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You can use Ark in the wild

I saw a post on nostr about Arkade launching their live beta, and decided to try it out.
Arkade is one of the several Ark implementations currently under development. In the past there have been a few mainnet tests of Ark, but I don't think any of these implementations have released a live mainnet beta until today (Second released a signet version in March, but I don't believe they have a publicly available mainnet version).

Creating a wallet

When you go to arkade.money, you are shown a few brief screens that say things about Bitcoin entering a "new dimension" and Ark being "your gateway to a new generation of applications -- all secured by Bitcoin!" Then they prompt you to install the PWA on your home screen.
The next step is to create a wallet.
This only took a second and then I got a familiar screen that looked like pretty much every other wallet I've used: send, receive, balance, and transaction history.

Sending sats to Lightning to Arkade

I decided I would start with my standard micropayments test: how easy is it to send 10 sats into the wallet?
First thing I noticed is that when setting up an invoice to receive is that any amount over 332 sats triggered a little tooltip:
Below this amount displays no tooltip at all. Once I generated the invoice, the wallet displayed a QR, but when I tried to scan the QR with a lightning wallet, the lightning wallet produced an error. It turns out that Arkade was generating an ark invoice and none of my lightning wallets could pay it.
This makes sense, if you think about it: an onchain wallet won't recognize a lightning QR as they are separate networks. Just like sats can't just be sent from an onchain wallet to a lightning wallet, you can't send lightning sats to an ark wallet...unless there is a gateway of some sort.
Arkade must have a gateway because I was able to send 350 sats into my Arkade wallet from a lightning wallet I was using. It deducted a 1 sat fee -- although I'm not sure whether this was the routing fee or a fee from whoever was running the gateway.

Sending sats from Arkade to Lightning

Next I decided to see if I could send sats out of the wallet. I created a 10 sat invoice in my lightning wallet and then clicked send in Arkade. I pasted the invoice into the field here and clicked continue. It produced this error:
It seems like Arkade is trying to use a Boltz swap to send my 10 sats and likely this is uneconomical, and so it produces an error. I increased the amount to 333 sats and was able to successfully make the transaction.

Sending sats inside Ark

Finally, I noticed when I generated a QR for receiving that it showed an ark address. So, I decided to create a second Arkade wallet and see if it could receive a small amount of sats from my first Arkade wallet.
This worked beautifully. Very fast and no errors to send 10 sats from my first Arkade wallet to the second.

Arkade Apps

At the bottom of the screen on my Arkade wallet there are a couple of buttons, one of which is Apps. I clicked this and it showed me this:
It seems like they plan on introducing a few things to use your Ark sats with so that you don't have to just spend all your time getting them in and out of Ark.

Dust, VUTXOs and where my sats are hanging out

Finally, I checked out the Settings area. Clicking About showed me this screen:
I noticed that under the line Dust it says "330 sats". This surprises me because my balance is only 155 sats. 330 is close to the amount (334 sats) I sent to my lightning wallet as a test.
Also confusing to me is where these 155 sats actually are. I doubt that I could unilaterally exit to the chain with 155 sats.
When i clicked on Settings > Advanced > Coin Control I got this screen:
It makes me think Arkade has some solution for holding dust amounts.

Conclusion

I'm intrigued by Ark. It sounds complex, but not necessarily more so than Lightning. Ark does solve the onboarding problem that is present in LIghtning. An Ark user can receive from another Ark user without setting up channels or anything fiddly like that. I'm not really clear how self-sovereign this receiving is for amounts under the dust limit, though.
I'm looking forward to learning more about it.
Avoid dust amounts for now.
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Also, when sending small amounts inside Ark, you see a "pre-confirmed" notice. This is because it's "an offchain balance that needs to participate in a round to inherit Bitcoin security"
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Attack on Bitcoin
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Do see all Ark implementations as an attack, or just Arkade?
I'm not sure that I see it as such any more than ETFs or Treasury companies.
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I'm aware of two, Arkade definitely the more egregious and iirc the creator of the protocol who exploited 0 day against LND a few years ago is with them. They've been the scammiest with their marketing.
Both are ultimately an attack as far as being deceptive and lobbying for covenants.
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206 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 20h
iirc the creator of the protocol who exploited 0 day against LND a few years ago is with them
I heard Burak moved on to other things
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Hmm, disappeared off twitter... most recent tag of note is him signing the CTV petition
Looks like he put out this vaporware nonsense post last year about "Brollups", the domain for the project seems parked now: https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/brollups-bitcoin-native-rollup-design/
Interestingly that was only a few weeks after re-arranging the deck chairs on the titantic re: Ark
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Hahahagah Brollups
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126 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 20h
What's the point of going "offline" into a VUTXO and then come back into LN, aka using again a LN channel liquidity, when the main point of Ark is "to skip LN liquidity issues" ?
For me doesn't make sense. An Ark wallet still depends of a LN node to get out and make payments to the rest of the world.
OK maybe I understand it that is designed to "help" poor losers that get onboard now and have zero sats and can transact "inside" those VUTXOs, without any liquidity management, in the limits of the ASP.
When a Ark user have to pay somebody that only have a LN wallet, SOMEBODY have to have that LN node bridge with liquidity ready, in order to be able to make the swap or whatever is doing. because I do not think is opening LN channels on the fly with those 10 sats you've tried to pay. And using submarine swaps for this, we are back to square one, exactly what we are trying to avoid in payments, because let's be honest, submarine swaps on the fly, in payments is really idiotic and unnecessary.
So I will see this as a big failure, and the bottleneck will be going back to LN.
For me Ark remains the network of dumb and poor people without any UTXO to open a LN channel.
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110 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 20h
My understanding is that Ark promoters are very optimistic and are thinking of it somewhat like Lightning promoters were thinking of LN back in 2018 -- they are predicting a world where lots and lots of people are using Ark. If there are lots of people using Ark, then the new user experience of ark to ark transfers is probably better than the experience of lightning to lightning transfers. Until that point, though, yes, you are correct: Ark relies on LN to reach "everything else" and it feels like an extra step.
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119 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 20h
I have to make a meme with this...
And anybody that comes to say that I am an asshole with the new comers, should STFU. I was praising Bitcoin for over 10+ years and everybody was laughing in my face. Now they tell me that I am a rude asshole because I am telling them the truth in the face: they were idiots not using Bitcoin years and years ago.
They were mumbling around rejecting bitcoin or worse playing with shitcoins and now they want same rights as old adopters and bitching around that they cannot use bitcoin with zero sats.
You get what you fucking deserve: dust and shit.
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Can’t do a 10 sat transaction? Did you try this on mobile?
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133 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 16h
The only way you can do a 10 sat tx is if you spent from arkade to another arkade wallet. As long as you stay on ark, you cab send small, but if you want to do LN to ark, you have to send at least 333 sats
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Ahh okay
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Yes, another fake L2s indeed
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The fees seems reasonable compared to other wallets.
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