You could absolutely do what you are suggesting, but sender privacy on lightning is already quite good. The only way they could discern it was YOU that was paying is by probing your other channels to determine if the balances changed. (If yes, you could have easily forwarded the payment from elsewhere.)

A fair amount of probing goes on in the network - mostly passive, i.e. seeing changes in channel balances over time. This is about the worst you have to contend with.

To reclaim some privacy here it's recommended that you set your htlc_maximum_msat to much less than the total channel size. I like to use ~25%, which means I can only route a payment that it at maximum 25% of the total size of the channel. However, if your channel balance is greater than 25% of the capacity, it also means a single probe can't determine the exact balance of the channel.

Of course, channels can be probes in both directions, so if your peer doesn't also set a smaller htlc_maximum_msat, the channel balance could still be probed from their side.

I expect more implementations to roll out privacy preserving features and defaults outlined in the "Oakland Protocol" in the near future, which should help mitigate channel surveillance via probing.

I would encourage you to create the manual payment routing script because it sounds great, but also, you're only protecting yourself from someone who's already continually probing your channel balances, so it may be overkill.

I wonder if miners can be colluding in some way and creating these transactions that they are mining themselves, I believe that happened when most mining was concentrated in China. It's not that hard to put together for an agreement a few actors that have their interests aligned.

First of, thank you so much for your work! Second, I have three human rights related questions:

• What are currently the best ways to help people living in North Korea? What's the current top thing? Is it still USB flash drives? Does Bitcoin play any role?
• What is the level of awareness in the African countries under CFA about their value being sucked by France?
• I really enjoyed your essays and investigations on different countries. Are there more essays in works?

God, family, friends, and capability.

They don't accept Bitcoin lol

I don't know that it's worth the effort. It's not really about how bitcoiners are (not that you're completely wrong). It's about how we're portrayed.

Normies will always default to believing what they're told by "the experts" and "the experts" have their own reasons for portraying us poorly.

My preferred approach is to let people discover bitcoin on their own time and then welcome them with open arms. I suspect that will be when it solves some particular problem for them. As bitcoin improves, it will appeal to more people.