734 sats \ 30 replies \ @Jonathan_Adly 5 Feb 2023 \ on: Muun wallet is bloating the chain with submarine swaps bitcoin
Muun does a valuable service as a first step from exchange to wallet for lots of people. It was my first wallet out of exchange and served its purpose as a bridge to Trezor quite well.
Perhaps unpopular opinion, but I would take this “bloating” over people keeping there coins at coinbase and binance. An imperfect solution; to an imperfect world.
Phoenix, Blixt, and Breez are all an actual lightning wallet that really work. That's the kind of solution we should be steering users towards.
Right now, on the Google Play Store Muun wallet describes itself as "Muun: Bitcoin Lightning Wallet".
The fact is they're not a Lightning wallet. They're an on-chain wallet that can use swaps to also receive and pay Lightning invoices. And that means they're subject to all the costs of on chain payments. Which Muun users find out the hard way every time fees are high.
I know for a fact that Muun's dishonesty is turning people away from Lightning, and Bitcoin, because I've personally had people tell me that Lightning was too expensive to be worthwhile because they used Muun and every "Lightning" transaction they did cost as much as an onchain payment. Because it was an on chain payment!
Muun are bad actors who deserve to be pushed out of the community. Stop making excuses for them.
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My experience with muun and its users is different from yours. All of the muun users I've ever talked to were satisfied with the experience. Muun is fast, reliable, and (usually) cheap, and their user interface is much simpler than competing "real" lightning wallets. It's not only a great "first wallet," I recommend muun to almost everyone, I only recommend something else to people who specifically want a more advanced wallet with more features, customization, and control.
It seems to me that about one day of every month has high fees and muun's user experience on that day, if you happen to use it on that day, is poor. But 29 out of 30 days, fees are low and muun works like a charm. I think it's a net positive for its users even in its current state, and there's no reason they can't shift to being a "real" lightning wallet over time, as the need arises. They'll probably have to because I suspect their current revenue model is not sustainable in the long term.
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Go back a few months where we had full blocks. We had many people saying lightning sucks because they were paying $5 in sats for muun fees. And muun was literally crying to core devs trying to make them change the software so they can keep doing broken things.
Muun works in the same way that random "fast" shitcoins work - no competition or use on the base chain. I wouldn't call it something to praise.
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Lol muun is not “easier” than WoS. Thats the first lightning wallet people should be introduced too. Especially normies.
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My dream is for Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix to merge: custodial until you have enough money to make it worthwhile to open a channel.
This could be implemented as an entirely automatic process, with users able to continue to send and receive the whole time. Unfortunately Phoenix has already said they while they would like to have this model, they aren't comfortable due to the fact that they'd be a custodian, and in the EU, that has a lot of legal baggage.
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My dream is for Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix to merge: custodial until you have enough money to make it worthwhile to open a channel.
Yes, exactly.
This is the plan I have coming for Blixt.
With the 0conf channel support in lnd (and other implementations), it's possible to provide a "custodial" channel by just not ever broadcasting the channel opening transaction.
This is quite neat, because there's no need to do a fully custodial solution (BlueWallet, WoS), just utilize LN normal channels, but make it trusted.
This way people can get onboarded Blixt custodially.
I cannot open a channel for small amount like 1000 sats, right, and I don't think it matters if it's custodial when it's just a small amount.
But eventually when the user has proven they actually use the wallet, it's reasonable to let them have a real channel.
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Awesome!
FWIW, Blixt is the main Lightning wallet I use. Though I use it for a totally different reason: I exclusively open private Lightning channels to my own Lightning node. I hope you are able to maintain this functionality. :)
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That's great to hear!
Yes, I plan to maintain all power user stuff (and keep improving it).
My understanding is that it's somewhat popular for users to connect to their own bitcoin and lightning nodes.
Though the LSP features will ofc likely only work together with Blixt Node (or you'll have to self-host the LSP software (Dunder LSP, Lightning Box)).
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I gotta try this
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My dream is for Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix to merge: custodial until you have enough money to make it worthwhile to open a channel.
You described OBW with hosted channels.
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Phoenix is already a custodian. I doubt what they have is always going to fly under the radar. Create an on chain address on Phoenix and you'll see that it comes directly from their servers.
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There's a good argument that the time scale involved in getting a new channel isn't really a custodial arrangement. That's akin to claiming a money exchange booth is also a custodian because they physically have your money for a minute or two while they count out the foreign currency they're about to give you.
Very different circumstances to something like Wallet of Satoshi, who has had full control of the $5 I've had on my WoS wallet for the last few months.
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“Simpler” i mean
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That's even less true
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There are many types of "muun users":
- clueless noobs, that are just following somebody else saying "use muun"
- bitcoiners that know what they are doing and use Muun when they need a swap (some of these don't really know the "dark" practices of Muun)
- researchers, testers, that use Muun as testing ground
- fanatics followers of Muun that don't want to hear anything
Is not about "muun is working like a charm"... is about HOW is working. Is a wrong model.
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This is spot on. Muun works like "a charm" until it doesn't. Their model is putting them AND the users out of control. It won't work like this. Users and muun will have a bad awakening at some point in the future. They need to change
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I am astonished by the big number of "privacy advocates" pushing noobs to use Muun.
But NONE of these are talking about how Muun is managing the xpubs of each Muun user.
NONE of Muun users are in control of those xpubs. Muun servers are.
Meanwhile these "privacy advocates" are screaming all day, not your keys, not your bitcoins. Damn it, xpub ARE your public keys and if somebody else know them you are screwed, they can scan all your movements.
YOU CANNOT EXPORT OR CONTROL XPUBS IN MUUN.
And Muun is linked to your Google Play account - that means they can also link it to your IMEI.
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could you elaborate on these dark practices?
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submarine swaps instead of simply LN channels.
Submarine swaps are not meant to be used as payments. Are simply swaps in/out into LN channels, when is needed more liquidity
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Oh I misunderstood your previous comment!
I thought you said that an user can leverage the fact that muum is using submarine swaps through some dark pratices.
But what you called dark pratices are those of muum wallet itself by doing these swaps.
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Yes, many of muun users don't even know how that app works. Only few really knows that muun actually is doing submarine swaps all the time.
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Submarine swaps are not meant to be used as payments
What else can you use them for?
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I disagree that the facts support Muun driving users away. My personal experience was exactly opposite. Never wanted to bother with LN until I saw the LN invoices flying on nostr and Muun made it dead easy to get started. Since, I have moved to other LN wallet, but it was a great tool to get started.
Most users will never run their own lighting node. Simple wins. Let the free market decide what belongs on the blockchain.
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Until recently, I had been a happy user for a couple of years. I've recommended Muun to many CEX bitcoiners who knew nothing about Lightning. The onboarding was very easy given the double tab bitcoin/lightning. I also liked their seed backup approach that was exposing the limits of BIP39. I've only once experienced exagerated fees.
Nevertheless, I think they've stayed behind, like for example with LNURL-Pay, and my go-to recommendation now is WalletofSatoshi.
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Muun es una billetera, nadie custodia tu dinero
WalletofSatoshi es un banco, la empresa controla tu dinero
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Oh yeah? Please show me you are in total control of that xpub from Muun...
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You are new into this.
Please read and learn
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/lightning-wallets-comparison
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/getting-started-ln
Simple advice: never have an opinion on something if you do not know what are you talking about.
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Love that last sentence my man
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awesome wallet comparison, thank you!
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