Ran some analytics on zaps on nostr, it's quite terrible...
~95% of users have their lightning address set to a custodial wallet
~91% of all zaps by volume have gone to a custodial wallet
#[0] is the clear winner of 50% of users and 67.5% of volume
Image
Hey, man. Why don’t you, like, go build something to fix that. 😉
When two WoS users zap each other, does a real LN transaction take place? Or is it just an account balance update in the app?
Big fan of WoS, just wondering.
There is nothing horrible to use custodial wallet for small amounts. Does it make sense to pay $10 per month for hosting if your revenue is $0.5? It's all about optionality once WoS stops working the people can change in the address in a second. Also the people that will make their business on it and have higher revenue than they can afford better solution.
UNPOPULAR(?) OPINION: FOR POCKET CHANGE AMOUNTS (LIKE ZAPS) IT’S A FINE TRADEOFF TO USE CUSTODIAL WALLETS IN EXCHANGE FOR A SUPERIOR USER EXPERIENCE.
My wallet being non-custodial is what makes my experience as a user superior. 😉
Do you have any nip57 enabled alternatives?
Satdress Fork by #[5] already support NIP-57 https://github.com/believethehype/satdress
Zap ⚡️ Zap
Running a lightning node is not easy. We already know that.
Who among us was not orange pilled into self custody through some form of custodial exchange?
If you think of it as a stepping stone, it doesn't have to be "terrible."
That's a really bleak outlook.
I'm sure these stats are pretty reflective of reality, but it should be noted that a lot of non-custodial solutions for lightning addresses (eg, LNBits, satdress, etc) don't currently support the sending of zap notes (kind 9735) which might then causes zaps to be under-reported for non-custodial. I'm currently using Ligess for my setup which only started supporting Nostr zap notes a couple weeks ago.
Satdress Fork by #[5] already support NIP-57 https://github.com/believethehype/satdress
wos is simple to use for small amounts, then move to muun, then to something with a propper seed with passphrase and/or to cold storage. No need to complicate for some sats.
I use getalby directed to my own node.
But yes, it is a major area in need of improvement.
Getting all the bitcoin fundamentals down is one thing, lightning still seems a little complicated to run yourself. Liquidity, channels, etc.
Even on Umbrel…
Is a there a good approach for first timers? 🤙🙏
Sort of disagree to call this “terrible” tho. It’s a bunch of people sending/receiving lightning payments. Sending zaps non-custodially is easy. Receiving is more work. Seems limited to plebs that are willing to put into the extra effort until bolt12
If you could get an lnurl from a Phoenix or Breeze wallet, that would be a big step forward. It’s not worth it for me to run a dedicated ln node so I can be sovereign in zapping 15 sats to a shitpost
I would say a few things in response to "its quite terrible":
• This, at least from what I've been using, is 98% because of Lightning Addresses. The pain of hosting your own domain and server is precisely why the internet has become centralized.
• It takes no time at all to withdraw to a wallet in my control, which I do daily. Custodial wallets have been solely for integration with zaps.
• The major problem with custodians is exposure in SIZE, not kind. No one has their life savings zapping around on WoS. The reason we want to avoid custodians isn't a purity test, its about risk. $5 at "risk" is very, very different from $5,000.
• BOLT12, have you heard about BOLT12? I'd like to tell you about BOLT12
If we make it so people have to run their own servers and buy their own domain to receive zaps, then we should expect for the exact same portion of people to do so as those who currently host their own cloud storage & run their own password manager.
*Despite* the reliance on custodial for the singular feature critical to zaps, the staggering drop in the barrier to exit as well as the much more open market for custodial apps is still a world's difference from where we are coming from. I mean shit, the whole zaps universe over here is barely weeks old.
Yes, we can do better & I wish we already had the tools that fix the few major weaknesses here, but I think it's foolish to mistake this as not having made enormous progress in the right direction.
I agree 💯
Using a custodial lightning wallet with enough sats to get you through the day is a lot different than buying Bitcoin on Coinbase and leaving your sats in their custody.
I keep a majority of sats in cold storage, and some sats on a non-custodial hot wallet. When I need more sats for nostr, I move them to WoS in under a minute.
If I get a generous amount of sats on my WoS, I move them to my hot wallet, or usually just zap them all away immediately. I haven’t had a need to move any nostr zaps to cold storage, but it’s all very simple and fast.
I tried, but could not get any other wallet than WoS working, that is, didn’t find a wallet that supports LNURL for a receiving address.
Who cares? zaps are pocket change. I use a custodial wallet on nostr b/c it took 60 seconds to set up. I keep my bitcoin stack in cold storage. The two wallets never interact. What's the problem exactly?
Wen ⚡️ wallet set 🆙?
😂🙏⚡️🤙💜🫂
WOS is a Play Store flashlight app, true Bitcoiners should be ashamed.
I use my own BTCPay server if you wanna help thr stats.
I want to but...
I got 2 zaps a few minutes ago but you are right, I had a problem with my nodd, I couldn't pay for my burger with Bitcoin LN this lunch, my node gavean error twice. Maybe I'm under DoDS attack somehow?
No wonder why most use custodial in that case.
Thanks for trying to zap anyway.
Worked now ⚡
It was me, glad it worked. Zapped twice because the first one Zeus told me that the payment failed so I tried again then both succeeded.
Now I have to try a setup like yours. I was going to wait for Bolt12 but let's experiment a bit until it comes.
Thanks, good luck with your experiment. Do plan to use RaspBlitz, Umbrel (or fork), Elementary OS or install all manually?
GM.
Everyone likes convenience, but considering why 95% of us are here, this is disappointing.
You can do better.
#[0]
Maybe this is why a federated model like liquid is actually better for an L2... All L2's will be inherently more centralizing. That's why they're on L2.
This is a valid concern although I would point to the fact that because Bitcoin and lightning is permission less and open, a centralized player can't take advantage of a monopoly on transactions. If it became censorious or too expensive, a competitor would come take their place rather quickly, thus leaving no incentive to do so in the first place!
It's really amazing tech. People are simple. They respond to incentive. I'm already thinking about making something similar to zaps for the Liquid Network.
You could even do stuff like badges as assets on liquid for instance. Will that be useful? idk, but why not build it and see.
I’m ✋ trying to upgrade the sovereignty of my setup and see it as somewhat of a never ending process ♻️ .
There’s also only so much time in the day. I’m ✋ a noob 🤷 and I’m trying but I’m not getting down on myself either because everything isn’t 💯 immediately.
It’s ☝️ of the reasons I’m so bullish on this 🟣.
Because I’m seeing conversations and topics I’ve never been exposed to 🎧 to podcasts. And I listen to a lot of podcasts about this 🟠.
TL;DR
+ ☝️ to learn more about options I may or may not be 🏃 regarding this 🟠🟣 yet.
Also I figured I’m gonna fuck up 🏃 this 🟣 at some point because I and this 🟣 are so new.
Why would I want to risk all of this 🟠 as a result of that too?
Or at least exposing privacy when I’m learning how important this 🟠🟣 demands.
🫂 that are following ✋.
Please share your thoughts:
#[0]
Dare I say this is a problem with lightning implementations and available hardware altogether? How do we bridge the knowledge gap from me, a kid that grew up building homebrew PCs and pirating games, to you, someone who sounds like they are comfortable and at home sending money around on lightning. I still squeeze my buttcheecks a bit moving money from swan to my trezor.
I think jb55 has a solution for that https://sendsats.lol/ but only works with CLN! 🐶🐾🫡
Maybe that’s a signal to other wallets that perhaps they don’t offer the best UX?
Easy usually wins.
I’d add or 10-100x better improvement wins too.
Based
This does need fixing however it is reliable. I attempted zapping to my lightning node and I guess I don’t have enough channels. A zap was rejected. So I just switched to WOS.
That's what happens when BOLT12 isn't integrated in LN. People use LNURL which isn't integrated in most wallets. It's a choice for wallet makers to integrate as it is on the application level.
Sure, one can set it up via their own node with privacy trade offs.
BOLT12 is on the protocol level.
if only someone was working on a self-custodial lightning wallet that works in your browser 😞
Zaps are very new. What self-sovereign solution supports zaps? BTCPay doesn't yet, right?
I tried a bunch. Couldn’t find non-custodial solution supporting incoming Zaps. Zaps hugely increased custodial LN. Its disappointing
#[1]
Is there a write up somewhere on how to receive non-custodially? I couldn’t figure it out.
You just received one 😁
I run one of the top LN nodes on the network, hold BTC in cold storage but also use WOS for zaps. Why not? It’s quick and easy and I can withdraw if I ever have more than 69420 sats in there at a time.
One of the saddest things I could have read today. 4 key takeaways:
1. This is what happens when we don't properly prioritize solving LN's issues w/ non-custodial usage or prioritize self-sovereign setups, and when we normalize "it's just for small amounts bro"
2. The fact that BOLT 12 hasn't been widely adopted after more than 2 years (or even *implemented* in LND?!?) is depressing. Zaps have to drive BOLT 12 adoption ASAP.
3. Good luck getting all of these non-technical WoS users to migrate to self-sovereign setups now that they've tasted the convenience of trusting someone else entirely, aka PayPal 2.0. Even when we improve self-sovereign setups it will be much harder now to build momentum
4. The fact that #[1] can even do this analysis shows the serious privacy issues with Zaps - let's make private/anon Zaps the default in *all* clients, please
More on BOLT 12 if you're new to the concept:
#[0]
I want BOLT12 as much as anybody. What can the humble plebs do?
Pressure Lightning Labs to actually get their ass in gear and focus on BOLT 12 instead of NFTs.
One of them has generational impact on LN/Bitcoin usage, the other are stupid monkey pictures over LN.
Zaps are inherently not private
Zaps can easily be private, the framework is already there. We can do private Zaps which encrypt all information to the recipients pubkey, hiding comment/sender from the broader network, or we can do anon Zaps which are essentially the same as tips and reveal no information on the sender even to the recipient.
There's no need to reveal to the world our entire financial data to like a post.
There is, it’s part of the signal zaps carry
Zaps can carry plenty of "signal" by just revealing amounts as a skin-in-the-game analog to likes.
I would argue the opposite. The whole reason people are zapping is for social signaling, they want the payment to be public.
Since zaps are trusted on if the payment was actually made, we shouldnt reveal the actual lightning payment and try to protect the user's privacy around all of their other payments that they don't want public.
Zaps are meant to be public. If you want more private, just use invoices or send to LN addresses, it'll never show on nostr.
If anything about zaps on nostr strikes you as “sad” consider an alternative perspective
Lol, ok.
So I should just blindly accept the custodial, transparent status quo and cheer people on for changing database entires in WoS and never even touching LN or Bitcoin?
No, but you can smile and celebrate how far this feature (zaps) has come in just a few months.
And then from this place of positivity, realize that the status quo is 100% due to the difficulties in creating your own lnurl, and with more time people will have a self-custodial solution
I have done both, I've been loving Zaps and cheering them on while also fighting for privacy at the same time.
I can both love a feature and want to see it built with privacy and self-sovereignty in mind from day one.
The longer we wait to think deeply about how we do this in a privacy-preserving way, the less people will do so and the less likely that it is done in a privacy-preserving way at all. We *have* to build from the ground up with privacy in mind.
#BringBackThinkingAdversarially
And also, I want to say that I love your content, and am grateful for all the work you do. Just a difference of perspective :)
chill dawg. wos is no-kyc. of course, adding it to your social media profile kinda defeats the point, but only if you’re using your state identity as your social media identity, which you should not do!
Not going to chill, the more we normalize it the less likely we see better non-custodial solutions.
I was being facetious, good to be concerned but it’s still such a big improvement over fiat equivalents (except cash, of course) that we should also celebrate
Seth I feel you’re screaming into a black hole. I wish you the best with your privacy push on bitcoin but I follow a lot of people in the bitcoin sphere and you’re the only one consistently calling out the lack of privacy. What’s also annoying is the few people who do care about privacy use monero in silence because they’re invested in bitcoins success
There are definitely others, sadly the minority but working on that 😉
Meh. I keep like 20,000 SATs on there. Enough to zap small amounts for a year or two
Wild testing some mentions stuff with Gossip, in production of course :) Because I need to share some notes lets pick up something interesting, for example:
#[1]
An then:
#[2]
More on the matter:
#[0]
Finish.
yikes
I have a lightning node and Zeus connected to it, how do I make zaps work? So far I can't make it work.
Yeah. Had a really interesting conversation with #[3] last night about custodial wallets and sweeping funds regularly.
It’s not ideal but there is an education and/UX gap that needs to be addressed too. Turns out Nostr is an amazing on-ramp to Bitcoin, but we can’t expect people to process it all at once.
Looking forward to seeing what you are working on.
Need one click deployment / easy setup info on some of the options available.
