That´s why Alby is a client-side only application. We provide more details about the question of security in our FAQs here: https://guides.getalby.com/overall-guide/ But you are right we have to provide an excellent service and constantly earn the trust of our users.

There are a lot of very skilled developers and designers that are helping us to build Alby. Without them, we would not be there, where we are today. We can still get better at coordinating different developer requests and provide more streamlined guidance.

We are thinking about that and would love to support this effort as well as standardize APIs for greater interoperability. Happy to talk about that and discuss the requirements on our Telegram or Slack channel.

That`s a good point. Would you like to see a public roadmap? A part of our roadmap is to build out further connectors to other Lightning wallets. We are also thinking about how Alby can provide a convenient way to acquire sats and try out all these different Lightning apps on the web.

Security is a super important topic for us. There are various levels of security here. First of all the connection from Alby to a wallet. That's one reason why Alby can connect to different backends. This allows you as a user to choose whatever setup you are happy with. For example, depending on your setup you can connect to LND directly or create a special limited account with something like lndhub or lnbits. (btw. we also push the development of a new lndhub implementation for this) Then there is the connection from the website to Alby. Alby always prompts the user before a website can interact with the wallet. Here we plan to have an extensive permission system with detailed control and transparency for the user.

... to strive for interoperability by creating and using open standards.

Given its young state, the Lightning ecosystem has been evolving quickly and that will only accelarate with better tools. Why should we differentiate between Bitcoin and Lightning use cases? They will depend on each other and benefit from its value proposition. Personally, we are just excited about the great number of potential use cases around instant and borderless payments.

What do you think of lqwd company? Looks like they are growing and setting up international routing nodes.

We actually don´t know in detail because we do not track users. Based on conversations with users we see quite a variety of use cases ranging from tipping on social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and individual websites, to accessing Lightning web apps or even developers building and testing their apps.

That´s an exciting idea. Creating a closed loop economy can become a game changer because it so easy to exchange value over the Lightning Network. Actually a lot of building stones are already in place. https://webln.twentyuno.net/scroll can be reverted to pay out sats to website visitors for instance. The sats are collected in your wallet that is connected to Alby and can be spent again on another website. The interesting part here is it is an open system and works with any WebLN enabled wallet.

Yes, that could be an interesting option. If we have confidence that the majority of users appreciate such a feature, we will prioritize it. Conducting a user study could be useful.

We hope you find answers to your questions in our guides: https://guides.getalby.com/overall-guide/ If not, feel free to DM on moritz@getalby.com

We want to bring Lightning to the web. That´s why we keep adding locations where you can use Alby such as Stackoverflow. And that list will increase further. But I am personally also excited about how we can automate payments and make it easier for users to create and manage budgets. That would be another step towards the idea of streaming payments.

Alby does not track and store your usage data. We aim at keeping it as anonymous as possible and are confident that it can stay like this if you use Alby with your own private wallet. In the future, there might be a non-custodial wallet service from Alby. But there could also be services that ask for personal information due to regulatory requirements. But it should be up to the user to decide to use such a service or not.

That is still quite a challenge, indeed, especially when your node runs behind Tor. That´s why we created a companion app that you can download and install locally during the onboarding process on Alby. It serves as a Tor proxy for your remote node and makes use of the browser’s native messaging protocol to securely interact with your browser. No additional configuration is required. That solves a lot of problems. On top of that, we are also looking at other technologies like Lightning Node Connect to see how we can integrate that into Alby.

We are super happy that the whole ecosystem welcomed Alby so openly. Users share feedback and ideas on how to improve. The open-source community of developers, designers, and even content creators is growing. This culture is very important to grow as a whole ecosystem and get better over time. Finally, it is always great to see when another app implements WebLN or when website operator adds a Lightning meta tag to the website to receive sats.

That is our goal. We want and need to bring new people into Bitcoin. I good way to introduce people to bitcoin is through 1) education and 2) building more straightforward onboarding tools. The extension is one of these tools and the user experience is crucial. To provide regular educational content we are operating a blog here: https://blog.getalby.com/

That´s true, we don´t print our own money. And yes even an open-source project like Alby needs regular income to be sustainable and provide reliable user support. We have several projects on our roadmap that we plan to launch over the upcoming months. For example, every user should have seamless access to sats on the Lightning Network. That could become a premium service. But we are also looking into opportunities how we can support publishers and app developers to plug into the Lightning Network and enable them to receive sats from their audience.

We see Lightning as an enabler technology for faster and inexpensive transactions. What happens at the interface to the user is up to apps.

Thanks for this feedback. If you "connect to a website" you allow this particular website to perform certain actions such as requesting an invoice to make payouts to your wallet. As phishing is a problem on the internet Alby protects the user and double-checks before using a website for the first time. So Alby basically acts as an agent on your behalf.

... once we have conquered the web with bitcoin. There are great Lightning apps out there. But going mobile is exciting, indeed. If we think we can create value, we are in.