Nice guide! soon we will make this easier, with the ability to top up isolated app balances from within Alby Hub, and also to generate basic lightning addresses for isolated apps. That way, when you onboard someone they do not have to immediately sign up for an Alby Account.

NWC is actually a big part of Alby Hub, not just for the self-custodial aspect but the idea of seamlessly connecting your node to all your apps you use. "Bring your own wallet" to many apps, similar to the "Bring your own client" idea we see in Nostr and Podcasting.

We are seeing a trend over time that more and more apps are integrating lightning, and rather than having separate inbuilt wallets per app, we see the ability for apps to seamlessly connect to your wallet as a superpower.

Soon Alby Hub will show more stats about usage across apps - for example in the transaction list you can already see what apps make what payments. Alby Hub will really show what is possible with open source programmable money.

@bumi worked on this for Phoenixd (https://github.com/getAlby/hub/blob/master/scripts/linux-x86_64/phoenixd/README.md) and there is also a dedicated Alby Hub Phoenixd for Umbrel. For LND, this is already the case for Umbrel and Start9 and is the default install. Start9 will also support picking between LND and LDK at startup without having to configure anything else.

But yes, we would recommend the default backend (LDK) for most people unless they already have a lightning node.

I guess it's the 354 sats channel reserve for Megalith channels. You can see it on the "Node" page inside Alby Hub.

1.7 has been released now with the Friends & Family app, so do try it when you get the chance! it'll be even easier as the Alby Go mobile app becomes generally available, as this is the simplest wallet interface to use as an onboarded family member or friend.

Hi, to answer some of your questions:

Thanks very much!

For the logs, you'd have to change the log level. This will be difficult currently in Alby Cloud, but if you run Alby Hub self-hosted you can change the LDK_LOG_LEVEL environment variable (e.g. LDK_LOG_LEVEL=1 to enable trace logs).

I really appreciate that, thanks.

What do you mean by the wallet being locked? this does not sound good!

In this case, due to such a rapid jump in fees, there was a big difference between fee estimates for different block confirmation targets, and different node implementations used different confirmation targets for the fees.

We have a workaround in place for Alby Hub as we run a blended fee estimator, so this particular force close issue will not happen again.

I don't believe it's a channel size issue, and Alby Hub users have full control over their channel management. You can open channels with whoever you want. If you decide to buy a channel with an LSP, then yes we help users there to make things simple to get started.

Also, if you don't use the wallet any more and have no channels, you can import the seed into Sparrow wallet and send the sats out from there (only recommended if you are not actively using Alby Hub)

Sorry about this. The withdraw function a bit broken (it didn't set aside enough fees to pay the onchain transaction) and will be fixed in 1.6.0 (released on github) which should also go out to Alby Cloud in the next few days.

We publish the 13194 event to announce what capabilities the wallet service supports, but this is done only once for the entire service.

The get_info command however is specific to the app connection, and can have a different list of commands based on the permissions granted to that app.

It takes work to bundle it. For now we did the simplest and see if people use it. We would be happy for a contribution, Alby Hub is open source.

I think so. Your bounty looks great and well thought out! I think using NWC will create a much more seamless integration.

There is some NWC support in https://github.com/Kukks/NNostr which is written in C# - maybe this helps a developer to implement it.

Also, you could use Alby Hub's new isolated apps feature to actually give all players an embedded wallet (basically subaccounts).

I'd be happy to chat with you about this, feel free to email me at roland@getalby.com

You can connect Alby Hub to your existing LND node. Alby Hub works on Start9 and Umbrel

native app: 2 weeks desktop: already possible with Alby Hub :-)

Definitely that Alby Hub focuses on being the one wallet you need, connected to all your apps. We're totally re-thinking what a wallet is. Like Zeus, Alby Hub is completely open and doesn't restrict what channels you can open (unlike Phoenix which is a closed system). Unlike Zeus, Alby Hub can run 24/7.

You can connect Alby Hub to Zeus and Olympus LSP from Zeus is one of the LSPs that you can choose to buy receiving capacity from! We are good friends with Zeus and totally recommend their wallet :-)

You need to pay for your own channels and liquidity, but you might get some liquidity as part of the Alby Cloud subscription package if you choose this option

Margarine, processed cheese, low fat milk, vegetable oil, tofu, soy/almond milk

Atlas Shrugged

That’s possible if you run Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) yourself (it’s all open source) There’s an umbrel app for it if you use Umbrel