So as you all already know the lighting network is a system that's utilizing smart contracts to enable "instant micropayments".
Or maybe you don't know, here's an article:
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network/
Skipping to the point. El - Salvador recently adopted bitcoin as the country's cryptocurrency.
After the big news of el salvador adopting <<cryptocurrency>> and integrating it in the national financial system, shortly afterwards the "improvement protocol" of the said cryptocurrency was also slowly adopted.
Lighting Network
Here's a video of it:
The huge irony about this, and at the same time tragedy is that what they integrated happily, is neither 'crypto' or a currency. But in this article we will focus in the vital aspect the critical error of all this.
Privacy
The issue about lighting network was already addressed many times by many internet presses, and ignored as well. The most recent one being:
What happens when your Lightning Network routing node is fed with garbage transactions that never resolve? In short, it causes a lot of grief for routing nodes. What was once a smooth, global payment system can be locked up with trivial effort from a savvy script writer.
The attacker saturates one (or several) channel(s) with Hashed Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) that don't resolve as a finalized payment. These are a special breed of HTLCs known as HODL invoices. Only 483 of these unresolved HTLCs are required to overwhelm a channel per direction. Once those HTLCs are in the channel, any transactions using that same channel direction are impossible, including a transaction to cooperatively close that channel.
In simpler terms, literally everyone with some coding knowledge, the means, and the time, could literally hack lighting network.
The lighting network that soon a country of 6 million people will adopt as a solution.
A common argument some people use to describe privacy or "financial decentralization" is the following, especially bitcoin-maximalists.
"If you don't have anything to hide you shouldn't worry about your transactions being public information, only criminals do"
Ignoring the stupidity of the said quote it's important to mention what eases a criminal's work.
People who don't care about their privacy.
Criminals are also very pleased with crypto users who don't take their privacy seriously. In fact, imagine what a criminal would do if he knew you have a wallet with a significant amount of money in it, and you can transfer your funds to him with just a few clicks.
You don't have to imagine, it happened to 260.000 people already.
The Ledger Scandal
A tiny mistake of a company that was renowned for its privacy, security, and safety, resulted to this.
This might seem harmless in a first glance for people who're not informed about how such things work so. Let's show examples.
One picture is thousand words right?
These are just 4 examples of the general reactions - results of people to the huge scandal, so they don't prove anything right?
This what you might believe. Well let me show you.
This is from 6 months ago. It's an event that transpired to a person from 6 months ago, so why would we care is long past gone right?
These two screenshots were taken just now. Literally when this article is being written.
This drama, this potentially dangerous drama for people, is still continuing to this very day. With some of them being threatened daily, harassed for their own wealth.
When you don't value your privacy, and even worse the privacy of your wealth, it's not just government you have to worry about.
Any type of menacing individual, can make you a target simply for the financial gain you offer. And the combination of the wealth being in a cryptocurrency, something easily transferred, makes it far more convenient for them.
Even right now, while you're reading this article, someone out there is probably being targeted for their assets.
And this was done with one company, with 260.000 people, who are also veterans in using crypto (the majority of them) which is why they chosen hardware wallets the presumably -safest to begin with.
Technically that's not a lie, hardware wallets are "the safest" if a specific set of circumstances are met.
But evidently, that means absolutely nothing when the owner of these "secure assets" is a public data for all types of menaces that exist in internet.
Now pay attention...
Hardware wallets are considered the safest wallets in the crypto community, and one tiny mistake, caused this destruction.
Now let's be hypothetical here for a second, and express some reasonable doubts.
What do you think would happen if someone abused the lighting network's vulnerabilities and got his hands on millions of peoples personal data, with the knowledge that every, single, one of them, can be threated or blackmailed into sending his assets with just few clicks?
That's El Salvador.
6.5 million people are slowly going to be integrated to a cryptocurrency, with a smart contract system, that betrays all their data. And makes them potential targets for EVERYONE.
If 260.000 hardware users are still suffering from the attacks till this very day...
People who are warned, mailed about the attack, prepared for the consequences.
What's going to happen to millions of amateurs who just recently got introduced to this system?
And let's be a bit more cynical here, let's take it an extra step.
What happens if a politician, a member of a royal family, a big corporation, gets their data leaked to other governments, to other people, even worse, to international cyber criminals or terrorists.
You think that that's out of the question? Or governments got the "most super technology", well guess what. You are wrong.
It did happen before, hackers broke FAR MORE secure protocols than lighting network
You can google it yourself if you desire, but that's not the point.
The point is that the lighting network is being introduced to millions of people, and it's far worse than both government cyber security and hardware wallets.
The bottom line?
El Salvador adopted a system that compromises the privacy of everyone who has wealth.
That's not the end of this tragedy, bear with me.
The Humanitarian Perspective
Let's skip the skepticism, technology, cryptocurrencies, governments, and let's stick to the people. Just normal people who want to live their lives.
These are the people of el salvador.
https://borgenproject.org/poverty-in-el-salvador/
I could put graphic images here too to show the brutal reality that a big amount of these people live in, but this isn't a drama post, is a post to increase awareness.
These people aren't crypto-users, they don't know what bitcoin/monero/ethereum are, they are just introduced with something new, that was SUPPOSED TO better their lives.
The country was already suffering before they integrated any type of crypto, people were hungry, the depression levels were high, it was a country that needed a helping hand.
And what does the government of el-salvador do? They offer the magic solution "bitcoin" for all these problems.
This can only be addressed as pure indifference.
The point here isn't to sound grim and dramatic, but to awake people about the harsh aspect of flawed decisions.
These people, they're not michael saylor, they're not bill gates, they're not ellon musk, they aren't developers, they have no idea what gas fee is, what hardwares are, they are learning it NOW, they're not super developers or BTC maximalists, they probably have no idea what bitcoin or blockchain is besides what's promoted to them.
And they're simply going to grab the "solution" their government is trying to make them swallow with open arms. They're already doing so in fact, happily embracing it.
Normal people, living in poverty, unaware about the horrors that awaits them.
And all this with el-salvador being under a financial crisis.
It all just piles up on top of each other at this point.
To conclude, know this. If El-Salvador falls victim to this type of tragedy, it's not only the people of el-salvador who will suffer, the international economy will, political relation ships will, and the entire crypto space will turn into a living nightmare.
There's no safety with no privacy.
