D
reality is A-B-C-D

B and C are using their own balance and each others balance to facilitate the payment for A where the destination is D and where they take a commission(fee) for agreeing to be a payment facilitator

forget trying to read some promotional snake oil salesmans material..

actually take a couple steps away from your echo chamber and actually read the code, read how it works and then read regulations and for your own benefit of your own risk awareness.. LEARN about how regulations in the real world and functions in the real world outside of dreamy sales pitches work and affect each other

grow some confidence to break away from your echo chamber group

your forum wife this week is trying to break away from his own narrative.. its time you do too

..
if you still want to play ignorant and just echo chamber stuff.. thats on you

I hate it when the tor project created that confusion. No, tor is not a browser, but that browser includes it.

You just run a tor node, and configure your bitcoin node to use it. Is actually rather simple.

This is the original tor project page: https://2019.www.torproject.org/

Note the 2019. I wish they kept the browser in a different domain or a subdomain...

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That's because you are using a casino in the normal net from tor. If the casino was running in tor (aka hidden server) they can't. That's what you do with bitcoin nodes, make them use a tor node that is not an exit node. Exit nodes is what they detect, they can't do nothing about bridges, especially those that don't advertise (which you can add manually in your configuration). In addition, deep packet inspection is resisted using obfs4 which is an option you need to setup when configuring your tor node, and its needed in certain countries to bypass their restrictive nationwide firewalls.

Just so you get it, tor lets you browse normal internet, but that's not all it does. Some people like to call resources inside tor "dark". It is a place to put content that resists censorship, but tor is not the only project doing it.

PS: The TOR project is a free and open source project from the US Navy, so they are probably still interested in keeping it running for their own benefit. But even if they don't, the community is carrying it on.

Historical anecdote: Satoshi used it to write in this forum.

What's "lightning balance borrowing"? ???

I never said it's a direct communication. You deliberately twisted my words for once more. I just said that it's completely pointless and dangerous to consider routing as payment facilitating, in the same manner a bank does it. Even if you're the recipient, not only don't you know the sender, but you don't even know anyone besides the last hop. Good luck figuring out who's who.

you keep on trying the "not knowing" defence

you pretending to not know that A is not using As funds that D receives. then not knowing that the funds of a get 'promised' to B. but where B has to promise funds to C who promises funds to D

if you have not worked out about the promises aka IOU's that are not settled hense they are classed as IOU's.. not settled. then you still have alot to learn
if you dont understand what promises, commitments and borrowing is.. LEARN

so instead of telling me you dont know things or you are not sure of things.. GO AND LEARN

its obvious you dont want to learn from me and im not asking you to. im saying go learn yourself for yourself

but actually learn and not just recite the echo's someone told you

Let me be frank with you if you do not mind I do not want to offend you. You are a intelligent person but the way you write things is difficult to follow some times just look at your quote that is not easy to follow. I think you take things to personally some times and do not realize that people will have a different opinion to you and some times they might be right.

I do not know what lightening balance borrowing is either and a search on the internet does not give me any results on it. If you can educate me I can save the time required finding out what you mean because it is probably called some thing else.

@Macadonian

ok let me just tell you

i am not like them i do not create buzzwords and try to make them go viral.
its their game to try to fame up their words

lightning balance borrowing is not a noun(name/buzzword) its an adjective(description)

i even described it after.. which you quoted thus now you know how lightning works

A is borrowing B 's balance to C and C is using his balance to D for A to pay D
thus yes borrowing. promising later settlements. aka IOU's

it is words that describe the process. not a random brand name/buzzword
blackhatcoiner pretends to be dumb and pretends he cannot understand things. even though i am dumbing down things for him and avoiding techno jargon because they do not like it when techno jargon is used.

i purposely use ELI-5(explain like im 5) to avoid 98% of his responses of "i dont understand" and yet he again tries to just go into dumb mode

now he is trying  to go super dumb by pretending that certain things must be a buzzword he doesnt know. rather then reading the context and learning how lightning works to understand the description

its that simple

the reason i speak to certain people with words like idiot and dumb. is becasue for a couple of years they have been shouting the same snake oil sales pitches loving and adoring lightning and trying to recruit people but always avoiding learning about the reality. they only care about speaking of the best case scenario utopian sales pitches. and due to it being a few years of opportunity to learn the real lightning network and also their discussions about legislation, jurisdiction and regulatory classification..  and the risks that lightning presents and the flaws and even the dev reports of issues they cant and wont resolve. but they continually advertise that lightning is the best..  yet they still have not took the time to think for themselves

even in 2021 and 2022 they knew about the legislation and regulatory working of payment facilitators. OELEO and them had discussions where they were trying to say that it meant bitcoin was a PF but then they went on the defence when i corrected them saying lightning routing is a PF.. not a bitcoin dev nor a bitcoin node nor a asic

yet as you can see this week they are playing dumb, and starting the same games again. denying lightning regulatory classification and then trying to swing the debate to pretend that in their mind bitcoin is more like a PF not lightning.. where in reality the opposite is true
lighting network is the middle man payment system of using funds to facilitate other peoples payments for a fee

this game of theirs is not new. so this is why i insult them. because they play the same game repeatedly but then play ignorant. and thats why they earn the insults

if it was a one time mistake no problem. if it was a two time mistake followed by them taking the time to learn.. no problem. but their snake oil salesman rhetoric has been going on for years

the whole "censorshp resistant" buzzword they throw about is pathetic too
they pretend bitcoin never had a consent system. and they think it should never have one again.

Seems like that is indeed what Matt is advocating for: https://nitter.net/TheBlueMatt/status/1632510518949990401#m

Should we all be pushing for BOLT12 over LNURL as well if the privacy implications of LNURL are so severe?

We've been through this discussion with franky1 before. You can read my posts on the topic here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5369610.msg58377940#msg58377940) and here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5369589.msg58370477#msg58370477). You can see how trivial it would be for the government to argue that a Lightning node (or a regular node, or a miner) falls under the definition of "any person who (for consideration) is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person."

I have no doubt franky1 will rant some more about how I am wrong, but the fact is that multiple CEOs of crypto businesses, multiple lawyers, and multiple representatives in both houses in the US agree with what I have said above and have spoken out against this bill for this exact reason.

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I initially posted this thread in Dev & Tech, which as we all know franky1 is banned from for this exact reason. Unfortunately a mod moved it to Bitcoin Discussion, and franky1 has wasted no time in derailing it with his usual anti-Lightning rants. Since it is not self moderated, if it continues to be derailed with the same old provably false nonsense, I will simply lock it.

oeleo
in this topic you said how things are too vague, and it needs to be tested in court
then just now you said how lots of lawyers have said it means what you say it means

pick one narrative and stick with it. as it seems its you that is not sure about how regulators treat lightning thus play ping pong games of narratives to go back and forth

also no it does not mean those laws mean that bitcoin nodes are a PF just because lightning routing is implied as being a PF
because its not about running a node on a network relaying payments.. its about HOW the payments are facilitated that counts

learn how bitcoin payments differ to lightning payments

now please dont go back and forth with "i dont understand" "too vague " needs testing" and please do try to learn understand im not nor ever have been the type that wants or needs people to follow my words or opinion... every time i have seen you fall down a hole of being wrong about something, due to your over indulgence of being pro-snake oil sales hyper about a sub network.. i have simply said to just go DYOR do your own research

but it seems you just get angry that i break your sales pitch for the subnetwork adoration rather then take the time to research how the real world impacts the crypto world and vice versa

how about care a more about the potential recruits you are trying to sway to your favoured alt network. more so than if you have failed in your sales pitch

EG if there is things that can get people arrested. tell people the risk and how they can reduce their risk.. instead of "dont worry, just wait until you appear in court" style of mindset

now getting on topic
for those using lightning and are using your balance to allow payments for others(routing) be VERY CAREFUL.. financial regulations do apply

and right now regulators see things like doing PF for countries on the sanction list is a higher priority for regulators to find and sort out, more so then other financial crimes right now

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oh and some other hints..
things called "honeypot trap"

autorities do go out and get involved in illicit deals to then arrest the people they done deals with
EG police undercover doing drug deals to catch a dealer
EG police undercover doing prostitution deals to catch a prostitute/pimp
EG bitlicence agents doing account registrations with unlicenced exchanges
EG us embassy agents living in russia seeing which services allow russian residents access to world value/funds

and yes if you are doing a defi where you are moving your fiat to a russian and swapping msats.. they can find you out by many ways.. including the LNURL (aka invoice link) the payer/payee relationship
(one of many examples)

so dont play dumb when it comes to things that can get people into alot of legal problems
..make people whom you try to recruit aware of the risks of the alt networks you want them to move over too

and yes regulators know all about lightning. they have it listed as a privacy enhancing financial tool. which is why US regulated exchanges like coinbase does not accept lightning (coinbase is sister company to the devs sponsorship group that made lightning.. yep when a group that paid for lightnings creation and deems it their product has sister companies that refuse to use said product.. you know something is up)
because using lightning is a red flag when it comes to suspicious activity

i do apologise that i have to keep bursting your dream utopian bubble of hyped up misleading promotion of a sub network. but real people do actually want to be risk aware. and not just sold a dream

These are not conflicting statements.

Lawyers and Senators have both spoken out against the bill in question because the wording is too vague and could be argued to apply to nodes and miners. Until it is actually tested in court and a precedent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent) is set, we don't know which way it will go. This is a very simple concept, and something which happens all the time. I suspect you are deliberately trying to obfuscate this to fit your agenda.

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Locking this topic now as above. If anyone actually wants to discuss BOLT12 v LNURL, then I would suggest opening a thread in Dev & Tech where franky1 can't derail it with his endless nonsense.