pull down to refresh

This week I've been playing around a bit with this working Ark protocol on Signet. It wasn't a deep dive down the Ark rabbit hole, just some superficial observations. There are still a few things to be decided on like the refresh period and the fees, but I thought it gives us a taste of what using an Ark will be like when it's live.
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They have a nice guide with a straight forward walk through the installation, creating a wallet, getting some signet sats, boarding the Ark, paying a lightning invoice and then going back onchain. It's all in command line so I ended up having a few issues... I've had some experience with using Phoenixd so it wasn't completely new. I think it was that some of the terms like "board" and "offboard" took some getting used to, as the commands change depending whether your sats are offline or onchain. I'm sure having a GUI with visuals on where your sats sit will dissolve this issue. Boarding along with a refresh allowed offchain sats to be instantly spendable via lightning which was cool! Off-boarding or sending to an onchain address required a wait for some block confirmations.
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Receiving and sending LN payments through Ark without an upper limit (like a LN channel) sounds appealing. If they manage to get a large user base it could be a large gain in privacy. Transacting within the Ark between people and businesses could be very cheap and instant. I wonder if this might be a great wallet for NWC...?
I keep thinking that it feels similar to using Liquid as a resting asset and lightning to send or receive with a swap service like Boltz. I have not used Aqua but this is something that they automate. They're different in structure but might have a similar feel.
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The fees to offboard and to refresh will be interesting to see. Will this be something bitcoiners don't mind paying for? If the cost is too high or the time interval too short, I don't think it will get much interest. Unless of course there's another benefit to using Ark that I haven't yet heard.
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This is what I'd like to research some more:
  • The custody trade-offs and the unilateral exit.
  • What happens to the UTXO's under an ASP management? (consolidate?)
  • How do they pay out the LN invoice? (Do they also run a LN node?)
  • Why do they need to charge for the refresh?
  • How some of these OP codes improve ARK.
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Has anyone else on SN tested this out?
large gain in privacy
It's literally a centralized swap, to and from their shadowchain shitcoin, and thus a massive privacy liability for Lightning if it were facilitate a meaningful percentage of transaction flows. It's surveillance tech designed to to attack Lightning.
The fees to offboard
If you can afford to off-board you can afford a Lightning channel without the trustodial shenanigans run by scammers.
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Did you experience your VTXO expiring?
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86 sats \ 5 replies \ @OT OP 18h
No. I saw that it had an expiry at a certain block height. I think it was around 1 month.
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Yup that’s how it goes one month then POOF money vanished
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79 sats \ 3 replies \ @OT OP 15h
Lol, I'm sure it won't be that easy to run away with our precious sats.
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It’s baked into the protocol
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74 sats \ 1 reply \ @pakovm 6h
That's why you have things like Ark Notes, which are basically a reminder for the ASP that you have done money with them.
Refreshing could be solved with covenants or APO, so users wouldn't need to connect to refresh because the refresh tx could be pre-enforced as just another spending path in Bitcoin in the case of covenants, or the user could sign a PSBT for any amount and any fee rate in the case of APO.
42 sats \ 1 reply \ @4dcfa2e179 23h
Great insights! Ark definitely seems promising, especially with the potential for cheap, private, off-chain transactions. I'm also curious how the refresh fee model will evolve, could make or break user adoption.
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a melting ice cube sats. not holding my breath. the devs are working on this because and while dumb VCs bankroll this crap.
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