It's been a crazy couple of weeks since Hive Fest so I haven't updated but that needs to be fixed.
HBD instead of Hive
I made a decision in the last few days over what to use for payments when converting streaming sats. I was using Hive but with the sudden jump to over $1 Hive, it makes more sense to pay in HBD. Part of the reason is because when dealing with small sat amounts (like 8 sats) trying to send a suitable amount of Hive causes rounding issue which will get worse as Hive keeps going up (to the moon!). If you receive HBD and want Hive, you can easily kick off a conversion.
Issues
Almost everything from streaming payments to podcasters on Hive through the conversion of Hive and HBD into Bitcoin Lightning is working perfectly...
... but with one exception.
I'm having problems with users of the Muun Lightning wallet. Two users, both in Mexico I believe, have experienced repeated failures when trying to send sats to a Muun wallet. The specific error I receive is "no_route". However, when I use the Muun wallet and send to myself, I succeed but probably only 50% of the time.
This is one of the frustrations with the entire Lightning system and I'm now working with Muun wallet to see if we can figure out why these failures are happening so regularly.
Umbrel and Lightning
When I started learning what the Lightning network was and how I could use it, the first thing I did was buy a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 Megs and an external 1TB SSD with a USB case. This is the basic hardware you need to run your own Lightning node.
At the time (about 8 months ago) I looked around for the easiest ways to get up and running and found Umbrel. At that time the Umbrel Node had a very simple setup process with flashing an SSD, putting it in your Pi and leaving it alone for a few days. That worked except owing to me still having relatively slow ADSL at the time and some other issues with version of the Umbrel software, it took almost 2 weeks to get working.
The Umbrel App Store
When I first started with Umbrel it had an "App Store" which allowed you to install a few very useful Lightning management tools like Ride the Lightning (RTL) and Thunderhub. That was essential and really easy. As I came to understand, Umbrel is all built on Docker containers and adding new apps just downloads and runs a new Docker container on your machine.
Today the app store is growing into a complete home server system but I have very mixed feelings about this.
Just to remind you, I'm using Lightning because it is the method by which we distribute streaming payments of micro amounts (20 to 100 Sats per minute) from listeners to the creators of podcasts. This is all part of Podcasting 2.0 and @podcastindexorg's work.
So my use of Lightning is to receive payments on behalf of all the creators on 3speak and then batch and send these payments on to them as Hive transfers. In order to send and receive Lightning payments I have to tie up Bitcoin in "Channels" between my node and other nodes on the system. The Bitcoin in these channels is then shuffled backwards and forwards like beads on an abacus.
Within the entire Lightning all this invested Bitcoin provides the liquidity for the system to work. This also means that my node currently has a few thousand USD's worth of BTC tied up on it.
Building my App
Right now I'm not running any part of the Hive <> Lightning gateway directly on the same Raspberry Pi I use for my Lightning. I have another machine, on the same LAN, which accesses the Lightning node via various API calls. None of this travels across the Internet.
My plan is to learn how / pay someone to package up what I've built ready to run directly with the Lightning Node which moves what I've built closer into the territory where anyone can run this kind of gateway.
Umbrel Security
What bothers me a little about the direction Umbrel is taking is that any of these apps can have pretty much unfettered access to the Lightning funds on the Node. It would be completely trivial to drain a Node of all the BTC stored within the Lightning side of the wallet and probably any BTC also stored on chain.
For this reason I've decided to drastically curtail my impulses to try out new things on this Umbrel. I love what Umbrel are doing making a whole lot of cloud apps which you can run yourself easy to use, but I question the wisdom of co-locating these with a Lightning node and Bitcoin wallet! If you plan to use Lightning for anything beyond pocket money, I'd urge you to get a second Umbrel to play with other things like shared calendars and cloud data.
Next Steps
Podcasters!
I've got a lot of explaining to do, I'm well aware of this! @threespeak is now a fully fledged video podcast host with the ability to be listed in Apple's Podcast app and pretty much every podcast app in the world. I haven't made a big enough deal out of this yet but that's coming in the next week or so.
If you have a 3speak channel it will be up to you to explain Value 4 Value to your audience and see if you can drive adoption. Everything is in place for this now and there will be more help to get people using it over the next few days and weeks.
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On your concerns with the larger Umbrel app store.
My understanding is at that point the BTC/Lightning Nodes will only be Apps on the store not installed by default.
So the vision is you load up Umbrel OS on your pi and either load up BTC/Lightning nodes and apps or use it as a home server and load up other apps that are not BTC/Lightning.
So the vision is have 2 pi's running 1: BTC node 2: home server
I get the concerns with unfretted access, but I feel the concept is to make it easier to have home servers and store/serve up their own Git, phots library, chat etc.. and move off the big tech companies.
Also I love this line "The Bitcoin in these channels is then shuffled backwards and forwards like beads on an abacus"
This the best description for the basic person I have heard in a long time explaining lightning. !LUV it
@simplegame(3/3) gave you LUV. | wallet | market | tools | connect | <><
The beads on the abacus thing comes from a really long post written by Roy from Breez. It's somewhere on Medium.
I agree on 2 servers but I hope that gets better communicated by the Umbrel guys.
Agreed.
Umbrel could do a better job.
For the time being I will give them the benefit of the doubt and wait and see.
👍🏻 Great to hear things are moving on, Brian! Thanks for updating.
Regards Thomas
Thanks a lot for the update about Bitcoin Lightning Network and Podcasting. I learned a lot. Even though some of the words sounded completely new to me.
Terrific progress. I am very glad to see the transition to HBD. While the decision was based upon a feasibility feature, it is great to see a use case for it.
This is wonderful. Keep up the good work.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Great work!
Very interesting security point regarding the Umbrel App Store being a security risk.
Doesn't the Dockerisation provide isolation between the BTC node and Apps?
It does to some extent but the keys to the api which controls Lightning are available as environment variables which point to files that any app can find.
This is necessary and by design so that a utility like Ride The Lightning can make changes like open and close channels (which is an on chain bitcoin transaction) and moving sats which requires the admin access to the Lightning node.
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Good idea to package this up and make it available for others to easily run nodes. One dude as the bridge between Hive / Lightning / Podcasters is probably not the way to go long term...