Your lightning channels just became so much more valuable. ⚡️
This will hopefully be the kick people need to move all payments to lightning and incentivize exchanges to incorporate lightning withdrawals. #bitcoin
Discussion
or just use monero and don't worry about anything
I’ve been doing this for a few months but I’m basically a beginner. How do you get Bitcoin to a lightning wallet (from an exchange or from a cold wallet) without being exposed to the on chain fees of moving the bitcoin? I’ve seen several people mention what you’re talking about but it seems that there is a limitation of actually getting the BTC to the lightning wallet to avoid fee exposure. I understand that fees should be less once transactions are on lightening (although I had one zap yesterday that was 1000 sats and the muun fee was 4900 sats…although that’s uncommon).
Using Muun is your first problem - they do submarine swaps and isn’t real lightning so fees are astronomical. You’ll always be exposed to on chain fees while on chain. You have to run a node and open lighting channels from your on-chain balance. Once on lightning, those channels theoretically can be open forever. If you’re using custodial wallets for now then I would swap to Wallet of Satoshi. Some people will recommend Phoenix too but I haven’t played with it yet. Blitz wallet is a way to run a node on your phone. Otherwise check out plebnet.org for node running.
BTW. Where do you go to learn the nuance of things like whether a wallet isn’t really using lightening?
Muun released that info on Twitter a couple years ago. You learn the nuances by asking questions, following good people on here, going to meetups, hop in a bitcoin spaces, podcasts, plebnet.org, and by making lots of mistakes.
Muun tries to simplify by having one address to send and receive to lightning or basechain wallets. When fees are high muun gets exposed but not really using lightning. It's a workaround for ease of use.
Phoenix and Breez are running lightning nodes on your phone. They are cool but there is a learning curve. We are still in the very early days of this and seeing the speed of lightning payments is super exciting.
I completely misunderstood that app until today. I tried to move 10,000 sats to try a Phoenix wallet and the fee was so big (131,000 sats) that it wouldn’t do it bc i lacked funds! Possibly similarly bad I deposited $25 usd into strike to get some quick sats to play with Phoenix and Strike only gave me 9000 instead of 90000 sats. I still haven’t heard back from them regarding why that happened.
Yikes, that’s a lot of sats! If you don’t mind waiting (potentially a long time) usually you can set a lower fee manually. 
BTW. I think I have to correct my misinterpretation of the sats strike sent me. They send me 0.0009032 and I interpreted it as they shorted me. I thought this bc the last decimal was missing and bc I had visually compared it to my last 25 dollar order of 0.00090914. Not that you care but I didn’t want to let it slip that I made a mistake.
As far as on-chain fees from a custodian, use Swan, Strike, or Fold. They pay the on-chain fees.
I’d also add…the muun fee for this 1000 sat zap was 7000 sats!
Insane. We call this “bitcoin tuition fees.” 😂 Drop me an invoice and I’ll pay it back. Change your custodial tipping wallet to Wallet of Satoshi.
Thank you!!!! I’ll switch and the. Zap you when I get a better wallet. This is a new rabbit hole for me.
muun has its place, but not for zaps.
Wallet of Satoshi is the simplest for receiving zaps, Zebedee works well too but its more than just a custodial lightning wallet so it adds layers of complexity.
Eventually we should all be moving to non-custodial lightning wallets but they are overly complicated for normies to set that up for zaps.
In the meantime don't keep too many funds on the custodians , and its simple enough on a mobile device to occasionally move WoS sats over to something like Phoenix wallet.
I’m mostly zapping others so yeah muun has shown to be a major drawback the last 2 days. I’ve read that Phoenix is a lightning node on your phone. Their fees seem relatively straightforward except for their “on-the-fly channel creation” fee. I’d hope the wallet notifies you when this happens but muun doesn’t stop and notify you of fees when you zap on nostr so I’ll probably have to play with it to see what happens. Interesting. Thank you.
I usually zap with Phoenix but I receive zaps with Zebedee.
the fees are for setting up channels which the non custodial wallets need to do. You can turn off on the fly channel creation but then some payments might fail. These are some of the "pain points" or bad UX of the non-custodial wallets. There is a lot more to know and a lot more to do and cost, but this comes at increased sovereignty.
Thank you!!!
I tried sending 10,000 sats to my Phoenix wallet (from my muun) to start the Phoenix wallet and the fee was 140,000 sats (more than I even had in the muun). Unfortunately, I think the muun would have sent the funds (if I had them) without stopping to make sure I was ok with the fees.
Question: I run an Umbrel node. If I open a Lightning channel with one person, that I’ll likely never pay them for anything, what is the benefit?
Is my open channel going to be used to help the whole network as a whole?
The benefits are dependent on who they’re connected with. By opening to one well connected node, you can send payments to almost anyone. You can also receive payments if there are sats on their side. If you want to be a routing node (not for everyone) then you’ll need a bunch of well connected channels.