Please pay attention to this experiment, is fun but if people don't know these details it could end up in disaster.

IntroductionIntroduction

In the last 2 weeks I did an experiment that want to share it with you now. Initially was just for me testing various LN addresses and wallets on nostr, but then I thought that some of you may find it useful.

So as some of you know, on nostr you just have to add a LN address in your profile in order to receive zaps for your notes. But that is not the fun part. The fun part is what and which wallet associated with that LN address you are using in order to have full control of those sats and also keep a good level of privacy.

The best way is to use a DECOY wallet. Yes, we all want to have a self-custodial wallet, but in a public place like nostr is better to not show your personal linked domains / nodes / wallets.

Are many ways to use a decoy wallet and I will not enter in those details here. You can read this guide about LN addresses if you want to know more.

Among many other LN addresses I used, for this test purpose I used a https://npub.cash/ LN address.
The site is straight forward linking your nostr npub to a dedicated wallet, so nobody can access it without your nsec.

You can also, optional, you can get a personalized LN address, paying 5k sats for it. So I did for darthcoin@npub.cash, especially for nostr.

I do not like too much ecash cashu, but I consider it an interesting way as a decoy. I keep very few sats in some cashu mints and I've tested some wallets with it, just to know how it works and not being clueless. I do not like to talk about things that I do not know or test myself.

Fun partFun part

So I posted some memes, some comments, some other things, just to get enough zaps. My main goal was to test how to redeem these cashu tokens into self-custody sats.

I got like 245 zaps, that representing 245 tokens. For some of you that don't know, each time you receive sats in form of cashu tokens, it represent a token, like a gift card. Yes... you see your balance displaying 1234 sats, but you don't really know how many tokens (gift cards) you have.

The important part to remember is that for more tokens you have, harder will be to redeem them. Is like a big consolidation of small UTXOs. That's why using cashu on places like nostr, where are mostly small amounts of sats zapped, it can create an issue when the user wants to move them out to another real LN wallet or simply pay somebody else, They will encounter problems when are too many small tokens placed into a payment and the app could crash or simply cannot read that giant token string.

So one day I decided to get out those accumulated sats in the https://npub.cash/ account.
You have only one way out - withdraw all sats into another wallet, being cashu or LN.

It is presenting you a live QR code that contain ALL tokens you received until that moment. That means you will see an animated QR flickering, but in fact is displaying very fast all token QRs to be scanned and redeemed.

It also presenting you a link to cashu wallets page but I tried with almost all of them to scan the QR and none was able to read that giant string.

So I decided to use Zeus, that supports cashu wallets as additional custodial accounts.
And surprise !

In one of my testing Zeus nodes I had an almost empty LN channel, so I decided to use that one to receive all the sats, without importing the mint from npub.cash and dealing again with all those tokens.

I just open Zeus and click on the main screen to scan the QR.

REMINDER: You HAVE TO keep scanning ALL tokens / QRs, so have patience and also look on the top of the screen where it displays how many tokens are scanned, wait patiently until it finishes.

It will bring you all the sats and you will be prompted with 2 options:

• import the mint and the tokens into a new cashu wallet in Zeus
• redeem all sats into self-custody, in this case in one of your LN channels that have enough inbound liquidity.

I choose "self-custody" and after few moments appeared the OK message saying that the redeem was successfully. You can close that screen and go back to your wallet. Check the balance and the tx log. You will see 2 txs: one with the entire balance redeemed (in red) and another one (in green) with the remaining sats redeemed after the melt of the tokens and deducted fees (remember that the melt process end up with a LN payment that carry routing fees).

Aaaand done. All sats were safe in my own custody.
And this process leave no trace. Nobody will be able to know where those were going.

ConclusionConclusion

Do not keep in a cashu wallet too many small tokens. Always redeem them or consolidate them. In the end a cashu wallet is just a gift card.

I hope this fun experiment will be useful for you.