QUESTION: When I create Bitcoin Lightning payment channel, make several payments and close the channel, will anyone be able to link my BTC mainnet wallet with the wallets of my BTC Lightning transactions recipients?

ANSWER by ChatGPT (may be entirely wrong):
In general, the nature of the Bitcoin Lightning Network is to provide additional privacy and confidentiality for transactions, as compared to on-chain transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. When you create a payment channel on the Lightning Network, make several payments, and then close the channel, the transactions that occur within that channel are not broadcast to the Bitcoin blockchain and therefore do not leave a permanent, publicly-viewable record of the transactions.

However, it's important to note that while Lightning Network transactions are not broadcast to the blockchain, they are not entirely anonymous or unlinkable. For example, if an attacker is able to observe both the funding transaction that opens the payment channel and the closing transaction that settles the channel on the blockchain, they may be able to infer some information about the transactions that occurred within the channel.

Furthermore, if an attacker is able to observe a large number of payment channels and correlate them with on-chain transactions, they may be able to make inferences about the payment patterns and network topology of Lightning Network users. This type of attack is known as a "correlation attack" and is a potential weakness of the Lightning Network that researchers are actively working to address.

In summary, while the Bitcoin Lightning Network provides greater privacy and confidentiality than on-chain transactions, it is not completely anonymous or unlinkable. Care should be taken to protect one's privacy when using the Lightning Network, and users should be aware of the potential risks associated with correlation attacks.

Comments?

Evan Kaloudis, the developer behind Zeus, a non-custodial Lightning wallet, told Decrypt that while using Lightning, it’s “virtually impossible” to find out who paid what.
https://decrypt.co/107376/bitcoin-pr...unks-are-doing

Our simulations indicate that only one
adversarial node on a payment path uniquely identifies at least one
of sender and recipient for around 70% of the transactions observed
by the adversary. Moreover, multiple colluding attackers can almost
always identify sender and receiver uniquely
2021?, researchers from the Delft University of Technology, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465481.3465761 / https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.10070.pdf

LN is currently still in the study phase and many privacy issues still exist and need further development to be resolved, but the basis for operating with greater privacy exists and can help users protect their (crypto) financial information
2021 https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/11/0...te/#Conclusion

The LN presents a very low degree of anonymity ... Studying LN’s ability to preserve its users privacy from an attacker that controls one or more nodes, therefore capable to intercept and study the flow of information within the network, we find that the system poses a weak layer of protection, with low values of degree of anonymity. From a structural point of view, LN is very effective into protecting its nodes’ identities from malicious external observers with only prior knowledge about topological characteristics, such as degree or cluster coefficients, of the target node.
2019 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0225966

adversary needs to control only 2% of nodes
to learn sensitive payment information (e.g., sender, receiver,
and amount)
2020, https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/303.pdf