Broadcasting fake Lightning channels

As I understand it, right now every public Lightning Network channel must be tied to a UTXO. This is required in order to prevent nodes from spamming the gossip network with nonexistent channels, but it's not great for privacy. It seems to me though that this anti-spam measure would still work if, for example, the protocol allowed nodes to announce one channel without public UTXO for every channel with. Additional restrictions might be necessary but you get the idea.

Apart from improving each node's privacy by default, this would also allow creating fake public channels for additional privacy. Some wallets today create fake private channels and pretend to route payments through them while actually being the final payment destination themselves, but this pattern seems easy to spot and could be made more believable with a fake public channel.

Is there a reason allowing this would be a bad idea?



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