I baited you with the title. It's not.
I know everyone recommends this and that wallet for XYZ reasons. I'm here today to briefly shill Phoenix Wallet as a hot onchain/LN wallet for noobs or even lazy power users. This might be interesting if you have never used it OR you used it anytime before a couple of weeks ago. If you are in the latter group, your experience is now outdated.
Okay, you might have heard a lot of noise recently about Phoenix and the new splicing stuff and how awesome splicing is. It is, but I'm gonna skip the technical bit today and present stuff from the user POV.
Okay, so what's the deal? Since Phoenix 2.0 started to use splicing, this is the cool stuff:
- You can send and receive onchain sats. You simply pay the miner fees when sending. That's it.
- You can send and receive through Lightning. Usual LN fees (the proper super low ones, not the stupid high ones from Muun and the like). I can pay a 10,000 sats (~3$) beer through LN and the fee will be around ~40 sats (roughly, one cent).
- You only see and have one balance. Everything you have is both spendable onchain and through Lightning. No need to juggle to balances and go around swapping like an idiot.
- The backup is a 12 word seedphrase. You know the drill. The wallet is noncustodial and you hold your own keys.
Feels like nothing? Well, to me, it feels like a gift from God. Giving a complete noob a wallet in 2023 before this option came around was a drama. You have to deal with a monster matrix of feature combinations, onchain vs lightning, custodial vs noncustodial, normal seedphrases vs crazy recovery schemes, etc. And no wallet crossed all the checks. Muun was the wallet that so far came closer to having it all, but it had its issues (weird backup approach, crazy fees for LN, lack of transparency on how certain features worked).
Now Phoenix has finally done it. The noobie installs it. Writes down 12 words. You send him his first sats through onchain or LN, whatever you prefer. He can then send it out again through onchain or lightning with reasonable fees for each option. All non-custodial and with a great UX.
I'm dramatically pumped about this. It's going to be such a great tool for onboarding people. And also as a personal wallet, even if you are an experienced node runner.
I would like to leave with a call to action. If you haven't tried Phoenix 2.0, please, do. And once you have, spread the message and show it to newbies so that they avoid other worse options (Muun? Already discussed. WoS? Custodial. Bluewallet? Two different balances for onchain and lightning).
I only use muun as onchain wallet as I use phoenix as lightning wallet.