Subnostr

lightning is NOT bitcoin.

lightning is a seperate network, a centralized layer on top of bitcoin.

the billionaires operating lightning want you to think that it is bitcoin. michael saylor, the ex twitter guy, caty wood all pushing lightning making it look like bitcoin.

last year i opened an umbrel node, wrote down the seed and funded it. the computer crashed and i installed a new distro. with bitcoin this would not create any problem. you put the seed words into any bitcoin app and voila your funds are restored no matter what hardware or what software you use. that is what i thought when i used umbrel.

but this does not work with lightning. you put in your seed words into umbrel and it restores your node. but it does not restore your channels. now they have a backup of your channels integrated into umbrel but this does not seem to work when you close the channel before the money arrives onchain. they have bugs in their system. it is broken causing customers to lose funds.

last year i went to the umbrel forum asking for help to retrieve my funds. one programmer there told me that i had done everything wrong and everything was my fault.

this is a typical reaction of bad programmer who develop a faulty system. accusing the user, the customer , if it does not work or if it is made too complicated to use.

i have not done anything wrong. i have installed umbrel, opened a channel and funded it. i was aware that umbrel is experimental and they even tell you that you can lose your funds.

be very careful. lightning is not bitcoin. you can lose your funds easily

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Discussion

dr.fred 2y ago

here is the post from last year, full of accusations and personal insults even accusing me of not telling the truth. here the full post, verify it on umbrel forum. i did not reply anything, posted the channel id, all information i had and still got zero support:

DarthCoin

Apr '22

First of all, seems that you start running a node without reading and learning anything about how LN works or at least how a LN node have to be managed. That’s the biggest mistake all new users are doing.

We’ve posted a lot of guides, right here on this forum, in the Guides section 2, for you guys, to read them, BEFORE start playing around with funds. But seems that many do not have that patience to read. It would save you a lot of trouble if you read first.

A lot of links to documentation and tutorials were posted just to give you, as a new user, more info and knowledge about what are you going to do and learn more about LN. With even more video tutorials here.

A MUST start guide is also this one dedicated to new users: Getting started with Umbrel, where is explained step by step what should do a new Umbrel user.

A dedicated troubleshooting guide for Umbrel users to debug and diagnose issues they have BEFORE doing any stupid things.

A special guide about how to recover your funds from a dead node, in 8 ways, depending on each situation you are.

So, to recap what you did…(as far I can understand from your confusing post).

you didn’t wait for the node to be 100% synced and also totally ready to open LN channels. WRONG

you send from another LN wallet to your “lightning address”. WRONG. That is your nodeURI not an address where to send sats. Is not even possible to send sats to that address, your wallet will simply say is not a valid LN invoice. So this part seems to be fake or you are not saying all you did.

So your OS crashed (ok, shit happen all the time), but you restored with the seed and you didn’t mentioned if you also used the channels.backup file. So again… WRONG, if you had someway funds in LN channels, without that backup, is impossible to recover your funds.

What LN wallet on the phone you are talking about? If your node was dead, how that you still have shown funds in that wallet app? If the node is dead, you will not be able to see anything in any app on the phone (if was connected to your node).

Who has your funds? You and only you can have them, but if you do not have the right wallet open, then you will never see them.

So please explain more, because the whole story doesn’t add up.

Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

Bitcoin on lightning channels is Bitcoin.

Lightning implemetations are still going through their paces but we're at the tail end of #reckless. It's fairly safe with backups but edge cases of issues exist. If you have backups of each state change then you should be able to recover funds. If you rely solely on a node package to do the backups for you, then probably not.

There is no single lightning network. There can be separate ones. It's decentralized but in any decentralized network that attains popularity there will be centralized hub custodians making it easy to use but not operate for those that don't want to mess with self sovereign for every use case.

While Umbrel and other node packages try to provide a one stop shop or GUI setup it really helps to have an understanding of Linux and filesystems and the lightning implementation itself to sort out issues.

dr.fred 2y ago

the backup for bitcoin is the seed. if you use bitcoin for many years, you get used of that. remember the seed or write it down somewhere and you are covered

for lightning the seed is NOT the backup.

this is irritating and costs a lot of people a lot of money

Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

The seed is for onchain funds of you only. Not for the multisig wallet transactions established for channels. That's documented and the reason to backup

dr.fred 2y ago

from the funding wallet i have requested a closing of the channel and a refund of my money. the wallet shows the amount as refundable, shows the correct value, says channel shutting down and even asked to where. i was told it can take 14 days, it takes longer than a year now, nothing happened.

lightning is broken. i would not recommend it to anyone. only for very small micro payments where it does not matter

Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

Do you have the closing transaction(s) or their id(s) ?

Anon 2y ago

Agreed this is why i dont store funds on lightening on my own node

Pelican6 2y ago

I run an Umbrel node. It is improving but is still not a simple thing. I still 😬 every time I have to do an update. I still find it fascinating and love the fact I can ZAP from my own node from anywhere on the planet but there is a risk of loss.

Wouldn’t your channels eventually force close and you get most of your funds back?