You can host it yourself if you don't want to pay. 

 It might have been driven by regulations. That's why Stacker News is moving away from its custodial wallet. I also miss the ease of use that these services provided.

https://stacker.news/r/Undisciplined 

 What's going on w stacker news?  

 They're just moving away from having a custodial wallet and having people link external lightning wallets instead. 

 So if I got SATs on there I should take them off? 

 There's no rush. They'll always be available to withdraw. They just want transactions to shift to linked wallets, so at some point withdrawing them will be the only thing the site allows you to do with them. 

 It was regulatory and they had been working on Alby Hub for awhile to replace it.  

 I would imagine the same thing that prompted WoS to back out of the U.S. plays a factor in ending the custodial offering. After all, I believe that was when Alby went invite only, too.

However, it sounds like they also didn't want to have to maintain a large node with a ton of liquidity locked into lightning channels to accommodate the number of people using their service, some of them for over 1m sats at a time before transferring to cold storage. I must admit I was one of the lunatics doing so.

Instead, they are offering various ways for you to hold your own keys and take advantage of the browser extension UX + Lightning address, and I hear a mobile app is also coming. Only one of those ways requires payment. 

 The custodial accounts still work 

 The hub is amazing 

 https://media.tenor.com/DL6eSXYsTPQAAAAC/beavis-and-butthead-laughing-beavis-butthead.gif 

 Do you use it primarily as your main lightning wallet?

I could see paying 21,000 sats a month for a lightning wallet if I wasn’t using tons of other wallets.

I’m using blink, phoenix, Zeus, mutiny (RIP) and others.

Mutiny subscription was 16,000 sats and I paid that. 

 I’m trying to stop paying for satellite tv 

 It's free if you run it locally on your own computer.  

 I'm still using their custodial shit and wondering when I'm gonna get shut down 

 I'm running it on Umbrel. You can run it on Star9 too. 

 ya they moving away from that. your best bet jf you aint wanting to run your own shit is to use minibits app as it has ln address and can create nwc strings for setting up zapping in clients. but its not a perfect replacement and im sure itll eventually be a victim of its own success too. best you just run a node bruv 

 Its actually a pretty great product. People were comfortable running mutiny on their phones and now alby hub is sort of like that but on a computer, definitely best on a server/always on computer. 

If youre not comfortable with that, it seems they have a really nice set of tools released today and more releasing soon so that someone you know can share their alby hub with you. 

 Their invite requirement turned me off from the start.  The more bells and whistles I hear Alby adds on, the more I appreciate nos2x for simple browser extension needs. 

 Nos2x is insecure  

 Of course it's insecure.  All browser extensions are insecure. 

 That's not true.  

 If there could be browser extensions that are secure, then there would be no market for hardware wallets. 

 They don’t have an ios app, so is a No for me. 

 coming 

 Great!! 

 You need to do more than a surface evaluation.  There is charge to host on their infrastructure as there should be expected or you can host on your own infrastructure at no cost.

What ever solution you are using hopefully, you are putting some sats in their wallet.  Everyone likes to be rewarded for their hard work. 

 The Hub rocks. I was a Mutiny ride or die so I needed to do something and very happy with the decision thus far. 

 Do something yourself If you want to pay less sats #AlbyHub has options for you, according to your own convenience and knowledge. 

 Yet another lnbits clone. Because the lnbits model makes sense. Their custodial business model didn't make sense, so they pivoted into making something that already exists rather than being original. 

 This is a fair criticism in some ways,but not in others. LNBits can do most of what Alby Hub does and WAY more, but is less approachable. It's also more difficult to get it set up with Zeus, especially if your node is Tor only and you want to connect to your wallet quickly and reliably while you are out and about. Moreover, having a lightning address on LNBits requires you to own a domain and have some additional technical know-how to set up the address service.


Meanwhile, Alby Hub doesn't do all the things LNBits does, but it is dead simple to set up, connects quickly and reliably to Zeus even if your node is Tor only, and every wallet you create that connects to an Alby account has a lightning address without needing to mess around with configuring your own domain. 

 Just make LNbits easier to set up. Low hanging fruit. No need to rebuild something that exists and is great. Zerosum 

 For example, use breez or nwc to fund https://github.com/lnbits/lnbits/releases/tag/0.12.11-rc1 

 I am not aware of many LNBits clones out there, and while making LNBits better and more approachable would be good, I also think competition is good.

What other LNBits clones were you referring to? 

 Some talk of Tor above. Any plans for LNBits to run with domains? 

 I don't see how Alby Hub should be any LNBits clone?! It's a lightning wallet built around NWC and has a completely different approach and is a totally different product. It does not even try to do most of the things that LNBits does...
OK, it is a lightning wallet and also works with LND - same as LNBits maybe... and many other lightning wallets and tools out there. Did you even look at it?
We also support NWC development for LNBits, add support for LNBits in libraries like bitcoin connect and generally recommend LNBits to many projects... 
To me a diverse lightning ecosystem is important and benefits all projects. Imo there is also no point to talk like that about other open source projects, we're in the same boat of working for Bitcoin and lightning, aren't we? 

 Why are you discounting NWC so much? 

 Alby is a big pain the ass on my browser. I had to disable it. Going to remove it completely. 

 Could you share some details what was heppening? 

 I think Brad is trying to say that he's a bit lost in the rabbithole L2. Why exactly can't we trust you guys with node? Do you really think that every single nostr user should run their own node?

I mean I can understand importance of self-custody and safety etc. but for some people this is not needed at this point. 

Or do I miss something? Why I shouldn't simply trust you with the node and enjoy memes as on any other social media platform? 

 You can run Alby Hub with a Cashu mint as the backend. 

 Consider the regulatory risk of being a custodian/bank for randos on the Internet.

Also consider the liquidity required to run a Lightning node being used by hundreds or even thousands of people.

Alby had a limit of 1m sats per user for their custodial wallet. At just 100 users that requires a full Bitcoin of liquidity. It also requires your channel partners to have sufficient liquidity to forward payments. Every 100 users after that requires another full Bitcoin of liquidity that has to be locked up in a "hot wallet" since the device holding the keys has to be connected to the internet at all times.

I don't blame them one bit for discontinuing the custodial offering. 

 Browser extension works as it used to - it still requires some lightning node to operate. 
The change is that Alby replaced their custodial wallet service with easy to use node app #AlbyHub. Makes it a bit more complicated now, but should be easier with time

 @nodana has pay as you go hosting for that