Do you think any of these ideas could help counter this trend:
  • white listing: only open channels with counter parties you can trust not to share balances
  • black listing: compile a list of known balance sharing nodes and develop open source tools to automatically blacklist them in routing, peering, and channel creation
  • Taint balance history databases with intentionally bad data
  • Modify routing algorithms to split payments more aggressively and route through more nodes
  • Augment the protocol with some kind of payment batching / net settlement protocol
Right on, yeah I think many of these are very valid. I wouldn't have thought people cared about black listing nodes but someone else I know suggested closing channels with nodes that show up as balance sharing node in their list. Unfortunately from what I can tell they have an option of balance sharing privately with just Amboss so you may not know that your channel partner is doing this.
If all else fails, and I don't use that term lightly, I think attacking these nodes are a very valid response to this.
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These are some mitigations and the blacklisting especially does hurt the network. What we need is to change the approach: Don't make data sharing the norm because probing is already possible. Rather make probing more difficult, expensive and inconclusive.
Improve payment reliability by implementing Pickhardt-payments and share known good hops in Blinded Paths.
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  • Wall of Shame website for data sharing nodes (where publicyl visible) now
  • lobby for the much more previcy preserving 2-bits approach proposed by Rene Pickardt
Apart from that, make script/plugin for nodes to report intentionally false data -essentially spam Amboss- has the best short-term cost-benefit ratio. Granted, we must assume that the big regulated nodes will virtue signal and openly communicate to not report false data, but the moment a payment takes two hops through non-datasharing nodes, then there is enough reasonable doubt
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  • compromise: attempt to provide most of the same convenience with much less balance data (I think rene proposed 2 bits)
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  • ddos balance sharing nodes
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  • Activate BIP 300, give up on lightning privacy, and use zside
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  • Move more transactions into chaumian ledgers
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