Oddbean new post about login | logout How to lightning for poor people? It looks like most popular peers are requiring anywhere from 1Ms to 5Ms or more to open a channel. I don't have that laying around. :/ Maybe I'm misunderstanding? Still learning about channels. #lightning
Use the Minibits wallet.
how to lightning for poor people: don't lightning, cashu
Whelp. shit
most important is don't make public channels, they are a pain and a waste if you have under like 10Msat and don't even bother on a home connection
Yeah I guess we skipped ahead. nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7erfw36x7tnsw43z7un9d3shjqpqqdjn8j4gwgmkj3k5un775nq6q3q7mguv5tvajstmkdsqdja2havqmp5l49 what are your goals? Do you just plan to use it as a personal wallet? Run a service? Route payments? Run a mint? Something else?
To be clear I have a strong sysadmin background, so that's not the issue for me, it's the lightning specific technical stuff, and apparently the financial side that no one has been clear about. I just need a wallet to send and receive funds, other stuff is just for fun to support the network. I don't use a smart phone, I haven't found a working desktop wallet, and absolutely no KYC. So my options are severely limited. I also want to keep the scope of my footprint small and understandable, which is why I have been avoiding other alternatives that nostr supports.
I think https://albyhub.com/ would fit your needs well. Our goals seem aligned and this works great for me.
I feel like whatever they're doing I should be able to do too, unless they're doing some sort of magic based on external services, which I believe it does with the chain-state already.
Well you are far above me then because whatever they are doing I most certainly could not do! I felt proud that I was able to host this let alone get there from scratch!
zap wallet is good, it's a Neutrino/LND wallet... it needs a BIP-157 full node to connect to, i think it's strike that runs the ones that are default in zap oh, sadly it's unmaintained for a year now: https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop Jack Mallers built it originally
If you want to be a node runner, that's cool but it's important to be clear about the risks. You are running an always-on hot wallet with your keys exposed to the internet. In addition to getting hacked, you run the risk of losing money due to channel force closes, hardware failure, and software bugs. You can't earn any significant yield as a pleb node runner so it's basically all downside. And if you don't have serious technical chops it will be a very frustrating uphill battle. The lone upside is that you will learn a lot of valuable skills the hard way. You might be able to parley them into a job if that is your goal. If that is not your goal, save yourself a whole lot of trouble and use phoenix wallet or minibits. Minibits is custodial so keep your balance low to limit the downside of getting rugged. Phoenix is amazing and self-custodial but unavailable in US app stores thanks to the overzealous chaps in the regulatory apparatus.
Self sov channel with zeus lsp is 100k sats and give you 100k inbound.
Running my own nodes :/
This is the way. I'm confused are you saying the minimum for the channel is 1m-5m sats? Or someone is trying to charge you that many sats, to open a channel regardless of capacity.
Might mot be worth running a node for less than 1m sats channel even if a private node that isn’t routing. That is why Zeus node in the phone is good for smaller numbers. Once cashu balance is at 100k sats i move it into my zeus channel.
Aren’t you looking at liquidity and not channel open fees?
Right, but I need to have the UTXOs available for the liquidity right
I’m still new to lightning and figuring it out so don’t take my word for it … but ive opened 3-5m channels for much less 🤷♂️
I think he is saying he wants channels smaller than that.
He said he doesn’t have that much laying around - sounds like assuming he has to pay that much to open that sort of channel size
That's jank if someone is charging them that much.
I'm saying I don't know what I'm doing, but running my own node, it looks like I must have the UTXOs available for the desired channel size, which makes sense, but I wonder how everyone else is doing it. I know I'm not the only one without $1k+ USD on hand to tie up per channel. So I must be doing something wrong
No, I think you're correct.
That I'm just poor, or doing something wrong? XD
Yeah I would have 5M channels minimum but 10M is better…you don’t need 10 channels just 2 or 3
Well the idea is to open a channel large enough to sustain usage. Lots of people want to have a decent size channel. Are RoF still a thing? We had user built out rings of liquidity for people to join. The idea nowadays is you can splice in and out liquidity based on your needs. It's just a single on chain tx instead of 2. One to close and another to open. Splicing is just one of chain tx. Iirc.
> Are RoF still a thing? What does that mean? >We had user built out rings of liquidity for people to join. Also confused here. Plz explain
https://lightningnetwork.plus/ Check this out.
$500 worth of sats is enough to run a decent pair of private channels but not much point if you don't need to move sats fast or receive them... one thing that is clear to me now, you open an outbound, with your 100k+ sats really you need to make them a bit bigger but that's minimal with many channel partners, and then you should open a bigger inbound one because you can, they are a lot cheaper, outbound channels you fill, inbound channels the other side fills
You can purchase inbound liquidity. You pay a lightning invoice and someone opens a channel with you. The fees are always changing and differ for different LSPs however an example would be something like you might pay an invoice of 10k sats to a LSP and then they will open a 1million sat channel with you. The 10k data covers the on-chain fee plus a fee to the LSP. At first all the liquidity will be on their side so you will only be able to recieve transactions through this channel. But once you have received you will be able to send back out through that channel.
So how do?
Depends on how your node is set up. With Alby Hub this is integrated easily under the node management page. You can also purchase directly from the LSP if you don't have something like Alby's build in integration. You could take a look at the liquidity provider "lnserver". They have tutorials walking you through the process on different node setups. https://lnserver.com/
Also I have just had a look and on chain transaction fees are quite high right now so that may make it expensive. It's better to open channels when the fees are low.
I appreciate it. I'm using core-lightning at the moment and the cli tool
I have no experience with this personally. Hopefully the lnserver tutorials give you enough insight to get this to work for you.
vis LSPs or community nodes. anything smaller then 5m is useless
It's either expensive or requires a lot of time to learn, sometimes both.
Damn. I guess I should stop in my tracks. I was going to try to help route payments but don’t want to have too much in a hot wallet and stuff.
Yeah it's starting to feel that way. Why is on chain still easier and, at this point cheaper for people without that many sats to tie up.
Personally I'm using a custodial wallet, which interestingly does work with Amethyst, though not most other Nostr clients, as it doesn't actually use NWC. It's called Speed Wallet ( https://www.speed.app ) , and you can use it with a Chrome Extension even without a smartphone. Might be handy while you're getting things rolling, and then when you've got the liquidity to support it, get your own node up and running later. That's what I'm doing anyway, while stacking sats from a silly amount of app sources.
Yeah I appreciate the recommendation!
There's also of course Alby, which makes finding a middle ground a little easier, but at a little bit of a cost as well. If you're going to pay anyone to get you there though, you couldn't pick a better bunch of people to support. It is invite only at the moment though just due to a spike in interest.
Personally I'm using a custodial wallet, which interestingly does work with Amethyst, though not most other Nostr clients, as it doesn't actually use NWC. It's called Speed Wallet ( https://www.speed.app ) , and you can use it with a Chrome Extension even without a smartphone. Might be handy while you're getting things rolling, and then when you've got the liquidity to support it, get your own node up and running later. That's what I'm doing anyway, while stacking sats from a silly amount of app sources.
Yeah I appreciate the recommendation!
There's also of course Alby, which makes finding a middle ground a little easier, but at a little bit of a cost as well. If you're going to pay anyone to get you there though, you couldn't pick a better bunch of people to support. It is invite only at the moment though just due to a spike in interest.
Yeah I appreciate the recommendation!
There's also of course Alby, which makes finding a middle ground a little easier, but at a little bit of a cost as well. If you're going to pay anyone to get you there though, you couldn't pick a better bunch of people to support. It is invite only at the moment though just due to a spike in interest.
There's also of course Alby, which makes finding a middle ground a little easier, but at a little bit of a cost as well. If you're going to pay anyone to get you there though, you couldn't pick a better bunch of people to support. It is invite only at the moment though just due to a spike in interest.
> https://stacker.news/items/379225 Thanks for that ugh, I feel like those who are riding the copium of LN should provide such a disclaimer, blogs videos and more. I don't know anyone irl with enough liquid they'd want tied up in channels unless more irl purchases used LN. LN only scales with some form of custodial at my current understanding, I can't see another way around it. I also don't think I'd encourage having that much in UTXOs available in a hot wallet, that's my issue. My limit for hot wallet is like 600-700k stats total. Maybe I'm just paranoid, idk
It works for me for payments but I use it in combination. I have wallet of Satoshi and my xapo bank has inbound LN so I can use it to get funds into my bank fast, and for a lot of cases I can pay for stuff via ln payments to bitrefill. But it is at this point a bit annoying the capital requirement. On the other hand with some outbound liquidity I can get around bursts of high onchain fees.
Yeah. It's probably just going to take more time investment. Yay!
Lightning devs are really bad at fudding their own bags. This is why there is so much ecash hate. We will need to overcome this myopic attitude in order to progress the bitcoin ecosystem to where it needs to be for mass adoption.
When you view it more pragmatically as a decentralized payment system and ecash provides further scaling, then there isn't much copium to be had.
Any good links or docs on ecash to get me started? Are there going to be a bunch of hiccups like I've run into here
Follow @calle 👁️⚡👁️ and have a look at https://github.com/cashubtc
What are your goals? The most straightforward analog to running a lightning node is running a cashu mint. It's also a lightning node, so it won't be less work than now lol. But it's way easier to build on because it's a single api on a single server. Each ecash token is self authenticated. No accounts. The beauty of ecash is it's simplicity.
With recently merged NUT-18, I see the possibility of building a Cashu ‘node’ that can initiate payment requests and use whatever mint is available. All state is stored as nostr events. @calle 👁️⚡👁️
Yeah I just don't see this working. If the system is so complex we need a small handful of really smart people to paper over the complexities, the masses will become dependent. I'm not expecting perfect decentralization, but it's just that it's far more convenient and decentralized to send on-chain if I don't want to use a smartphone and someone else's nodes.
My goal is to create a binary / library that just works, then wrap an app/system around it. Still rough, but it works. https://github.com/trbouma/safebox-binaries
Yeah I would highly recommend against checking in binaries into git, you'd want to release those as an asset for sure. maybe I could lend a hand sometime although I'm very unfamiliar with python build/compilation tools. I'm curious how Python creates "Linux" safe binaries.
It works for me for payments but I use it in combination. I have wallet of Satoshi and my xapo bank has inbound LN so I can use it to get funds into my bank fast, and for a lot of cases I can pay for stuff via ln payments to bitrefill. But it is at this point a bit annoying the capital requirement. On the other hand with some outbound liquidity I can get around bursts of high onchain fees.
Yeah. It's probably just going to take more time investment. Yay!
Cashu stuff it still over my head. Sunken cost on getting my node to work at this point I think. I just want to send and receive from plebs. I also want it to happen on my own servers. I don't have a smartphone so my options are limited for server based "wallets" See my other note for details on my situation nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqqm9x092su3hd9rdfe8aafxp5pzpak3cegkem9qhhvmqqm96406cqythwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnwdaehgu3wvfskuep0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uqzq326z60ty967snf23eumhqmu50hfmr52ngdl0ry3zaemqshlhjl2sg80w2
Lightning devs are really bad at fudding their own bags. This is why there is so much ecash hate. We will need to overcome this myopic attitude in order to progress the bitcoin ecosystem to where it needs to be for mass adoption.
When you view it more pragmatically as a decentralized payment system and ecash provides further scaling, then there isn't much copium to be had.
Any good links or docs on ecash to get me started? Are there going to be a bunch of hiccups like I've run into here
Follow @calle 👁️⚡👁️ and have a look at https://github.com/cashubtc
What are your goals? The most straightforward analog to running a lightning node is running a cashu mint. It's also a lightning node, so it won't be less work than now lol. But it's way easier to build on because it's a single api on a single server. Each ecash token is self authenticated. No accounts. The beauty of ecash is it's simplicity.
With recently merged NUT-18, I see the possibility of building a Cashu ‘node’ that can initiate payment requests and use whatever mint is available. All state is stored as nostr events. @calle 👁️⚡👁️
Yeah I just don't see this working. If the system is so complex we need a small handful of really smart people to paper over the complexities, the masses will become dependent. I'm not expecting perfect decentralization, but it's just that it's far more convenient and decentralized to send on-chain if I don't want to use a smartphone and someone else's nodes.
My goal is to create a binary / library that just works, then wrap an app/system around it. Still rough, but it works. https://github.com/trbouma/safebox-binaries
Yeah I would highly recommend against checking in binaries into git, you'd want to release those as an asset for sure. maybe I could lend a hand sometime although I'm very unfamiliar with python build/compilation tools. I'm curious how Python creates "Linux" safe binaries.