>  With Ark, you lose your funds automatically if you go offline

That's not necessary. Ark implementations can (and should) treat that circumstance as an IOU, similar to ecash. They can also go on chain (potentially as unconfirmed transaction(s) that the owner can decide to mine at their leisure).

petertodd

The difference between Lightning and Ark explains this design choice.

With Lightning, your channel stays open indefinitely, and you can only lose funds if your channel peer cheats while you are offline for the duration of your timelock.

With Ark, you lose your funds automatically if you go offline without continuously refreshing your timelock with a VTXO swap.

tl:dr, Lightning users can only lose funds to an active attacker + negligence, while Ark users can lose funds to negligence alone (hence the email contact).

AskSN

bitcoin

lightning

Would you use a lightning wallet that requires you to provide an email address?

Scoresby

The difference between Lightning and Ark explains this design choice.

With Lightning, your channel stays open indefinitely, and you can only lose funds if your channel peer cheats while you are offline for the duration of your timelock.

With Ark, you lose your funds automatically if you go offline without continuously refreshing your timelock with a VTXO swap.

tl:dr, Lightning users can only lose funds to an active attacker + negligence, while Ark users can lose funds to negligence alone (hence the email contact).