Nostr Web Client

Yesterday I finally set up my Alby Hub, after much nagging by Alby. I'm running it on my permanently online machine where I also run my Bitcoin node.

All I know is that after pushing the button to "establish your first LN channel", suddenly my balance went 18+k sats down (network fees, I guess? No explanation, no options, nothing)

Also I now seem to have to be on top of "balancing my channel" (or what?) with whoever they picked for me, because I had no option to pick anything...

I don't see any upside whatsoever to any of this shit, or at the very least the onboarding process and the explanations about what the fuck is going on at every step suck massively.

For the record, I've always had ZERO interest in Lightning. I don't think it makes any sense, and I don't think it's Bitcoin. I did it just to have direct experience, so I can bitch about it.

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Discussion

bumi 1y ago

any recommendation on how to make it better? your main issue was that the costs have been unclear to you?

hh 1y ago

I had zero input in the whole process. I wasn't given an explanation about anything. I couldn't set the fee rates, and I didn't get a warning about the cost. I wasn't able to pick a channel partner, so I have no idea who they are, what they do, how they operate etc. I don't know what "balancing the channel" entails and I can't find an obvious way to look into that from Alby Hub.

All that would be general things. In my particular case, the unexpected 18k sat hit would have been a deal breaker if I had known in advance, because my only LN sats are the ones I get from Nostr zaps, so a cost of 18k has basically eaten up a big chunk of what I had and, ironically, that is going to make me use LN less now, since I have very little money to pay for stuff.

bumi 1y ago

hmm. what explanation ware you missing? about how lightning works?

you can choose the channel partner in “advanced” - most people like the default and don’t care.

Typical people who send and receive sats don’t need to care about some balancing.

but if you don’t want to use lighting then at this stage I guess it’s not for you. :(

siggy47 1y ago

I think something went wrong. You didn't need to open a channel. The Alby hub just connects to your node. It seems you may have been setting up a second, stand alone node.

hh 1y ago

I've no idea. They try so hard to "make it easy" that they don't give any help.

I do have my Hub running, with several peers connected to it and I can see the channel open. And my extension wallet and Alby Go wallets are connect to it too and I can see the shared balance in both.

hh 1y ago

Forgot to say - I just followed the 5 steps in the set up. One of them was "open your first channel". I clicked on it, and it did that.

The Beave 1y ago

Yeah... That's about what I think about lightning. It's not at all "good."

hh 1y ago

How the fuck can setting up a channel cost 16+k sats? And what does "balancing" entail and what will happen if I don't give a fuck and don't pay any mind to it?

Chriso🇺🇸🇦🇺🦘⚡️ 1y ago

For Alby Hub to work, you need a channel to send and receive funds. It was my understanding that if you already had established channels, then you wouldn’t need to open a channel for it to function. Sounds like you didn’t have any channels opened so your sats went to purchase liquidity rather than actually open a channel. What is your sending and receiving capability? I’d assume it’s more than 18k in sats. This may also be a monthly fee so you might check on that and get out now if you have no interest in Lightning.

My experience with Alby Hub has been completely different but I had a good idea about how it worked before installing it. I loaded it on a second node and opened a channel from my primary node to the Alby Hub Node and it the only thing it cost was the channel opening fees.

Good luck. Hate to hear you have no interest in Lightning. Still glad to see you here on NOSTR. Have a great day. 🤙🏻☕️

hh 1y ago

Thanks for the concern and good wishes. What do you mean "a monthly fee"? To have a channel open? If that's the case, I'm absolutely undoing this immediately by any means I can -- I may stop using Alby altogether.

Chriso🇺🇸🇦🇺🦘⚡️ 1y ago

This is what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s not the way you set it up. Maybe it was a one time fee to open a channel with one of their LSP’s.

nobody 1y ago

BTC Sessions’ tutorial on Alby hub with Start9 is helpful. And some other resources he has on his channel about setting up a standalone lightning node from scratch and opening channels.

I think some of your concerns will be addressed by gaining an understanding first about how inbound and outbound liquidity work with lightning nodes. You will also learn some background knowledge that will show you how layer 2 technologies work while indeed still remaining Bitcoin.

Lightning is complicated. Lightning development is hard. Rolling out a consumer focused product and providing enough tool tips to fill in users’ knowledge gaps about how lightning even works is unrealistic.

Once you gain some of the background knowledge about Lightning, opening/closing/balancing channels, and recovering your funds in the event that you have a catastrophic issue with your node hardware, you may come to the conclusion that, for the minuscule sat balances most Lightning users are maintaining for sub $100 purchases, Alby’s cloud hosted option for under $10/month is actually a good value if you’re transacting in BTC day to day.

My experience with Lightning has pretty much left me with the impression that it’s best treated like the walk-around cash in your pocket. You have liquidity that will support buying what you need for a day’s outing, but if you lose your billfold or your node goes down, you aren’t going to go hungry. You can just reload an alternate wallet like Speed Wallet from one of your main stacks on chain and keep trucking until you can sort it out.

Being your own bank using a monetary instrument that isn’t constantly losing purchasing power is not easy. You instantly take on the role of bank manager, teller, head of security and head of IT. It’s why most people are quite happy to ignore the inflationary theft and counter party risk of having their life savings in banks and retirement investment accounts.

hh 1y ago

Start9 was a non-starter for me. I did not want to buy another computer just to get StartOS preinstalled, and the one(s) I had available couldn't run StartOS *and* Bitcore simultaneously because as far as I understood during my research, there is no way to have the datafolder on an external drive in StartOS.

I documented my journey to setting up my own Bitcoin node a few months ago, and that was fun too. With Bitcoin I see the point and I value it, so I pushed through all the crap and got it done.

With this, not so much, other than a natural tendency to explore stuff. It's just that the threshold of BS I'm willing to tolerate to simply kill a couple of afternoons during a rainy weekend is limited.