How Anonymous is Lightening Network?

[Ucy]

How is privacy handled on Lightening Network?

Is it Anonymous, Pseudo-anonymous or not anonymous at all.

[HeRetiK]

Anonymous in theory, but I guess it remains to be seen how this looks in practice.

Anonymity in LN works in that only you and your counterparty are aware of how funds are being moved, with external observers seeing only the opening and the closing (on-chain) state. LN nodes along the way only know their in- and outgoing transactions, without being aware of the start and end point of the channel. So from a technical point of view, privacy is ensured.

However other kinds of attacks are thinkable, such as correlating opening / closing states with information that could be gathered by controlling multiple nodes across the network. Question being how feasible such an attack would be.

Either way, privacy is definitely improved when using LN. Not sure how it will compare to privacy focused coins though, although admittedly even with privacy focused coins there's still little known about how secure in terms of privacy they really are.

[MoonJeina]

How is privacy handled on Lightening Network?

Is it Anonymous, Pseudo-anonymous or not anonymous at all.

Complete anonymity is still a figure to be achived in the case of Bitcoin transactions .
The lightening network may be called as a Pseudo-anonymous network . There is a security ensurity to the certain point . The peer-to peer networks helps the users to make a transaction privately through a very secretive medium . Thus this would increase a security and the transactions can only be revealed when they gets completed , the point to catch here is that the amount can be split into many more parts and thus people would never know the original amount .
The loop hole here is that an eyes to the transactions can still be kept and that does not provide maximum security making it a pesudo-anonymous network. Several encryptions are made for making the networks and transactions more secure.

[Kprawn]

I thought tech like MimbleWimble was supposed to add that functionality. Advanced features such as so-called "scriptless

scripts" that would add other functionalities, such as Lightning Networks, to Grin? Would it not be better if you do not have

that as a default feature, but rather as a "added feature" 

[HeRetiK]

I thought tech like MimbleWimble was supposed to add that functionality. Advanced features such as so-called "scriptless

scripts" that would add other functionalities, such as Lightning Networks, to Grin? Would it not be better if you do not have

that as a default feature, but rather as a "added feature" 

What do you mean? Lightning Network on Bitcoin is opt-in, you can still use on-chain transactions as before. The Bitcoin protocol itself doesn't change.

Not sure how Lightning Network will apply to MimbleWimble though, as I haven't fully wrapped my head around MimbleWimble itself yet. Also it appears to be still in a very early phase of implementation.

[Jamesbond1991]

why do u need anonymous ?

Nothing can be anonymous bcuz everything has a source code .....

[sjyi]

Anonymity with bitcoin is an interesting topic.

Normally, no one knows your transaction history, other than your CPA that is.

But when you know a bitcoin address, you can track the entire history of that organization/person.

Of course there are many ways for one to protect his/her privacy.

This is a published address of wikileaks, so I'll use this as an example.

Wikileaks donation page:
https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

Look up the bitcoin transactions for wikileaks:
https://blockchain.info/address/1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v

You can see the total donation via bitcoin, the current balance and who, I mean which bitcoin address, donated to them.
You can follow each transaction to see where the money, I mean fund, came from.

I followed some bitcoin addresses and found 1 address that was reported as a scam.

It was one of these addresses.
http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2017/11/29/most-frequently-reported-bitcoin-scam-addresses/

If there is any link from this address back to an entity, we can find out exactly who the scammer is.

Not that I want these scammers to hide within the anonymity of coin built in feature, but this can easily be applied to any bitcoin/altcoin users.  As the market adapts cryptocurrencies, our information will fill the 'Net.

It would be only a matter of time before our financial history can be explored by anybody.