Many people seem to think that the holder of the private keys is the custodian, but with the emergence of services that allow the private key owner to do blind and automated signing that line is rapidly blurring and in a practical sense, I think maybe that's too narrow of a view. Would like to know your opinion.
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bitcoin core + [lnd, ldk, eclair, or cln]: I do full validation of blocks and the mempool. I hold my own keys and I decide what transactions I'm going to assemble and sign. My machine is in my exclusive physical control. The way I connect to the internet and how I assemble transactions determines my privacy.
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lnd in neutrino mode: I do moderate validation of blocks and the mempool. I hold my own keys and I decide what transactions I'm going to assemble and sign. My machine is in my exclusive physical control. The way I connect to the internet and how I assemble transactions determines my privacy.
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electrum client connected to a single electrum server: I trust someone else for validation of blocks and the mempool. I hold my own keys and I decide what transactions I'm going to assemble and sign. My machine is in my exclusive physical control. If I privately connect to the internet, the electrum server can still gather an idea what my wallet looks like based on my queries, but they don't necessarily know who I am.
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electrum client connected to multiple electrum servers: I don't trust a single server for validation of blocks and the mempool, instead I check with a few and see if they are in agreement. I hold my own keys and I decide what transactions I'm going to assemble and sign. My machine is in my exclusive physical control. If I privately connect to the internet, the electrum server can still gather an idea what my wallet looks like based on my queries, but they don't necessarily know who I am.
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greenlight: I don't do any validation of blocks and the mempool. I hold my own keys but I let someone else provide me transactions to automatically/blindly sign, they know and indirectly control everything about my node unless I turn off the local signing software. The greenlight server has a full view of my lightning node, but if I privately connect to the internet, they don't necessarily know who I am. If I turn off the local automated signing software and opt out of greenlight, my future privacy and security are not affected.
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lnd on voltage.cloud: I trust voltage.cloud to do validation of blocks and the mempool. voltage.cloud keeps a copy of my keys in RAM but not on disk. I trust that voltage.cloud is running an honest version of lnd. voltage.cloud can monitor what my node is doing by looking in RAM on their servers and whatever network traffic they see.
Also, please let me know if I've made any technical errors in the descriptions above.
bitcoind+[lnd/ldk/eclair/cln]20.0%
lnd in neutrino mode13.3%
electrum client: single server20.0%
electrum client: multi server6.7%
greenlight26.7%
lnd on voltage.cloud13.3%
15 votes \ poll ended