Muun's claims of being a Lightning wallet are dishonest: costs $0.5 to send $5 \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Muun's claims of being a Lightning wallet are dishonest: costs $0.5 to send $5 twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1592532859616915456

873 sats \ 18 comments \ @petertodd 15 Nov 2022 bitcoin

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481 sats \ 0 replies \ @jeff 15 Nov 2022

@petertodd you're absolutely right, but in this context, I think intent matters.

The intent of their omissions (what you call a "lie") is to abstract. I don't think it's malicious intent to deceive or steal.

They are trying to abstract away on-chain and LN fees.

It's a hard problem.

If/when solved, the UX will/could be better than any other wallet.

They are obviously trying.

293 sats \ 2 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 15 Nov 2022

They need to be a lot more transparent, in many regards really, but also specifically on fees. Your fee could have been due to:

your previous debt to muun (yes they have debt and debt consolidation events)
actual LN fees
what muun charges you in fees
the 2 on chain transactions required for every payment or receive

Muun has been exploited before with 0 conf double spends and I don't think the fee here came from any of that. But they do need to increase the on chain fees or the two 0 conf tx's would fall out of the mempool and never get mined, making it way easier to double spend.

250 sats \ 1 reply \ @petertodd OP 15 Nov 2022

The reason why the fee is so high is because due to high mempool demand, normal transaction fees are about $0.5 It's as simple as that.

As I mentioned further in the thread, I've tested this over and over again on a wallet that has had plenty of funds in it for well over a week, plenty of time for any confirmations. All non-trivial Lightning payments with Muun charge a mining fee, because under the hood an actual transaction has to be made. For trivial payments if low enough value ($1) they appear to just operate on trust.

280 sats \ 0 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 15 Nov 2022

Yup, not sure what it's at now, but with low mempools that limit was around 20k sats. If you make a number of payments under that value, it's all trust. Then when you finally hit a big enough payment or go over 20k, you pay the fee for all the previous ones. You could use their recovery tool to get those funds back on chain before it gets to that point. There's several areas where Muun literally lies about your balance in the app too.

253 sats \ 0 replies \ @theinstagibbs 15 Nov 2022

The opaqueness of their model is the most frustrating thing. I was unable to get technical details on how things work, and it turns out under the hood it's relying on a lot of trust.

65 sats \ 0 replies \ @joelklabo 16 Nov 2022

I had finally convinced one of my ETH-loving friends to pay me back for a beer with lightning. He asked what wallet to download and I said Muun, just because I had heard about it being so easy to use. He did and sent me 10 bucks or whatever. But, he had this super high fee and immediately wrote lightning off as BS. Do not use this wallet, stupid expensive.