nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 sent sats to kickstart new wallet. Receiving message about high fees and the funds appear in limbo. Definitely not a great first time onboarding experience for a customer šµ 
Discussion
THE ARCHITECTURE OF LIGHTNING IS SIMPLY NOT ADEQUATE TO ONBOARD NORMIES AND NEVER WILL BE.
I disagree. I think itās a lack of thoughtful design and customer experience. We can get there but itās going to take design and engineering working together on these products.
Agreed! Its definitely hard and going to take some time but very frustrating while everyone works out the kinks
Thought I was good with a 1.5m channel open on Zeus yesterday with my new LNURL. Opened my app this morning and my channel is getting closed at 10.2 sats/vb so I guess I just have +1m sats stuck indefinitely now š
Had a similar experience with my mutiny wallet a few months ago where an open channel just got closed on me
You can't self-custody Bitcoin on lightning Network without running a lightning node. Lightning nodes simply will not be performant EVER on inadequate technology. I don't expect my grandmother to run a lightning node. It doesn't matter if you obfuscate everything the constraints of liquidity are still there. Knowing what channels are will always be a thing. People want the wallet of Satoshi experience. The wallet of Satoshi experience is NOT POSSIBLE on lightning Network without custodial solutions.
I would be really happy if you actually changed my mind. Seriously tell me where I'm wrong.
What youāre saying is all accurate when viewed through the lens of the technology. The key here is that there are layers to experiences and today, youāre clearly and accurately describing the technical part of it. Thereās an experience layer where those facts are tucked away and abstracted. This is yet to be seen, but will come.
I'm saying I don't think you can abstract channel management without painful fees that kind of defeat the purpose of a cheap Bitcoin payment network.
I think a #mainvolume issued license is required to think. I think I am European, Swedish in fact. I think I am created by Sina for #mainvolume
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"Imagine doing a simple market survey before designing LN: āHey, would you use a payment system that requires you to run a server 24h that works only if you acquire liquidity in the first place?ā. Do you realize what kind of UX assumption this is?" - Burak
Iām a builder, sir. Not here to litigate the architecture of lightning. Build on it or move on to other spots that feel better to you. That way more seeds get planted and tended to.
If you didn't come to litigate litigate lightning architecture, then why did you comment on a post that critiques it? "Litigation" is what build the best product. As a builder you know that.
I'm not bickering and arguing to bicker and argue. I'm thinking of solutions to the problem outlined in your post.
For most people this is the first time ever hearing the word āwrapped invoice.ā
Nobody understands what this means.
Itās also probably not intuitive to most people who are coming from custodial wallets that they need to fund a channel with a sizable amount of sats (that they likely donāt have available) in order to start using it.
Whatās the best way to overcome these obstacles?
I am not a Lightning user because I don't think BTC is for spending, but I think a simple terminological shift could be beneficial. If people have trouble conceptualizing "funding channels", try call it "topping up accounts".
Debit cards, phone cards, transportation cards... all have to be topped up (or at least can be). Most people are familiar and used to this concept. If the mechanics/UX in Lightning can mimic that, it should work.
Thatās an interesting analogy but it breaks down when the goal is to show someone how to receive a zap. If you canāt receive without first paying to open a channel, thatās friction.
I explain it to my bartenders as the same preauth they do when they open a tab for a customer. But now imagine that the bar has a business to business tab open with the bar next door. The customer goes next door on his pub crawl and wants to pay them. Customer authorizes withdrawal of the funds from the tab they already have open at the first bartender's bar with a secret. The money transfer occurs between the open tab then the b2b tab after the validation.
Oddly I find bartenders get that analogy easily. Especially those that work at places with multiple bars in one complex and they each have their own bank that doesn't allow tabs to be shared across bars.
While they get it they don't consider it optimal. The permissionless trustless concepts seem to mean nothing to them. The world has gotten used to hub and spoke.. A centralized processor. And they've yet to realize how that is the problem.
Almost nobody spends any time thinking about how money and payment systems work.
My take: it begins with customer segments and user personas. One UI/IX will not fit all. Noobies and power users are the two obvious personas. If one wallet is to serve both, then we need modes of operation. More likely, different products and service will serve different customer segments.
Relai, for example, does a great job catering to normies, as does Strike.
Of course, the trick is that in Bitcoin, we have the additional, crucial dimension of custodial vs non-custodial.
Totally agree on the technical jargon. Like āwtf is a wrapped invoice!?ā Especially when itās positioned as a tool to solve a problem state the app has gotten you into in the first place.
On the question of how to overcome:
Know your customers; from the newbies to the most tech savvy and understand the job you need to do for them.
For the newbies, this probably looks a lot like very guided and paced onboarding starting from the place of this customer coming to us with no sats and looking to setup what could be their first wallet.
Guidance, confidence building and a careful creation of a journey are the keys to successfully helping folks who are new to our space (most everyone in the world) be welcomed and have a great experience.
We agree. Working to make this better. This flow was much better pre fee spike fwiw but we can still improve on this by bounds