Greetings Central PA Bitcoiners!
We're pleased to announce that we have two meetups slated for July, both happening in the middle of the month. The first is a pizza meetup at 6pm on Thursday July 17th, hosted by Business Cat, at DaVinci Italian Eatery in Mechanicsbug. The second is a new and much anticipated format for us, a hiking event. That'll be at 7:30am on Sunday July 20th at the Pole Steeple Trailhead, which is located in Pine Grove Furnace state park. See attached flyer. Note: there's no fourth Sunday coffee meetup for July.
It was great seeing all those who came out to last coffee meetup. One topic that we broached: What's the current recommended wallet for a newcoiner who's looking to make lightning payments? Today we're going to talk about two such wallets, Muun and Aqua.
Both of these wallets are available on both Android and iOS, and can make both on-chain and lightning bitcoin transactions. Unfamiliar with lightning? It's a second layer on top of bitcoin that's become the customary way to make day to day payments. To make an analogy to legacy banking, on-chain bitcoin is to a wire transfer as lightning is to a tap to pay credit card payment. Small, day to day payments are increasingly best served by lightning, whereas larger, infrequent transactions such as buying a house/car, or moving one's cold storage sats, are best served by on-chain. On-chain offers maximum security, reliability, and redundancy, whereas lightning makes some tradeoffs that allow for faster and cheaper payments.
Both Muun and Aqua are very user friendly, and can have you (or the person you're helping) making lightning payments very quickly without the need connect to a personal lightning node. In order to provide this smooth process, both of these wallets do make some tradeoffs against what seasoned bitcoiners expect from a sovereign setup, which we'll delve into.
Muun:
When you open Muun and use a new wallet for the first time, you can begin sending and receiving payments immediately, without the need to deal with any kind of backup process right away. When you eventually choose to back it up (highly recommended) you can either give them an email and password for recovery, or generate a PDF recovery kit that also includes a security code. This backup/recovery process is unique to Muun. On the plus side, it's very easy and fast; on the downside, it can only be recovered via their app or using their tools on github.
Sending is simple in Muun...there's only one send button for both on-chain and lightning payments. You can scan or paste in either a bitcoin address or lightning invoice, and it'll figure out which one it is automatically. For receiving, you can toggle between lightning and on-chain bitcoin.
Muun actually uses on-chain bitcoin transactions under the hood when you're sending a lightning transaction. This is abstracted away from users and can introduce drawbacks to the experience, namely when on-chain fees happen to be high. When that's the case, the fee to send a lightning payment can get quite high. Historically, on-chain fees tend to be on the low end for the majority of time and have occasional spikes. There's always the risk that you'll go to make a lightning payment in Muun and the fee will be very high, though. Since low fee transactions is one of lightning's benefits and selling points, this is a sore spot for Muun users.
Pros:
off and running right away with sending/receiving
email backup available
one balance and one send button for both lighting and on-chain
Cons:
doesn't use 12 or 24 work backups like almost every other wallet
high fees are a possibility
Aqua:
When you open Aqua for the first time, you'll have the experience that bitcoiners have come to expect, which is to either make a new wallet, or import an existing one. If you create a new wallet, it will generate a 12 word seed phrase, which you can backup by writing down and keeping in a safe place. By following the current standard for wallet initialization and backup, BIP-39 seed phrases, this is a big pro for Aqua in my book. These seed word backups make for a wonderfully robust and sovereign setup.
Both Muun and Aqua can send and receive lightning payments. Whereas Muun uses on-chain bitcoin transactions under the hood, Aqua uses liquid bitcoin transactions. What is liquid bitcoin? Although that's a topic for another day, for now let's just say it's a way to make some tradeoffs in order to get faster and cheaper transactions. Because Aqua made this design choice, you don't run the risk of your lightning payment being costly to make due to a high-fee environment on the bitcoin network.
Unlike Muun, Aqua treats on-chain bitcoin and L2 (layer 2) bitcoin separately. Aqua can hold a balance of either, and allows you to convert between the two. When sending or receiving, you're given four options: on-chain bitcoin, lightning bitcoin, liquid bitcoin, and tether USD on liquid. Although this offers more choices than Muun, it does take away from approachability and simplicity. Incorporation of tether functionality is a touchy subject. Aqua's promotion among bitcoiners argues that lots of people, especially outside the US, use fiatcoins, AKA stablecoins, to hold value in USD instead of their local (more inflationary) currency. Aqua argues that since such people are going to be using a wallet that handles fiatcoins anyway, it's better for them to be doing it in a more bitcoin-centric wallet. Americans don't have much use for fiatcoins, IMHO.
Pros:
off and running right away with sending/receiving
uses seed phrase backups that bitcoiners know and trust
fees are low and consistent
Cons:
four choices of assets when doing a send or receive
integrates tether, which is a faux pas in the eyes of many bitcoiners
treats L1 and L2 bitcoin as separate assets
In closing, Aqua and Muun are both great choices if someone's looking to get up and running with lightning payments. Like most technologies that abstract certain functionality away from users to make for a smoother experience, they do make certain tradeoffs.
~ @Lonelypumpkins
Central PA Bitcoiners
