Imagine you want to use a private AI platform, you want your identity to be hidden, and because this AI platform does not have any guardrails, it’s also hidden.
Okay fine, we have TOR’s hidden services, but how do you pay for them?
Sure, you can do a one of transaction, to top up your balance, but since we are all private, you could potentially get scammed. So you opt in for topping up every 10 dollars, but then you have to topup it every now and then… not very nice.
Hidden Payment Channels is not a fancy name but describes exactly what this POC does, it uses already well known payment channel mechanism but does it privately, using railguns cookbook.
Read more in the github repo.
While the scenario I describe is an extreme case, users may just want to pay privately to a service, Hidden Payment Channels are transport agnostic, Waku is utilised to send tickets to the service privately.
PS: the repo is a POC with lots of hardening to be done