Hanshan on Nostr: As if we haven't gone back and forth about the trade-offs of transacting on a L1 like ...

As if we haven't gone back and forth about the trade-offs of transacting on a L1 like monero vs lightning FOR FUCKING YEARS

And that IS what we are actually talking about, comparing an L1 to an L2.

But sure, if the sender uses unique fee values or a wallet defaults to something strange, your transaction stands out. People need to know that.
And becoming informed about *that is STILL easier than running your own ln node and doing channel management.

A quick glance at the chain tells me that 95% of all transactions use the defaults.
4.5% cluster around higher base fees and their transactions tend larger. Probably swap services or exchanges doing payouts or sweeps.
The remaining .5% are extreme outliers. Ignoramuses afraid their DNM payment won't go through.

So a standard user using cake, feather, monfluo etc and not attempting a custom fee should consider that their anonset is just 95% of the daily transactions.
If you DO use a custom fee, make sure you dont always use the SAME custom fee. People have done this and its obvious on the chain a single entity is behind those spends.
The output you spend will end up in a ring with 15 other transactions. If someone is looking and YOUR output is the ONLY one that has a unique fee, it draws attention.
Uniformity is your friend.

Lets do a deep dive, just to dilute the cheap bullshit STN is peddling.

So.
Fees are really hard anyway and hiding them introduces a lot of problems. There are a bunch of issues, off the top of my head,
1. People have to be certain that the miner is getting paid as advertised and that there's no funny business.
2. We have to know that inputs minus outputs equals fees. Ie, that the block amounts check out.
3. how do you have a fee market when nobody knows what is being paid?
4. If you hide the fee (zkproof or similar) the size of each transaction now is much larger, which makes transactions more expensive.
5. Fees in Monero are a formula that is enforced by consensus. You can't do that if it's hidden.

there's a lot.

If we replace the fee with a ZK proof (which has been discussed endlessly but nobody has actually done) now not only do we need an additional proof that attests to the fee amount, we need several more besides the fee commitment. A balance proof and fee range proof. At least.
So we have created several new attack surfaces/implementation risks, many (or ALL) of which are potential inflation bugs.

It was *intentionally* decided a hidden fee was out of scope for Monero. This is because the design philosophy is to have the *simplest and lowest risk* implementation of digital cash possible.

MWEB and Zcash also show the fee btw. Every blockchain does.
Because the difficulties that come up from hiding the fees are complex and risky and potential inflation bugs,
and the privacy tradeoff is a few bits of entropy.

So that's a rational analysis of the trade-offs, as opposed to STNs fake ass straw man conversation with an imaginary person that is useless for users.