All the "easy"self-chstody lightning wallets seem to just use some "don't make me think" slight-of-hand that is ultimately belied as a really crap tradeoff.
Phoenix: Outrageous fees. Quickly looks like shit when you try to onboard someone with $10 and they receive $8.50.Even once they have a channel, the routing fees are like 10x what they should be. Don't demo this to vendors looking to escape credit card fees.
Aqua: Your "lightning" payment gets trapped in some limbo, where you can't tell if it failed, if it's multi-pathing, or whatever the fuck they are doing behind the curtain. Don't demo this to people who want instant settlement.
Wallet of Satoshi/Breez/Blitz: Last mile of the payment is paved with surveilance. Don't use this if you wa to demonstrate censorship resistance.
Replies (22)
Try Rizful
WoS has surveillance?
its self custody mode uses spark, and spark transactions are public as I understand
Everything BTC is public, no?
Isn't Zeus pretty straightforward to configure? I have a channel in testnet, and I didn't have any issues.
yes but lightning is really good for privacy, spark isn't
Zeus is great, but there's no way I can recommend it for onboarding. Firstly, the transparency of channel management is great for someone who understands it, but you quickly start tossing a word salad trying to explain it to someone who's never even held their own bitcoin. Secondly, the leasing model assumes you've already convinced someone to use the wallet for months to a year, and that conflicts with convincing someone that this is some no-commitment harmless little demo. Thirdly, while I appreciate the exhaustive feature set and pace of delivery, it's unstable and requires you to open the swiss army knife of settings/tools to wrestle it into usability, from having to manually push ecash index counters to widening derivation path index gaps or straight up abandoning the wallet for manual Sparrow UTXO rescue in a recovery scenario.
Lightning is not really that great for privacy. When enough people use it, it will result in non-fungible coins just like Bitcoin does. Telling people who need privacy that lightning is “good for privacy” is irresponsible. Monero, Pirate Chain, Tari are the “good for privacy” choices. You should say the truth: that everything else is not fungible or a public transaction.
Cashu for small amounts, non-custodial Lightning for bigger ones, on-chain for savings
@Rich Nost Try Misty Breez
@npub1juga...fc28 it’s using their SDK just like Aqua, but it works better.
Only downside iOS version in TestFlight only.
the Breez SDK does not require Spark usage for BOLT 11 payments currently...
"By default, using Spark transfers are disabled."
Sending payments - Breez SDK - Nodeless (Spark)
Beside what is not so great: What apps would you recommend for onbording shop owners, which might never ever touched bitcoin yet?
I would am most focused on fast setup, easy use.
Only option I was thinking of is ’swiss bitcoin pay’
Phoenix 4 sats fee outrageous?
Phoenix has that fee issue. I’ve seen it a lot. But comparing to running my own node or VPS, it’s gonna end up costing less. That said, it doesn’t make sense for small lightning payments to be more costly than on-chain transactions, even if you’re not the node-runner.
I haven’t had the issues you mentioned with LOL though. Maybe because I haven’t used it enough. :)))))
This is the way
20% fee
I think this conflates two different points. Lightning *can result in non-fungible coins because you can see that a UTXO is the result of a channel close (if it wasn't a Taproot) channel.
but the privacy of the actual payments moving across LN itself is (probably) good. you can spin up a node trustlessly without permission and open channels wherever you want. you could have two nodes and use one for routing all your payments and never send at all from your ultimate node, keeping your ultimate nodes pubkey to yourself.
The main issue with LN privacy is that you'd never know if it broke. since the network tends towards centralization it's probably fairly easy to map and if routing nodes started colluding and doing timing analysis of payments the end user would never know.
so with the UX burden and difficulty verifying your own privacy, sure why not use Monero?
but it isn't true that you can't get good privacy on LN.
Zeus is great, but you quickly start tossing a word salad:
"manually push ecash index counters to widening derivation path index gaps or straight up abandoning the wallet for manual Sparrow UTXO rescue in a recovery scenario."
Should I be concerned that I hold my own Bitcoin (for a while now), did a couple of transactions onchain, have multiple lightning wallets and did lightning payments, but can't for the love of satoshi convince myself to actually configure, let alone use Zeus?
It's not a requirement. I think the tradeoffs to Zeus are worth exploring if you're hesitant about the privacy/custodial/trustodial tradeoffs of the other mobile wallets.
