I need to look into running LNDHub for my friends and family. I don't know enough about how it works. Do I have access to their sats? Are they somehow separated? Can I rug them?
Discussion
Running an LNBits instance gets you LNDhub compatibility, as well as lots of other bonuses like Cashu (ecash).
💯 💯 💯
It’s absolutely amazing! You have no access to their sats, they open their own wallet. Connecting to your LNDHub just allows them to use your channel rails to send and receive payments. Only privacy tradeoff for them so far is that you can see the amount of sats sent/received on your node. But since it’s friends and fam, it’s totally acceptable in my opinion.
> Do I have access to their sats?
Yes, but there’s no standard UI for accessing individuals’ amounts. It’s in a Redis database that you can query. Presumably one could write code to update this database directly.
> Are they somehow separated?
LndHUB accounts are custodial entries in a Redis database. The sats are commingled in one shared Lightning node’s channels. It’s up to you to maintain enough liquidity to satisfy demand of your users.
> Can I rug them?
Absolutely. It is trivial to do so en masse. Just close all your channels and walk away.
Rugging an individual user is more difficult because there’s no UI for it. But the code is open source so developing a script ought to be possible.
Much more thorough answer! Learned from this, thank you 🙏🏽
No problem! I looked into this deeply when setting up my family with LndHUB on my Lightning node.
I had hoped to simply credit their balances directly, but there was no obvious way to do that. Instead I had to have them “fund” their Lightning wallets through the Blue Wallet mechanism that gives them an on-chain address to send to.
It’s kind of a bootstrapping problem. Suppose you already have a working lightning node. Now you want to make a Blue Wallet Lightning wallet. There’s no way to transfer funds from your Lightning wallet to the LndHUB account. Paying an invoice fails with an obscure error. I’d have to dig up my notes for more details, it’s been a while. 😅
Haha yes!! I remember trying that too! Maybe us plebs could zap the wallets and we fund it that way 😅
