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468 sats \ 9 replies \ @0330830bf9 2 Nov 2023 \ on: Mutiny wallet - questions to be answered bitcoin
"Self-hostable", sure, great... but if I was going to go through the hassle of setting up my own server for it, why wouldn't I just run a proper remote node to Zeus etc?
The other thing that's very wtf is the reverse proxy. Communication with the network can't be done from a browser context directly and so all traffic has to get routed through their servers over sockets. This creates metadata honeypot that is a disaster for privacy, it's also single point of failure that will be extremely difficult to scale.
This architecture also just doubles down on all the hacky crap that comes with other mobile node wallets that no one is happy with... "muh async payments!", "muh static offers!"
I love to see PWA efforts because obviously fuck app stores, but this is just another example of how bad the state of Lightning wallets is if people pay it any mind. It makes no sense.
"So preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Unless of course the entire point of it was to wash "grant" money through astroturf and make the LDK ecosystem appear to have any relevance?
You're not wrong if you're self hosting the website you could just self host a node. A node is more expensive to run than a website but I do see your point.
We don't get much information from the proxy, all of lightning communication is encrypted and authenticated so we only see who is connected to who and for us it's just users to the LSP.
Mobile lightning still has a lot of ways to go but we think we'll be able to make it 100x better than the lnd on the phone guys. We should be able to run the lightning node in the background and it let it claim payments. All in due time.
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That's all well and fair, but even then, what are the advantages vs. cloud nodes with a leaner remote signing wallet?
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It isn't really leaner. For it to be secure and non-custodial, it requires running a LN state machine on the device (eg VLS). So, for a single node and user, they must run two LN state machines. This increases complexity dramatically.
And, while it might sound simpler on the surface, it does not actually solve the big challenges of mobile non-custodial LN wallets. Offline receive is not solved by this. Multi-app interfaces are not solved by this. Backups are not uniqued solved this. In fact backups are more complex because you have 4 copies of the LN state instead of 2! You have the VLS local copy, the VLS cloud copy, the CLN/Greenlight copy, and the CLN/Greenlight cloud copy.
The only real benefit to the Greenlight model is to bundle up all the various server-based services that are needed for a LN wallet into a single provider, improving dev UX. However, that can be done with the LDK ecosystem too, it just hasn't yet (eg LSP, Esplora, VSS/backups, RGS, probing for payment success). Also, a single provider from either ecosystem weakens security and self-custody nature, as LN state backups ideally are not provided by the LSP.
Also, because the LDK ecosystem supports pathfinding on mobile (made performant with RGS and probing/scoring files), an LDK-based wallet has dramatically better privacy than having every single user payment sitting on Blockstream's servers.
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This confirms then what we knew, self-hosted or at worse uncle Jim hosted, is the most decentralized path forward and these self-custodial in name only mobile nodes still make no sense.
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You're talking about greenlight, which imo is custodial. Unless you're saving every state update locally, then you're trusting everything to the cloud provider. Almost all the complexity with lightning is making sure you have the latest state, so if you're going through the trouble of saving everything on the phone, may as well run it on the phone too
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That's a conflation of trust and custody. Users are trusting you to serve non-malicious code to the device, that's really no different than trusting the greenlight to do the same to their own device, since both are impractical to self-host.
Also isn't LDK's pushing vss state storage as a feature? I thought I had seen somewhere that you were using that / planning to?
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With mutiny if we disappear, the user can recover their funds, with greenlight you cannot, that is the main difference.
We are using VSS but that is for encrypted backups, we always write to the user's device first
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That would not surprise me and I am no defender of Blockstream, but I doubt that's true or will be for long as it's a relatively trivial matter to provide some recovery options.
Good luck in either case. The state of wallets is shit and needs improvement.
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