Well good to know at least I'm not alone. The mail said the balance I had would now appear on my Hub under Node. But that shows 0 sats.
"One of your lightning channels was closed. If you had a spending balance in this channel, these sats will be returned to your savings balance visible on the "Node" page of your Hub. Your funds will be returned to your savings balance within a few on-chain block confirmations."
Maybe it will still re-appear there, but it seems you can do nothing with the channel. To buy another channel means I basically lose all the sats I have. So not sure then what the point of self-hosting the hub is. I probably also cannot get that balance out anywhere without channel either.
Replies (4)
Honestly after losing 18,500 sats. Not motivated to sign up for another round of dealing with their shitty customer support to try and recover my lost funds right now. Feels like getting slapped in the face with condescension every time I try.
I have gone back and fourth with overly rude customer support multiple times between emails and nostr.
Tried to recently to troubleshoot from a terminal to see why the app kept crashing after a successful login with no success, or error outputs.
Hearing from multiple people that they had difficulty with losing funds from alby hub too.
Combined with yesterday reading a rumor that they reserve the right to take your funds after an extended period of inactivity in their terms of service.
I'm just going to call them Rug Hub now.
Plenty of other options to run your own lightning node. Such as the Electrum wallet that have an actual trustworthy track record.
Otherwise there is a surplus of custodial and non custodial lightning wallets to choose from too.
Hopefully you get your funds back. I wish you the best of luck and that you did not lose them like I did. Take care and have an awesome day.
Channels are the basics of how the lightning network works. To stay in full control you or the channel partner can close channels. What channel did you have?
Did you get a channel from a LSP (lightning service provider - like lnserver, megalith, etc.)?
Alby does not provide those channels and has no control over those. The Alby Hub node tries hard to avoid channel closures but it's up to you or the channel partner.
We don't know why it was closed. Often it happens if the channel is not used or if the node is offline for an extended period.
nostr:nprofile1qqsrxra3gv0lnkxz2pcxh0xuq9k4f9dr7azwq3aypqtnay4w0mjzmtqve7c2c Thanks for responding,
It is difficult now a year later to remember which/what channel it was (EDIT: the link in the e-mail took me to Megalith LSP). All I know is there was no warning at all, and no sats have re-appeared in my self-hosted Alby Hub under Node as the e-mail said it should. So the point is then that my Lightning Wallet was never under my control from what I'm seeing.
So without warning the channel is gone, and all my sats. I used the network every day so this cannot be from "not being used".
Sadly, this is going to be a real showstopper for any other users of the Lightning Network and/or Alby.
I'm a computer programmer and understand tech - I really cannot see how this will ever attract ordinary users. The mail I got came from "Your Alby Team" informing me the channel was closed. So it is true that maybe the real issue is with the channel - no idea which channel now, and certainly don't want to get involved with other channels if this is how it is going to go.
Despite having a self-hosted Alby Hub, this goes to show I was never in control of my sats at all. Otherwise they would have showed up there still. It was certainly connected every single day, as it was being used to authenticate my access to Nostr. Now I don't even know if I'll be able to access Nostr tomorrow after rebooting my computer. This may be the end of my access altogether.
Yes, I see now from Megalith LSP there is this comment on the Alby guides: "Your channel stays open longer if you send or receive at least one payment per 30 days". So despite daily posting I obviously never received any sats for the last month, and I had not sent either, so the channel just got closed and I have lost my sats. No warning, and no value whatsoever in actually self-hosting the Alby Hub. I'm certainly not going to burn my fingers again on the Lightning network. This has just never happened to me with Bitcoin - my offline wallets retain my find no matter what (that is proper control). The self-hosting was a farce (my self-hosted Hub wallet still shows 0 stats).
