Thread

I just tried, with several amounts, to topup my bitrefill account - but it just won't do. Already having a not so good mood aside, this does not feel like the "lightning fast and easy to use Bitcoin" that is promised. Fun for nostr, thats for sure - but apparently not worth it for anything outside of it. image

Replies (14)

When I started running my CLN node I took these kind of failures as a sign that my connectivity with the network had to improve ie. I needed new channels. Today I dont remeber the last time a payment failed. If you don't want to do this, open a channel with an LSP.
How many channels, good peers? If you have 3 small channels to shitty raspberry pi Tor nodes it will be unreliable. But the problem in this case is the user, not Lighting. If you want reliable, fast and self custodial Lightning try Phoenix.
↩ replying to Felix
Poor excuse to blame these things on users. Good engineering (KISS principle) and UX are laughably bad and not well thought out on LN. Ingwie seems above average in his technical knowledge and I always see him and many others struggling with it. The average person is never going to do all these technical gymnastics. Lightning is hot garbage. Time to scrap it and figure something else out.
↩ replying to Saberhagen The Nameless
Retarded take, there are well engineered lightning wallets for end users, but a pure lightning node like CLN or LND needs to expose the raw stuff and is not built for ease of use in regards to simple payments. Its built as a powerful tool to interact with the lightning network in all possible ways. Saying CLN is not user friendly enough is like saying the back end software of your bank is not user friendly enough (which they hire engenieers for)
↩ replying to npub1tcek...jmky
Yes phoenix runs on their (Acinq's) implementation called Eclair. This is a very reliable and easy to use setup. But if you want to self host some good channels to highly connected peers (like the Acinq node) really help with reliability. Also Tor really makes things unreliable, which is a Tor problem, not a Lightning problem as you could run everything on clearnet too.
Electrum, and previously obw on mobile wallets have worked well for me. Have previously had own clightning node set up but that definitely felt like a lot of work for a worse experience, at least for the amount of effort I was prepared to put in.
↩ replying to npub1t39l...0fey
Exactly my mood. I can not bring myself to trust a custodial solution, at all, because I do not see this as the real purpose of even holding any sats, BTC or whatever (unless it's a conversion service like Bitrefill where it makes sense to have a temporary custodial wallet to convert out from). But man do I wish CLN was a little... better. Cryptic messages, only JSON output on the CLI (I am not a maschine...) and only Zeus seems to support it, at all, via a plugin, that requires you now to disable an internal plugin, further complicating things. I WISH I had gone with LND. There is so much more support for that out there than CLN, like a LOT.