Muun is fee siphoning attacking any sender to Muun wallet. There is a mandatory hop through a private channel with a fee of +1500ppm.
RoboSats will strictly not route a buyer payout for a net loss. Given that RoboSats trading fees are 0.2%, and it needs to cover the routing fees, RoboSats will never find a suitable route to a Muun wallet user.
We should be careful to analyze the current lightning costs properly before calling economically rational pricing an "attack".
Being a non-custodial lightning mobile wallet during a bear market has costs that are usually overlooked: to provide inbound capacity, as a wallet, you are locking your own money into a depreciating asset, which has a very high financial cost. These locked assets have very low utilization since mobile nodes are not routing third-party payments.
Most lightning wallets and nodes either do not account for these costs or subsidize them. And that's fine if you can spare the money.
At scale, it's just not sustainable.
We can wish that lightning had "almost zero fees" and ignore the actual costs, or we can accept the real costs (both operational and financial), talk about them openly, and get to work on optimizing them down.
Why you need to submit everyone to your submarine-swap service... Make this an in-app service!! And relieve the rest of the people who just need those lightning sats available in the LN itself!
The idea of forced-fees is agains the btc idea! muun charges 2500 ppm or 0.25% just for Muun HOP.
You can measure like this:
Onchain transaction: 1 sat/vb = 500 satoshis (for ANY AMOUNT of bitcoins you wish to spend) - blockchain is empty nowadays... You can have 1 sat/vb confirmed within hours!
If I send 5 million satoshis (0.05 btcs) to someone on giveas a muun invoice: should cost 12,500 satoshis... the usual onchain fees to confirm next block is around 10 sat/vb and thats around 2600 satoshis, it means that by using lightning through Muun which meant to disrupt the high-fee blockchain you end up paying 5 times more fees than the previous one tech!
Muun is fee siphoning attacking any sender to Muun wallet. There is a mandatory hop through a private channel with a fee of +1500ppm.
Dario regarding this. Every time I tried to open a channel to your node, it was immediately closed. Almost as if you in fact did want to monetize your app via the excessive routing fee you charge on the last step. Can you talk about this?
We used to have our node open to anyone's channels!
The problem was that we would have some peers use us as a high-throughput routing node, depleting all liquidity fast. External peers constantly unbalanced channels, worsening Muun users' experience.
For that reason, we decided to optimize for Muun users' payment reliability, and restricted who could open channels to us.
Notice that having a direct connection from your node to ours doesn't lower the costs much. If your node were directly connected to ours, the payment route from your node to a Muun user would be {your node} ---> {muun's node} ---> {muun phone wallet}. Providing inbound liquidity for the last hop is what has really high financial costs, because Muun has to lock its own funds in advance.
Ok, here's where my understanding of the inner workings of muun might be lacking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought there were no channels in a muun wallet and that everything were just UTXO's in my wallet. From what I understood muun's interoperability with the LN was just that, interoperability, supported by submarine swaps.
Now if you say there's muun's capital locked between {muun's node} and {muun phone wallet} then this truly sounds more like a channel. Do you for instance keep a commitment (refund) transaction and might deploy it to get your capital back in case the user becomes unresponsive?
Yes and no. Muun is fully self custodial, that was their goal, and they had to do some workarounds. Imagine if self custody became easier to implement then Muun may change their approach
I keep recommending Muun to most newbies - with the due caveats on costs and decentralization.
Right now, Muun is the only product capable of reliably getting from app installation to receiving 1 dollar over lightning in less than one minute - and this is possible only if the company behind this product can stay profitable.
Yes, you should stop using Muun wallet if you aren't happy with the tradeoffs - which I agree could be more clear upfront. But no, I can't see why this product can't be used to hold a few sats and reduce the friction for new users who want to try LN.
YES. In the actual form and function, Muun is a TERRIBLE wallet.
I am in Bitcoinlandia from 2012 and I used almost ALL wallet apps out there, for testing, for fun, for regular use, for learning.
But I found Muun as one of the most weird and bad wallet app.
I still have lost 100k sats with Muun from 2020.
Why people say is non-custodial, when you NEVER get the mnemonic seed or private keys when you create the wallet?
Those codes that you receive are just fooling you that is "more secure" but in fact are hiding that Muun is generating for you the seed (so they manage it) and in exchange they gave you some random idiotic codes, hard to remember for a noob, instead of English words, that everybody can understand and remember.
That tool for recovery is the most idiotic thing I ever tested to recover a damn BTC wallet. And is not working all the time.
So as it is promoted to be "for new users that don't know anything about Bitcoin"... is a terrible mistake. Is making things even more complicated than it should be.
And please... stop saying that Muun is a LN wallet! IT IS NOT! Is faking the LN transaction and user is never in control of it!
SO YES, P`LEASE STOP USING THIS GARBAGE,until they will come up with a better way.
Lightning used to be a community that discussed issues thoughtfully and gently. We are all putting our hearts into building the best tools we can with this new technology. Let's not be hurtful :)
I'll answer point by point:
I still have lost 100k sats with Muun from 2020.
I'd love to give you a hand if you tell me how it is that you lost those sats. Feel free to contact me directly at dario@muun.com if you want, or point me to a past conversation.
Why people say is non-custodial, when you NEVER get the mnemonic seed or private keys when you create the wallet?
Once you export the emergency kit (a PDF document), you have full access to all the private keys. Both keys are included in the PDF file, encrypted with your recovery code.
Those codes that you receive are just fooling you that is "more secure" but in fact are hiding that Muun is generating for you the seed (so they manage it)
One private key is generated in the phone, and the other private key is generated in the backend. In their emergency kit, the user has a backup of both private keys. Muun never has access to the phone's private key.
Muun doesn't have access to the user's funds at any moment.
and in exchange they gave you some random idiotic codes, hard to remember for a noob, instead of English words, that everybody can understand and remember.
English words are definitely not easy to remember for non-English-speaking users. Bitcoin was supposed to be a global network. The places that need it the most are not English-speaking countries. We are building for them.
And please... stop saying that Muun is a LN wallet! IT IS NOT! Is faking the LN transaction and user is never in control of it!
Muun is not a lightning wallet. Muun is a bitcoin wallet. It allows users to make both on-chain payments and lightning payments with their bitcoins.
With that line of reasoning, these so-called lightning wallets would be "faking" on-chain payments. Which of course they are not. Different architectures have different trade-offs.
I don't know why in this field, some people attacks others people work with so much disrespect.
I understand muun solution is not the best, but come one man... why you need to be an asshole?
The way you talk, only talk about yourself. You can criticize every other wallet with valid points too.
Muun will continue to evolve and improve, but you will keep the same...
(I'm not a muun employee).
I have nothing against Muun guys. They are good guys, only that they had a bad approach building this app.
This is not an attack, this is a warning for all other users that don't know these aspects and to be aware.
Yes, it's garbage, it has outrageous fees and the claim of it being non-custodial is dubious at best. I would recommend SBW instead. (This is not a paid ad, I swear)
Muun I think is good for newbies also have been told and heard wallet of satoshi is if not the premier wallet downloaded it the other day N very smooth ui/ux..saw no one adding recommendations so thought I'd throw in my 1 2 punches haha...Anyways just showed my father how to pay in bitcoin using strike and he couldn't begin to comprehend lol was cool to blow a mind with that magic internet money.
Well that's no good. As much as I like Muun's interface and unified balance, its growing list of vulnerabilities and problems is making me heavily reconsider recommending it to noobs.
I tried other wallets and either their fees are too high or they don't quite work (Breez, Phoenix). If anyone does know and has tested a better alternative, please recommend. Otherwise, I think Muun covers my current needs.
{your node} ---> {muun's node} ---> {muun phone wallet}. Providing inbound liquidity for the last hop is what has really high financial costs, because Muun has to lock its own funds in advance.{muun's node}and{muun phone wallet}then this truly sounds more like a channel. Do you for instance keep a commitment (refund) transaction and might deploy it to get your capital back in case the user becomes unresponsive?