I thought it was very clear in my original post that I already hated altcoins and heavily suspected that the parts of DeFi I ignored were also bullshit... Now with supertestnet's reply this is no longer just a suspicion

Second time supertestnet comes up and blesses me with the ultimate answer. 100% clear now, thanks!

Based

Valid use cases indeed but they can all already be done on Bitcoin right? Maybe I was not clear with my original wording. When I used the "DeFi" term, what I had in mind was specifically what is happening on the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem that can't be found on Bitcoin.

As you can tell I'm really just looking for anything useful that Ethereum does that could not be done on Bitcoin

Well, do you know of any DeFi application that is actually useful and where the decentralization is justified? Which application(s) do you have in mind with your bank/central party example? I have a hunch that such things could be done on Bitcoin too, but Im interested to read more

I don't see a convincing argument for the hypothetical massive shakeout once rates are cut. We also need to take into account that the market is becoming smarter over time: the mind-games of the Fed are less and less effective as years pass.

Anything can happen but on average you're better off holding. I would agree with the "don't buy on margin" advice however

Thanks a lot that 100% cleared my misunderstandings. Btw GJ on the song on twitter 😁

My pleasure friend! 🤝

This Muun blog post was super informative, as well as this Phoenix blog post.

I don't think this convoluted Kraken -> Muun -> hardware wallet strategy is going to be worth it in the long run. That's because it's exploiting both:

Don't think they really can, it's a 2 of 2 multi-sig with one key inaccessible to them

Probably subsidized by users doing the opposite of what I'm doing: depositing on L1 which costs nothing for Muun, then withdrawing on L2 which Muun can tax

Interesting, thanks! Yes I'm loving the wallet right now, which is normal since I'm literally being a parasite to them with my specific use case 😄

Maybe they could somehow combine the "real L2" missing part with the existing submarine swap features which are awesome. That could help them be sustainably profitable as I suspect Phoenix is right now

In my use case I'm withdrawing thousands worth of USD to my hardware wallet (want large UTXO for future-proofing high fees). In Phoenix, I'd have to pay 1% of that for liquidity. And this 1% liquidity fee would need to be done every time because when you send an L1 from Phoenix this reduces your liquidity (splice-out). So it would be very expensive to use Phoenix on such large transactions (that's not what L2 is for after all)

I can say that they make 0 money if you withdraw from them on L1 (I checked on the blockchain and my entire fee went to the miner). So I would assume that they only make money if you withdraw from them on L2 but they lose money on users like me.

So they only win when someone uses it send L2 payments. But since it's not a real Lightning wallet I feel like this would not be a good choice anyway: just use a real L2 wallet instead of paying high L1-like fees! So I don't see how their business model would work long-term...

Update: Muun refuses incoming Lightning TX when L1 fees are high. This kinda confirms that they do lose money on every deposit because they pay miners every time. I'll simply use the normal Kraken withdrawal instead in those cases.

So Muun never loses too much money at once, but I still do not get when they win money...

But I checked the blockchain and the 4 transactions are there on L1!

It's far more logical that Muun payed for them: Kraken would not want to encourage this convoluted usecase which allows me to avoid paying them the current 0.0002btc (13usd) L1 withdrawal fee.