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It is said that a BOLT12 offer does hide the final destination, and therefore protects privacy of receiver.
However, I just generated an offer, decoded it, and in the value node_id, it had my node's public key without the first byte prefix, which is sufficient to have myself traced. Is there something that I haven't understood correctly?
Using BOLT 12 offer encodes the data necessary to reach a node to request an invoice to make a payment, either a node_id, or a blinded path (the last few hops in an onion route, pre-computed and encrypted) to that node using onion messages.
See here: https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/lightning-offers-bolt12/
I guess the answer is that you have those two options and you only get the privacy advantage if the blinded path feature is used.
In many cases, you're a public node and want to commit to the invoice publicly. The difference is, now a node doesn't have to!
In Core Lightning, our implementation doesn't yet support this use of aliases, but it's pretty trivial. If course we can pay someone using an alias...
