Nostr Web Client

I’ve heard a bit about Ark and VTXOs over the past year or so but until there’s an implementation we can put to the test, it’s just theoretical.

I’ll be a fan of whatever works best to scale bitcoin with least compromises. Some people consider the Liquid network to be centralized and shitcoiny, and I had barely used it until recently, but now it’s been integrated into Breez SDK and is turning out to be a brilliant solution for nodeless Lightning settlement.

When I first joined Nostr in 2022, most people were using Wallet of Satoshi, which concerned me due to it being custodial and centralized, and I knew that had the potential to end badly. No surprise, it did!

As a node runner, I thought it would be important to try to find as many other node runners as possible here, and help teach others to do the same. This turned into a group of a few hundred who provide liquidity to each other. This is one way to keep liquidity distributed as you say, and reduce centralization risk.

I saw in your profile that you work at Edge wallet. I used to use that back when it was called Airbitz. I don’t use it anymore because I have no need for a crypto wallet, and especially one that doesn’t support Lightning, but it’s definitely one I remember well. Say hello to Paul for me. 🤙

David Coen 9mo ago

Hey Daniel, I'll do!

We currently don't support lightning, that's true.

I'm a Lightning early adopter so you can clearly understand how much I want to use Edge to make LN payments.

Unfortunately we are not still ready for that, for a few reasons:

Onboarding would be difficult for the majority of our user base

Hard for them to manage liquidity (the current SDK options do not support splicing yet, as far as I know)

Success rate of payments (it's actually improved a lot lately, so that might not be a big issue anymore!)

In the meantime, I use Breez and Phoenix wallet.

As for Ark, it's no longer theoretical. There are a couple of implementations currently in development, check ArkLabs and Second.

They are in testnet, and probably out in mainnet later this year.

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Discussion

Roy 9mo ago

David, all these issues are resolved with our Nodeless SDK. There's no liquidity management. Edge is focused on trading, not payments and Paul doesn't believe in Lightning. While Ark is promising, it is theoretical because no one understands the economic model of running an Ark at scale.

The Daniel 🖖 9mo ago

This is exactly why I don’t use Edge. I am not a trader, and I am allergic to shitcoins. But if your founder “doesn’t believe” in Lightning, my guess is he hasn’t taken a good look at it in a long time. You should invite him here to see zaps working at scale, and maybe get him on a call with the Breez team.

Roy 9mo ago

Let's say that the last time I spoke with Paul about Lightning he was very skeptical. It's up to us to prove him wrong. Since then we've also released our nodeless SDK. nostr:npub149mp2m0q8prpdys7x2lusv2vceraxwzr4ajf6tv3l24my3gtszxsncas0t take a look a Misty Breez and lmk what you think.

Rizful.com (zap tester) 9mo ago

We did some zap tests on this note… we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at roys@breez.fun, over a period of 20 minutes. In each case, we found that your lightning address server did not respond correctly. (The failure point was when we did a GET request to your specified callback URL: https://breez.fun/lnurlpay/roys/invoice.) Your server did not produce an invoice, thus the zap failed. We recommend that you use a cloud-based Lightning node which is optimized for Nostr zaps, to get your zaps working.

The Daniel 🖖 9mo ago

What amount did you test with?

Misty Breez currently has a 1000 sat minimum, but I’m hearing that will be reduced significantly soon.

Rizful.com 9mo ago

We tested 1 satoshi payments. I just zapped you one satoshi now. It might have been a temporary/intermittent issue ...?

The Daniel 🖖 9mo ago

Your zap to me worked because I’m using my own node. The one to nostr:npub1ey6qdmvzcgcsr883m9nspzz0mm037l26xtardzcskfsvc6gc7jssm9szvp using Misty Breez would not have generated an invoice because it was too low to accept.

David Coen 9mo ago

I don't think it's a matter of "believing in Lightning".

Paul is a bit skeptical about reliability and has self-custody as a priority, that's why we strongly opposed previous lightning solutions that were custodial.

I respect his point of view.

Edge remains open source, so PRs are very welcome.

Also, you don't need to use shitcoins it you use Edge! Imagine your edge account as a client-side encrypted package where you can collect seed phrases (aka wallets) and maybe in the future ever more things.

You can have Bitcoin-only accounts with as many Bitcoin wallets as you wish.

That's how I use my accounts.

The Daniel 🖖 9mo ago

That’s fine. I’ve moved on to using bitcoin-only wallets. And I agree with the custodial criticism. Exodus just ditched Wallet of Satoshi probably for the same reason. That said, I hope you guys will take a new look at newer technologies that have emerged in the last two years including what Breez is doing with the SDK and Alby with NWC. Both of those are geared toward self custody.

David Coen 9mo ago

Totally!

BitBees 9mo ago

So zappable ⚡️⚡️⚡️

Rizful.com (zap tester) 9mo ago

Testing zap receipts for this note… we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at pay@davidcoen.it, over a period of 9 minutes. Six of the zaps were successfully paid... Please check for 6 satoshis received. Problem: we found that your lightning address server **did not** produce any zap receipts. This means that nobody else could see see that you got zapped... no number appears next to the ⚡icon after zapping.... also FYI... your server at davidcoen.it is responsible for creating your zap invoices, and we found that it responded slowly... invoice generation took an average of 5308ms (5.3 seconds). We consider this slow... generally, zap invoices should be created in under one second. We recommend that you use a cloud-based Lightning node to get more reliable zaps.