I'm not arguing for custodial solutions, but given the current state, WoS is basically the only wallet I'm actually using along with Strike, when I need to pay an invoice. I don't have any significant funds in any of those custodial wallets so I don't worry about loosing it, but I do worry about everything centralizing on WoS.
Are there any good alternatives, even custodial?
More context:
- Breez rarely works on my iOS phone (past months just constantly crashing), Android works better but not reliable
- blixt I have to manage channels which is still too much time
- SBW is gone
- BlueWallet custodial is gone
- Muun is in trouble, too high fees
- Zeus + Umbrel with Tailscale is still nightmare to maintain (I have to manage channels and it stops working every once in a while)
One word-Phoenix.
It just works. Except I should have funded a bigger channel from the start.
Can you ELI5 the reason?
Phoenix is only for people who already got lots of sats imo.
Trying... How does Phoenix work? It pretends I'm receiving sats over LN without opening any channels or having any balance in the wallet. Sounds like Muun. Can you tell me more?
AFAIK Phoenix opens channel when you do first receive of funds, and it is ok with zeroconf here.
You open a channel with your first transaction. Look at the channels menu tab to see it.
Phoenix at the first replenishment of the balance opens the channel. It is advisable to open a channel immediately for a large amount, since a fee of 3000 sat is charged for opening a channel. And if the liquidity is not large enough, then it may happen that the channels will be opened more often and for each opening of a new channel, you will again have to pay 3,000 sat.
You can top up on-chain (it’s a little expensive now) or from another LN wallet.
This is a very good solution, and non-custodial.
The first incoming TXT have to be bigger than 10.000 SATS, and from here they will charge a 3000 SATS fee for opening a channel.
Sent 30k sats and Phoenix says 27k and its still pending so probably waiting for something to get confirmed on-chain
3k fee to open first channel. It's recommended you open a big first channel. Oh well. I did the same thing
So first transaction will open a channel for me?
I'm trying to wrap my head around how Phoenix is non-custodial.
I understand you own the keys, but it connects to their node instead of you running your own.
Now, what would happen if ACINQ (the company) was suddenly wiped out off the face of the planet and their nodes disappeared and their mobile app stopped working? Would you still be able to force close the channel and withdraw your sats?
From the Phoenix faq:
"Phoenix is trust-minimized, but not trustless. Wise people know that there is no such thing as trustless and that it's all a matter of trade-offs.
The following operations require trust:
channel opening (until the funding tx is confirmed)
swaps (you pay upfront, and then our node does the swap)
You can configure Phoenix to use your own Electrum server to watch the Blockchain and monitor your channels. This significantly reduces your dependency on third parties to secure your wallet.
For a more detailed overview of the trade-offs, see our blog post."
Thanks. As for my exact question, I've found the answer:
If ACINQ disappears, you have to go to your Phoenix wallet (don't uninstall it until you've recovered your funds!) and use the "force close channels" feature. After 5 days your channels will be closed and the funds will appear in your on-chain wallet, which you can restore using your 12 word seed phrase.
All that assuming the mobile app does what it says it does (and it's open source, so has many people's eyes on it). The app stores static channel backups, which allow you to close the channels.
CoinOS.io -- it is a custodial Bitcoin wallet. Pretty much similar to WoS, (free of any verification/KYC) but is web only.
I think their customer target is merchant / point-of-sale, but if every one of us considers that we ARE merchants, (sometimes I accept Bitcoin from you and I sometimes I pay you), then their UI decisions (e.g., requiring a PIN to see the balance) make more sense.
There is a 0.1% fee when you deposit via LN and then withdraw on-chain, ... and vice-versa.
They only show a single BTC balance on the account, I think. So you don't have an LN balance separate from an on-chain balance, so I don't know how you would mix on-chain with LN without having a fee charged nearly all the time. I would probably create a separate account for my on-chain usage, and do LN only on my main account.
I've been using them for a couple years. (The wallet before they pivoted to being PoS-first approach is now called "Classic", and separate balance there ... ( Classic.coinos.io .. where you even could have a L-BTC / Liquid account, and balance ).
They do often have service issues though, like currently their fee estimates on LN withdrawal seems off. Solution for now seems to be to not withdraw the last 100 sats or so, and it will work as expected. And sending to SN seems to error without successdul LN payment, oddly. Not sure why.
And they used to have outages more frequent, but now that the split between CoinOS and Classic CoinOS, CoinOs has has been more reliable, as far as closer to being able to sign in and withdraw or deposit, 24/7.
It has really been quite useful, to me.
Thank you! I totally forgot CoinOS. I think its very useful to have a web wallet available.
Go with Zeus + Umbrel. If Tailscale is giving you troubles, try out Lightning Node Connect (LNC). Install the Lightning Terminal app in your Umbrel, fire up the app, and connect Zeus to it with LNC. Running your own lightning node to use lightning is the true self sovereign way. You do have to manage channels and inbound/outbound liquidity by running your node though.
If you don’t want to manage channels and channel liquidity; like many others said in their replies, Phoenix is a good option.
I had it working but somehow it got lost. I got Zeus+Umbrel working again. But still I have to manage the channels, which is pain.
afaik there are some tools to help auto balance channels for you
I am in the ZEUS + Umbrel camp. My current set up. Just open one channel make a large payment or swap out and boom works extremely well.
I also had issues with tailscale. I guess a bug was not allowing me to access my node outside of my home network but recent updates fixed that issue for me.
LNC with lightning labs seem to work well for some. LNC used to work for me but now it doesn’t.
Still no ez button solutions to this problem but current solutions are effective if you can stomach the technical issues.
With that said keep an eye out for BitKit. What they are building seems very user friendly with self custody as the base principal for the services they hope to deliver
What do you use for managing channels on Umbrel?
Thunderhub when it was a routing node
. Now I just manage the channel from the lightning app in umbrel
I'd like to see more development done on OBW. I think it is highly under rated & has the potential to be the non custodial WoS.
Using WoS has the best experience in terms of speed, low fees, & appearance. So I still use it to onboard newbies
Zeus + Umbrel with LNC?
stacker.news
Of course! How could I forget that one!!!
Zeus + a Sovran Pro
Nice! Didn't know about Sovran
https://sovransystems.com/
Thanks and glad you know now.
Blink wallet
https://blink.sv/
WOS is king ... i dont care if its custodial or not (i have little stack of sats on LN so I dont care)
Phoenix seems to be what you need.
OBW
Just one, PHOENIX, don't worry about channels, a non-custodial solution, allow payments via invoice, lnurl, address, just try it, you justs have to open the channel for the biggest amount you can, bcause a minimum fee of 3k SATs needed, but its fine cause you can adjust the fee of your own tx them in some cases and that all, enjoy
I use Phoenix on my Android.
Phoenix seems good.
BlueWallet with GetAlby works like a charm for custodial wallets. Note that they have an extension that makes everything more awesome, but you don't need to install it to get a wallet.
I like that BlueWallet can be installed directly from an apk, and GetAlby takes care of everything. You just import the GA wallet into BW.
Great for a quick simple lightning wallet.
GetAlby and Zeus 💪
I just finished a video tutorial about Phoenix wallet for my youtube channel.
Phoenix its a NON Custodial Lightning Wallet.
Very user friendly.
The creation of channels is very smooth.
Take a look of the web site and DYOR
https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq
Why about phoenix?
first use try to create a big channel with them, and after that you just use it and refill it.
Just use primal or ZBD and send it to a hardware wallet
Mutiny wallet.
Get the Zeus beta which gives you a Lightning address and it’s fully non-custodial.
Would love to try our PWA.
www.walletano.com/wallet/wallet.html
It's a multi wallet and we have both custodial and self-custodial wallet types.
Even darthcoin mentioned us. https://github.com/Walletano/Walletano/issues/1
Plus, we have a lot of cool features and FOSS like: Corporate E-Mail to Lightning Address (https://github.com/Walletano/Walletano-Email-to-Lightning) + Send Sats to e-mail (https://medium.com/@walletano/send-bitcoin-by-e-mail-yes-via-walletano-1b3f0ce68f0).
hehehe issue no.1 is by me 😂😂😂
Like for SN too https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/1
and some others...
case you're looking for custodial wallets (like WoS), I've seen two new ones launch recently lifpay.me, and walletano; I have not used them.
Blink is better as WoS doesnt have stablesats
Muun Wallet you can skip the high fees if you move less than 1.000 sats every time (for exampe 999 sats) that's how I manage to take them out from there. I also tried to move then to Fountain and I had low fees with 30.000 sats but it only worked once.
What exactly is the problem that you want to solve?
Happy to look into any issue you have with Breez. Just send us details to contact@breez.technology.
I can set you on BlueWallet with my node, works like a charm 😉
Problem with random nodes are:
I prefer Walletano.com, both custodial and self-custodial.
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I thought they shut SBW down. How is OBW different? Is it still working?
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