How many software wallets do you have? Is it good to have a few? What are your faves?
What do you think of Exodus Wallet and Phoenix Wallet? If I already have WoS and Muun, is there use in having more?
Discussion
Between those two, you’re fine. 🤙
Exodus never used but multi crypto and don't think it's open source, so no go for me. I use bluewallet for onchain and for LN WoS and Phoenix, Phoenix is non custodial but no LN address thats why I also use WoS. Muun i don't like the their backup and import method.
What don’t you like about Muun backup? Wondering if I should switch to Phoenix.
checkout the special section about muun at the bottom of the article
might be that
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/lightning-wallets-comparison
Great. It says Muun is stealing peoples funds. 🙁
Muun is just a horrible wallet in every way. Don’t make the mistake of even downloading it.
Well my btc is there, now what? Phoenix sounds complex.
Phoenix is a little tricky because you have to pay channel open fees to receive when you first start. It’s not a bad wallet, but it’s useless for zapping. I’d still rather use WoS or LightningTipBot because at least you can talk to the developers here on Nostr. If you want to manage your own sats, run a node. Otherwise just keep a minimal amount in custodial Lightning wallets and the rest in on-chain cold storage.
Got it. I just want a wallet I can rely on and forget about lol. These all seem sketch and complex. Losing funds, paying for service, ugh. Maybe I’ll just figure out paper wallets. I’m a simple guy and this is complicated lol. Happy to be stacking though. Just scared I’ll lose it all.
Lightning it's more tricky than onchain. I personally keep my btc in cold storage and just keep a small amount in WoS, they have your funds but it's ok and the easiest for beginners, if something happens to WoS I'm ok if I loose 10 usd or something. Most ppl here in Nostr go with WoS for some reason. But try a few and check which one you like most, but in my opinion avoid keeping a big ammout in a LN wallet.
I use Phoenix for sending zaps and Lightning Tip Bot for receiving zaps. When I have a good amount of sats built up on the tip bot, I send it over to Phoenix.
It's a little convoluted, but it's how I stay fully self custodial.
I don’t know anything about Muun but the name alone was enough to put me off of it
This hasn’t been my experience at all with Muun.
You experience has been ok?
Mine has been fine. You just have to use each wallet for what it’s good for. Muun isn’t a great lightning wallet. Breez, Phoenix, Wallet of Satoshi are better for lightning. Muun is sort of a hybrid wallet. Your balance is on chain and it uses swaps to send sats from on chain to lightning and vice versa. I’ve seen some others post pretty wild fees, so as always your mileage may vary. I’ve just primarily used it as an on chain wallet for swapping in and out of lightning, and it’s worked well for me for that.
Right. That makes sense. Maybe some are using it in the wrong way. I dont know. Im so new to all this. I was using Muun as a safe way to hold my btc until I get a hardware wallet. People were saying dont store on WoS. I bought my first small amount of btc recently and put it on Muun to be safe. Just looking for a good place for my btc until i figure out hardware wallet.
Wallet of Satoshi is custodial, so it is not wise to keep a substantial amount of sats on it. Up to each person what “substantial” means. Some are okay with more risk than others. For solely on chain mobile wallets I prefer BlueWallet. It gives you much better control over your funds and transactions than Muun. However, BlueWallet doesn’t perform on chain to lightning swaps like Muun does. So if you send from Wallet of Satoshi to BlueWallet on chain, for instance, you will pay whatever swap fee WoS charges. There are other swap services out there too but with all of them the fees vary, which is why I’ve used Muun for that. Best approach is to learn what each wallet is useful for and develop a strategy that works for you.
Piggybacking off this, I’ve found it fairly cost-effective to go from Lightning to Muun for an on-chain swap, then Muun to hardware, where you can set the miner fee.
Agree you have less (no) control over utxo selection with Muun, but since it’s a submarine swap anyway (which I only partially understand) it gives me a sense that privacy is enhanced already. Well worth the slightly higher LN fees to send into Muun!
Lol I used to use Muun as a on-chain to lighting top up service.
Fees made that ridiculous.
Better to use boltz.exchange, fixed float, or some other means.
I believe (and I heard this a lot in heated exchange) that Muun is not a proper Lightning wallet. It’s does some on-chain transactions then does a swap that’s temporarily custodial etc.
I agree I think there are better starter hot wallets out there both on chain and layer 2.
or it's something related to how submarine swaps work i have no idea
don't want to accuse them without knowing how to verify all that
I think its like youre saying, the way they process the submarine swaps with micro utxo sets on chain do something with fee rates with larger amounts of sats on LN and on chain.
Although I'm not technically equipped enough to fully understand what's going on.
I wouldn't call it stealing or unsafe to store sats on, just... something more complicated going on behind the scenes to make it as easy as possible for the user.
Trade offs.
Right. Do you happen to know if there are fees to transfer from Muun to hardware wallet/paper wallet?
Definitely going to be on chain fees. Mine usually sit at around 2000-3000 sats from Phoenix. I've had then go as high as 7000 when I was using muun.
LN to LN wallet muun seems to have lower fees for small transactions and higher for larger transactions in my experience.
But again. I'm not shilling Phoenix. Just my current set up led me to there.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around all this channel liquidity. How many hops. How that all contributes to fees. It's a lot sometimes...
I don’t think i will ever figure it out lol. I just want btc. I can’t deal with all the technical aspects to figure it out. No one will want btc if its this complex.
This aside from government interference is what I perceive to be the biggest hurdle. The centralized on-ramps help people get started but then it doesn’t benefit them in the slightest to keep the “simplistic” perception as they will eventually need to self manage their own coins
Yup. Cant wait for gov to ban all these apps and hardware wallets and make btc illegal lol 😆 Future scares me.
Lol China tried that, foolish to try and replicate their strategy. But people in power will do anything to stay in power
they cant ban
you'll always be able to get to download open source software wallets or build e.g. your own seed signer
they can try to control the supply chain but people will always stay creative and find roundabout ways
only thing is learn to do stuff through vpn and tor .. maybe on dedicated devices; but that's something for in further future
I struggle with this concept as well.
Maybe in our lifetimes it remains a group like anything else, religions, governments, countries, states, borders, cities, demographics, opinions.
Maybe I just found the cult I am willing tk drink the Kool-aid on. 🤔
My fucking spelling is going to be the death of me.
Last time I checked you could backup to a Google drive or something like that, and had to also create some kind of emergency kit and add your email. Email, Google drive for me it's a no, this only works for muun wallet I think, LN interoperability it's not easy but muun backup its too attached to them. In Phoenix you have 12 words seed like onchain btc. It's also not interoperable but it's easier.
Different wallets offer different features. I use those wallets that give me the feutures I’m interested in at any given time. But I try to keep things simple.
True. I’m looking for simple as possible as well. I just want the best wallet to store some btc before hardware wallet arrives.
phoenix 💯
I want to switch. Did you find it complex to use Phoenix?
im gonna try it out today. been procrastinating 😂🤣
but it also has higher fees I've heard
plus you pay them 10k sats initially for their work of managing channels in the background and such
I have to pay them to use their wallet? Sorry this is all too complex for me at this stage. I’m jealous of all you able to understand all of this. Lol
yea maybe dont if your funds are already on muun you gonna have to pay double if switching to phoenix
Makes sense. I initially thought moving btc between wallets didn’t cost anything.
it's all trade-offs
ln.tips to WoS = basically free
with muun you get to easily swap onchain <-> ln
but pay higher fees
with phoenix you get to be self-custodial on phone
but pay initial fee for the service of not having to figure out to manage all the complex stuff
is this also bs? do let me know if so
#[3]
This is the way.
And never forget, only what you are okay losing, on chain cold storage is still thr safest, play with lightning, get comfortable, keep stacking.
Use what suits you and try and keep an eye on these trade offs. You're doing nothing wrong using Muun.
I created a phoenix wallet. How do I pay this fee?
click on receive and it'll give you a message that the funds being transferred should be at least 10k sats
i think it'll deduct 3k sats from it for channel creation..
im about to do it now as well, but i have two questions first im about to post
Youre not so much paying "them" to use the wallet, as the on chain fee to open a multisig channel to use sats on the lightning network.
And as far as I know a lot of these wallet solutions, unless you are directly running your own nodes, are never really fully non custodial.
Hit a wall, retreat and recollect. No shame in that. And I could be wrong. Think of all the progress we've all made from our first BTC transactions off an exchange.
100%
Just spend some time studying them and seeing what features you would like to have in your arsenal.
Then you can decide what wallets you want to have and why.
I've tried to move away from Muun myself recently, despite its ease of use. Still have it ad a backup though.
Currently using Phoenix as my primary LN wallet, with Wallet of Satoshi linked here.
I also have a few stragglers sats in stacker news, Fountain and such for use on those platforms.
The "downside" with Phoenix is you're going to want to open as large a channel as possible the first time for the max amount you would want to hold there. There is a minimum 3000 sat few to open the channel but once it's open it's open until you hit the channel limit. Then a new channel would need to be opened and the minimum fee paid.
So if you use Phoenix make sure to open a channel large enough to suit your needs. And then you can move them back on chain and keep the capacity open. So initial use seems expensive but once it's done it's done.
Other than that use what you are most comfortable with at the time, we all move at our own pace.
Apologies if this is long winded, and I'm sure others have better inputs.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I’m curious to try Phoenix now. I’m worried it sounds complex though. Why did you move away from Muun?
First, sorry for my spelling. Can't seem to overcome autocorrect sneaks.
My gathering is that muun uses some behind the scenes stuff that isn't actually LN but something with submarine swaps and on chain, so the fees seem fine for tiny amounts but can be erratic.
I'll try and find some links to Stacker news articles I was digging through and put them here, and again not trying to dissuade you from muun. I used it a fair bit.
I'm still very much learning and not one to put too much credence in. Just a pleb.
There's a bunch of others but this is one take. So much deep diving and I still know nothing.
I created a phoenix wallet. How do i open a large channel?
Under receive, you can select show a bitcoin address. You should see a QR and this message at the bottom.
This is the fee for opening the lightning channel and why this wallet took me a while to begin using. I opened three small channels, all paying the 3000 sats for opening "$10" channels.
And eventually sent an amount I would like to receive to make it worth the fees before sending back on chain in the future.
So I don't want to tell you to send a huge sum and have something for wrong.
But I'm also pointing out that the fee isn't a scam to simply "use the wallet"
Take your time. Keep looking and wait for someone else's input other than only mine. Please. I don't want to feel responsible for lost funds.
The 12 word recovery is if you need to re-download the wallet, or force close channels you control the key to the on chain address. As far as my understanding goes.
Also note, you are going to likely want to then transact the sats back to your main on chain BTC wallet. Leaving the receiving capacity open for future receiving, then when it gets full move to the on chain address.
Am I missing anything fellow nostriches?