With transaction fees being so low right now, would it be a good idea to open lightning channels on wallets like Pheonix or Blitz? I would like to eventually give these wallets to my kids but what are the chances these companies close the lightning channel in the future?
Discussion
If you're giving bitcoin to your kids or sorting for long-term, don't keep it in a lightning wallet/channel. Put it in an on-chain address using a wallet like Aqua etc.
Oh they have btc in cold storage, I was thinking more about having a lighting channel for each of them to be able to transact cheaply in the next 10 years.
Nope. The chances that happening with a random lightning node as your peer is so low you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning while being bit by a shark under a full moon.
Only way to do that imo successfully, is to run two of your own lightning nodes, and open a channel between them just for yourself.
Would you recommend Alby hub for this or should one just not worry too much about managing lighting channels? Perhaps ecash, liquid or other implementations will be good enough in the future for micropayments.
The dirty secret is we might actually blow up lightning and move to something else. Who knows.
I'd say for now;
• use your Lightning node as a family node
• give your kids an LNBits/Alby/BTCPay/etc. account for them to stack/spend
• ecash would be great (run your own mint on your node [too easy with LNBits]) and give them that
- today's ecash is basically offline, more private lightning
When their balance gets above ~100k sats, use Boltz to swap that lightning, to a UTXO 💜
Now if I could manage my lightning wallet offline with my #coldcard that would be sweet.
In short;
- yes, open channels
- yes, channels have probability to close
To keep channels open, you must incentivize the channel peer to keep your channel open.
Best ways to incentivize channel stays open is;
1) constant activity
2) well balanced (best to keep most, if not all of your sats on your side, in case it does close you get your UTXO back)
3) if you can, communicate with channel peer (Nostr, TG, X, etc.)
These are not guarantees it'll stay open forever, just increases your likelihood it will
A channel per device is wasteful, it'll be too low volume to be sustainable and will get closed
For kids, share a family node over Nostr with lightning.pub and ShockWallet
Unfortunately I believe the only way to ensure something like this would be to run your own lightning node with enough routing that channel peers want to keep a channel with you.
IMO long term the only thing I'd worry about is on-chain and their UTXO management. Todays scaling solutions probably won't be tomorrow's. I'm confident that there will always be a way to transact cheaply, but hard to say what that looks like 10yrs from now. Only thing I'd be willing to bet is that there will be a path from on-chain to that scaling solution
Thanks! Yeah, that's what I'm thinking right now, worry just about the 1st layer for them, solutions should come in time.