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Some online merchants I pay in Bitcoin still only accept on-chain payments, and opening channels on Lightning can sometimes be very expensive. How do you deal with this when the mempool gets very hot? Do you use Liquid? or a custodial Lightning wallet like WoS?
Don't use P2PKH or P2SH addresses.
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If a merchant only accepts onchain, there is not much to do when the mempool is clogged but to suffer.
Outside of answering your specific question:
  • Find a merchant that uses lightning, convince your current merchant to use lighting, etc. Find a way towards Lightning. It probably helps if you make it explicit to that merchant that you are moving your business elsewhere because he doesn't accept lightning.
  • Be wise and get your UTXOs nicely arranged when fees are low.
  • Be wise and get your Lightning ready when fees are low.
As you see, it's mostly about moving to lightning and getting ready when the mempool is friendly.
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If the merchant only accepts on-chain payments, there isn't much you can do besides bite the bullet and pay the high fees. You could do a PayJoin but i don't think it would make much difference.
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Best to be prepared for high fees by having a few LN channels & a small amount of liquid (to refill LN channels). If you don't want to run a LN node some mobile LN wallets like electrum, Phoenix or blixt have worked well for me.
I'd personally wait for the fees to come down a bit to open LN channels. Fee's usually come in waves so I think they'll eventually come down a bit in the next few weeks or months.
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