pull down to refresh
Yes!
We have lots of ideas, but they will have to come at the right time. I want to revisit the lightning card for example, but right now it's too early: people don't perceive the value of the added security because lightning is still for pocket change.
Once on-chain fees go up and drive users to other scaling layers we will work on security devices for these solutions as well.
There's a lot of nuance required to answer this question. I'll try to break the privacy concerns into a few broad categories with their high level issues:
Information you broadcast as a public node (gossip)
This could include an IP address and anything you put in the node alias.
The mitigation here is either to not be a public node (open only private channels and be okay not routing payments) or to connect only via Tor and announce an onion address.
Linking your channel funding transaction to your node.
Mitigations: mix your utxo first, don't announce your node.
The combination of taproot channels and an updated gossip protocol will likely help with this in the future by breaking the 1:1 linkage of on-chain utxo to channel announcement, but this is an issue now.
Spending
Spending is fairly private by default. Issues are when outsourcing your routing you dox your payment. If you run your own full node, this shouldn't be an issue, but mobile wallets may try to do this for an improved UX. For users of phoenix, multiple trampoline hops could help here in the future, there just aren't enough trampoline nodes currently.
Probing is also an issue - monitoring changes in channel balances by periodically trying to send payments through. These payments are designed to fail, but depending on where they fail, some information about channel balances is leaked. Reducing htlc_maximum_msat can help here. Also, this only applies to public channels.
Receiving
This is the worst privacy aspect of LN currently - BOLT 11 invoices pretty much dox your node. Blinded paths (a default feature of BOLT 12) will help here. The BOLT 12 specification is fairly well fleshed out, but still needs wider usage and formal adoption.
Thanks for sharing - Fountain episode link is here - https://fountain.fm/episode/A99epUbBInazY2pK2Tss
Even in economics, you can go a long way before encountering any serious treatment of money. In fact, you can easily go clear through the vast majority of PhD programs without ever discussing what money is. The only exceptions I know of are Chicago and George Mason.
Generally, money is just magically introduced as a unit of account into models that really don't have any monetary dynamics. Most econ programs will have electives on economic history or history of economic thought that get into serious discussions of money.
They're not "requiring banks to adopt crypto" per se, at least the formulation is misleading. The regulator is reminding banks that they have to accept legal customers, and can't cite "crypto" as a reason not to accept them. I.e., it's doing the opposite the US is doing, which just made non-engagement with the space a prerequisite for whoever will take over Silicon Valley Bank.
While the Beijing regulators do steer Hong Kong, it's still under One Country, Two Systems. Hong Kong is used as a laboratory to experiment while keeping the larger Chinese banking system (more or less) isolated. So this is the national regulator directing the local banks to prevent them from letting local risk-management or regulatory fears drive them to pre-emptively reject crypto companies.
I don't think this has anything to do with the digital yuan, or the BRICS interchange currency that's only in its pre-planning stage in any case. I'd assume, rather, that they're trying to profit from an increasingly negative US regulatory environment, trying to draw business to Hong Kong that otherwise would have moved from the US to Singapore or Malta. This seems the more likely direct incentive here.