Watchtowers: Who Is Watching You?
So after all the recent talk about lost funds, problems with lightning network and the need for watchtowers to keep your funds safe I started thinking. Who will be running these "Watchtowers"? Seems to me to be a perfect opportunity for a little spying buy some of our favorite 3 letter agencies. They could do this in a couple of ways. First is the easiest. Setup their own services under dummy names. Second is though coercion. Either direct by the usual you will do this if you don't want to go to jail or through regulations. Sure there is some law somewhere these would fall under. If not well there will be another omnibus bill they can stick new ones in. I'm sure they have other ways too. If they can get back doors into systems, software, and even chips they can get them into these.
Even if the government doesn't how do you know who to trust to do this? Going to hire your neighbor who might loose power the same time you do? Some big corporation that's probably in league with the banks? Some startup that might run off at any moment leaving you hanging if not worse pulling some kind of scam that costs you money?
This whole LN thing makes no sense. So much complexity for what should have been as easy as removing a temporary limit. It's almost like it's designed to fail.
For future viewers: price of bitcoin at the moment of posting is 7888.50USD