Introducing lnproxy: opt-in to better lightning privacy
The "Poor man's rendez-vous"
lnproxy is a tool that let's you hide the destination of a payment without having to trust anyone with your funds. It does this by performing a poor man's rendez-vous routing [decker2021]. Basically, lnproxy takes a bolt 11 invoice and generates a “wrapped” invoice that can be settled if and only if the original invoice is settled. The “wrapped” invoice has the same payment hash, expiry, and description, as the invoice it wraps but adds a small routing budget to the amount.
Better privacy for node runners and custodial wallet users
Users that operate lightning network nodes, reveal the identity of their node and their onchain UTXOs with every lightning invoice they generate. With lnproxy, these users can can opt-in to better privacy by wrapping invoices before giving them out.
Users of custodial lightning wallets, like Wallet of Satoshi or Strike, reveal the destination of every lightning payment they make to their custodian. With lnproxy, these users can opt-in to better privacy by wrapping invoices before paying them.
Minimalist and paranoid by default
The source code for running lnproxy is less than 600 lines of Go code with no dependencies outside the standard library. Anyone can vet the code and build their own binary to allow users to use their node as an lnproxy wrapper.
The web interface for my lnproxy node is javascript-free and runs as a tor hidden service.