I’d love to hear more about your lifestyle. What country are you in?

Living off my Lightning node just isn’t feasible here in the US. I run a ton of my expenses through BitRefill (cell phone, groceries, restaurants). I also pay Bitcoin for tech expenses (servers, email, domains, VPN) but stuff like paying rent etc. is darned near impossible except in cases where landlord is young and Bitcoin-friendly.

I’m getting better at demanding *payment* in Bitcoin, but that’s only because I’m mostly retired and work only when it suits me. Most clients just aren’t open to it. 😕

How’re you able to live off Bitcoin?

I’m with him philosophically, although I’ll likely never get used to Europeans pluralizing the word math.

Truth. Even Bitcoin maxis like me typically make an exception for Monero and find it useful. The risk with holding XMR in large quantities is that every time a CEX delists it to satisfy some government thug, the price drops suddenly and violently. The practical use of XMR on DEXs like Bisque though is undeniable.

Just to follow up on this... I've had others try to send to my LN address (anon@anon.dev) and it works just fine, which indicates the Alby Hub LNUrl endpoint is working successfully. Good news. Love the product!

Thanks for trying, Roland. I've been looking for someone to test with. I just sent you 1,000 sats, which seemed to work just fine. When you try to send some back to me, what error message do you receive?

I'm 100% certain the error is on my side but not sure where. There's plenty of inbound liquidity and I can receive from other sources. Apparently it's just the inbound zaps that don't work. I'd be open to any suggestions.

No joke. I almost completely gave up on Alby because of the ridiculous CAPTCHA puzzles. It’s costing them users.

My thoughts after using Alby Hub for Windows to connect to an LND node running on the same machine....

(1) There seems to be an issue when LND uses self-signed certificates, which is the default behavior. AlbyHub complains that the certificate isn't trusted, and this happens even if the self-signed certificate is added to the Trusted Root Authorities folder in the Windows Certs console. What I ended up doing was creating a dedicated DNS entry for LND (lnd.mydomain.com), and then getting a free SSL cert from one of the countless free providers, including that DNS name on the certificate. I forced LND to use that certificate instead of the self-signed one and then referenced it in the AlbyHub setup. That seemed to clear up the error.

(2) If you make any errors during the initial setup of AlbyHub, even something simple like a misspelling or forgetting into include the Grpc port suffix (:10009), you can't correct it. You'll end up getting an error along the lines of "the product has already been setup." I believe I sent you a screenshot. To fix this, you have to close the app, delete the alby data folder from both %appdata% and %localappdata%, restart the app, and try the configuration again.

(3) Since this is a UI app, not a service, you'll probably want the default behavior to minimize the app to the system tray when the user clicks the close button, rather than terminating the app. That's the way long-running apps usually behave if they have a UI (see bitcoin-core UI, Telegram, Signal, etc. for example). It's what we Windows users expect. :)

(4) It would be nice to see BTC quantities expressed in BTC instead of sats, or at least provide the option to toggle. Not a deal-killer, just a personal preference issue. Dealing with unwieldy sat quantities (e.g. 78,300,000 sats) instead of more reasonable BTC quantities (e.g. .783 BTC) presents an extra mental conversion hurdle, albeit a small one, that users have to jump through when figuring out how much they want to send or receive. I'm guessing the decision to use sats has something to do with GetAlby's history as a preferred method of "zapping" NOSTR users, which is typically done in micro quantities, like 50 sats at a time?

I’m using Alby Hub as the LNUrl endpoint for my self-hosted LND node, but it’s not clear how Alby generates any revenue from such activity.

What is Alby’s revenue model?

#alby #bitcoin #albyhub

I’m here to lurk, listen, and learn.

#introductions