Topic: Opinions on Phoenix Wallet? - page 2. (Read 1406 times)

If I am understanding correctly, you sent coin to ACINQ, and upon this transaction confirming, they opened a LN channel with you that involves you having outbound capacity in the amount of the coin you sent (less any fees they are charging you), and possibly some inbound capacity for you.

If this is true, there is no risk to ACINQ because your "deposit" has already confirmed. Allowing a LN transaction to be processed when the opening transaction is unconfirmed is opening up risk to the counterparty to the channel only, and no one else in the LN network. This is probably a setting that should be set to "disable" by default though.

No. Changing the fee changes the transaction, which means it's a new channel and the current channel disappears.

ViaBTC's transaction accelerator is the only one I know of that works (minimum fee is 10 sat/byte (not vbyte)).

Your funding transaction needs to have a high enough fee to get confirmed before the channel is opened.

LoyceV, thanks for sharing your experience! I'm curious can that transaction be included in a future transaction with a fee high enough to get it confirmed quicker (if they were to ever "need" that)?

I've submitted transactions with fees that are too low and just sit there unconfirmed. I don't personally know how to bump those fees, but I feel like I've read or heard about that being an option.

I'm thinking these are two things that could be part of why you're able to use your Lightning Network channel and "they" aren't too worried about it.

Phoenix has been my lightning network wallet of choice due to low fee experience. The only issue with using the lightning network is when I have to load my wallet, but if I can lower the fees for loading my wallet and still be able to send payments to folks, that's even better.

While I understand it's theoretically possible to scam someone, I'm not sure how practical it is and how possible it would be for someone like me to even accomplish that, so I'm thinking more likely, as long as someone isn't in a hurry for the funds, they can let it sit there until perhaps they even pay a miner a boost to process that transaction in their next block. I would think that could be another way to accomplish this, but not sure whether services like that are actually set up at this point in time.

If ACINQ wanted to scam me, they would have done it by now.

Their LN-wallet isn't directly connected to my unconfirmed channel, they're connected to the ACINQ node (with possibly more nodes in between), and I'm pretty sure all those nodes won't accept a LN-transaction from a channel that isn't confirmed on-chain.

Do you feel like that opens the door for scams? Theoretically, you make a deal with someone where that person sends you cash or another crypto via an on-chain transaction, and you send him a payment via the LN where the on-chain fees are way too low. Do they mention in their documentation what are the minimum required fees, is there a minimum? Any mention how long the on-chain transaction will be broadcasted until it's finally dropped, if ever?

Maybe my logic is a bit of here. 

That's not how Phoenix Wallet works: I didn't open the channel, ACINQ did!

They'll just keep broadcasting it until it confirms.

Blockchair still knows the transaction, it's not confirmed, and I can just make outgoing payments

The fees you used to open the channel were quite low. Even two ago days when you made that transaction, 13 sat/vByte looks like a fee that would have below the purging limit. What if your opening transaction gets purged from the mempool? We are currently at a 18-19 sats purging threshold. Did your on-chain transaction confirm in the meantime? Are you able to use the channel for outgoing payments already?

Yep! I don't think there's risk in it for them though, they own the channel opening transaction.

True. But the risk is for the user: in a way the current channel is still custodial. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though: it works just fine!

Not sure if I'm following this correctly, but are they pretty much shouldering an unconfirmed transaction(at least temporarily) and taking a small risk just for a better experience for the end user? If so, though I'm not sure what the risks are for the user, but they seem to be doing the 'lightning for beginners' aspect really really well.

ACINQ has been around for years. It's much more likely they try to grow and earn billions from an IPO in the future.
Update: I have an open channel! It was opened (with 13 sat/vbyte) a few hours after my deposit confirmed, and a couple hours later the channel and balance became available to me. Here's the interesting part: The on-chain transaction opening the channel isn't confirmed yet! As far as I know, that's not even possible
So, and I'm slightly speculating here, this would mean ACINQ accepts LN-funds coming out of a LN-channel that's not confirmed on-chain yet. Because they're the ones who opened the channel, they can be sure it's not going to be double spent at some point and will confirm eventually. And I also expect their own hub to have confirmed channels with third parties, so third parties aren't dealing with an unconfirmed channel. So far so good, I am quite happy I don't have to wait (weeks?) for this transaction to confirm. But I'm not sure if this means the channel is now more or less custodial: if I try to close the channel, the opening transaction still has to confirm.

Update (6 days later): the transaction that opened my LN channel got confirmed. All this time I've been using Phoenix Wallet without problems.

Feels like the project is about to close
Prob restore it somewhere else on send to a different one

This is new: after receiving an on-chain transaction on Phoenix Wallet, it shows a popup:
Clicking the link shows that "channel opening/closing can be slow to confirm."

Meanwhile, Phoenix doesn't show a channel being opened, it shortly showed a new channel as "closed", but that one disappeared. On-chain I can see my transaction is split up into several other transactions already, each with 12 sat/vbyte fee. This was the largest deposit I've sent into LN so far, and channel opening is custodial. I don't know if a channel was opened for me, but if it's with 12 sat/vbyte, it's going to take a while.
I'm slightly disappointed Phoenix wallet didn't show this when I created the deposit address, or just increased their fee for opening a channel.

BlueWallet is a custodial wallet, while Phoenix Wallet is not. Making a deposit to BlueWallet is sending coin to a service that is crediting your account while sending coin to Phoenix Wallet is actually opening a LN channel with a percentage of your 'deposit' going to Phoenix.

I hope so, that sounds good! Either way, I like it

Isn't it just a proper implementation of multi-part payments? It should not matter if all parts (HTLCs) are sent from the same channel; all of them must use the same payment hash.

By the way, an iOS version is supposed to be released in Q1 2021.

This topic deserves a bump I've been using Phoenix Wallet a bit more lately, and I'm quite happy with how well-connected it is. I get more failed payments on BlueWallet than on Phoenix Wallet now, and Phoenix charges less fees. I paid around 0.01% fee on a 80,000 sat payment from Phoenix Wallet, while this would be a minimum of 0.3% on BlueWallet.

BlueWallet doesn't charge anything for on-chain deposits, Phoenix charges 0.1%. But that amount is even lower than the minimum BlueWallet charges to send funds out using LN, so Phoenix is cheaper in the end.
I wonder how they'll turn a profit though: 0.1% of a small deposit isn't even enough to cover the fees to open a channel, and each new on-chain deposit creates a new channel.

I was also happily surprised that I can use funds from multiple channels to make one payment that's larger than any individual channel could afford. I have no idea how they arrange that internally, but it works!

Thanks for that! A tip though: you should use proper quote-tags on Bitcointalk, as this forum is very strict on plagiarism. If you didn't type it, add quote tags I've edited my quote of your quote to fix this.
And welcome to Bitcointalk!

I'd say the fact that restoring from seed requires trust should be added here:

It depends: I don't trust the app (like most apps), so I wouldn't recommend installing it on a device that's in use for serious things. I've installed it on a tablet, and now that I think about it, the tablet holds some crypto already so it's not the best choice. But I'm running out of devices for testing
Apart from that, I'd recommend not only installing Phoenix, but testing several wallets and choosing on your own which you like most. These are the ones I've tested on Android:

• BlueWallet (custodial LN, non-custodial on-chain)
• Eclair (non-custodial LN, non-custodial on-chain
• Wallet of Satoshi (custodial LN)
• Mycelium (non-custodial on-chain)
• Coinomi (non-custodial on-chain, also many altcoins and some Forkcoins)
• Electrum (non-custodial on-chain)
• Bither/bitpie (I used this for low-value Forkcoins but nowadays it mostly crashes when I try that)

The usual disclaimer applies: "never send more than you're willing to lose", especially when using LN. But by all means, throw a few bucks tens of thousands of satoshis at it, and try it. Send from your LN-wallet, to a LN-casino to, to your other wallet, to another LN-casino and back to another one of your wallets. You can do all this in less than a minute, which is just amazing.

As for easy LN, I think BlueWallet and Phoenix both have their use case. I've been using BlueWallet a lot longer, so I'd like to know how you think they compare.

Yea, I wouldn't put larger amounts of money on any other mobile wallet either. I was also shocked on how seamless it is! It's so underrated in my opinion. Unfortunately they don't have an iOS app yet(which a lot of people use). Are you personally fine with recommending this to people as a hot wallet? Because I think I do.