Thread

Interesting. My question about self-custodial lightning is: Will this ever be worth doing for the average person, or even more sophisticated users of Bitcoin? It seems the superior setup is just to hold BTC in self-custody and then just hold whatever you want to spend (and can afford to lose) in the most trusted custodial Lightning wallet.

As far as I remember you don't have privacy with Pheonix, one channel with their node means they at least see liquidity going in and out.

On their privacy terms: However, for convenience, your Phoenix application delegates the calculation of payment routes to the ACINQ node. In the current version of the wallet, this node will know the final recipient of the payment, and the amount sent. Work is being done to remove that limitation and have better privacy. So no privacy.

They had the Eclair app before which allowed manual channel management but sadly they retired it. Hopefully they re-introduce something similar in the future version of Phoenix

Zeus has gotten quite painless as well. And when Blixt finishes adding necessary features (like watchtowers) we'll really be cooking with gas. I do want to set up an always on node so I can dispense with the use of cashu for zaps but my Knots machine is a raspberry pi and I really don't trust its horsepower. I do have LND running on it though, and was thinking of using it as a watchtower.

Part of the slowness is that its hard to appreciate a need for sovereignty when you're sending around a few hundred sats. Actually start buying and selling real goods and services though and custodial lightning seems insane.

Zeus has an embedded node now and you configure channel management. Also, keep an eye out for Blixt -- it's not ready for real funds yet but is a full lnd experience on your phone.

I think we're just so early that we don't see the future state. Why, after all, would the average person need a computer of all things in their home? And who would operate it for them?

Ok this may be true if in the future there is just going to be a fully automated and optimized way for channel management. But even in principle I think the economics of Lightning don’t really lend themselves to most people adopting it in a self-custodial way

I wouldn't say it works "perfectly" Bob The recipient has to be online

is there a way for self custodial lightning to work if one of the parties is offline?

Yes, try nostr:npub1cm3rpgj7457yjuqnvdalxaauakqu0ndkpkyp5cldkyutpz4xszpsmk96wt, I even translated the wallet to Portuguese Brazilian. It's a Spark wallet but with lightning compatibility. If you test, let me know what you think.

Shilling centralized surveillance platforms under the guise of self-custody is what will make my MSTR stocks and other investments in paper bitcoin rocket. Thanks for helping! On a much different note: I was actually checking out lightning pay a bit. Wanna quickly lay out the pros and cons between that and Strike?

The Phoenix LSP ran off the moment the state started arresting people. They are centralized and easy to take down.

He said self custodial Spark is maybe-self-custodial, depends on whether the operator repeatedly deletes his keys as he promises to do

Zeus wallet uses my zaplocker protocol to get close to this in a lightning compatible way Matt Corallo also has a spec for this that is better than zaplocker, but it is not adopted yet See also my hedgehog protocol -- that's not lightning though

Maybe. There may be efficiencies in terms of fees that grow, with shorter paths when you open channels, to, say, local chamber of commerce like LSP's. Why route through ACINQ's fees and routes when your local commungiven that most of us using lightningity offers cheaper shorter routes? Hard to say what comes next, but given that most of us using Lightning these days seem to use it as little more than a toy, I fon't think we can yet see where this goes. That said, despite being skeptical of any custody, I am somewhat bullish on the fedimint model. Trust minimized federated custody with significant privacy gains, and less expectation of user configuration.

Ugh touchscreen keyboard strikes again...

We're NZ only at the moment, so if you're not based in NZ Strike is your best option

I'm a big fan of Zeus as well

It will be worth doing if you value privacy and sovereignty enough.

Good point. Maybe perfect was too strong a word. "Optimally"? Btw I enjoyed your hedge hog demo at BHB

Also I'll shill anything that isn't using or leaving $ in a bank account.

When I say privacy I really mean regards to KYC. There are a lot of ways you can lose privacy even while running your own lightning node

Have you tried Umbrel?

They can stop the LSP. They can't stop all LSPs and they can't confiscate your Bitcoin.

I posed the question at https://stacker.news/items/1272818 a few days ago, and was recommended Lightning Pay. Then I saw you shilling surveillance in the name of self custody just by accident; some account re-posted your shill. When realizing you were associated with Lightning Pay I had to ask whether had some pros and cons scribbled down.

Not really interested in the Node in a Box approach of either Umbrel or Start9. I'd rather learn how my software is configured and know how to jump in and make alterations should the need arise, and at least have a vanilla set up rather than some configuration dreamed up by a team to make things coexist for their purposes. Same reason I can't stand Debian or Ubuntu or really most Linux distributions.

Sounds like you're an advanced user. God speed ser!

"shilling surveillance" not what I was doing. I think you're sacrificing the good at the expense of the perfect. Most lightning users are likely using a custodial service or a side chain. Phoenix is better than both of those options

It's ok. Your argument is a typical for-profit one. In addition, some languages use the same word for stupid and evil. So, you have my full understanding either way. But, no pros and cons of Strike vs Lightning Pay then?

I suppose. Though I do think one gets that way by being stubborn enough to learn. But yea, it does take time. I just find that putting in time when I can usually means less occasions when I HAVE to put in time I don't have because I've offloaded decisions that blow up on me. Biggest issue I run into these days is actually fighting with systemd on my Debian install on the Raspberry Pi. Really wishing I'd just gone with a BSD, and will probably migrate sooner rather than later.