No wonder we are down to $300 dollars a day for the total amount of zaps made on Nostr from all users... nobody can afford lightning anymore.
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Shooooot, you been to the gas pump? I can’t afford anything anymore, and it’s because of a whole different gas fee than you’re talking about lol
I wonder what the venn diagram of "invested in lightning companies" and "against on chain zaps" looks like.
What do you mean by can’t afford it?
Getting an account or running a node and setting up channels is way too expensive.
No one can afford Lightning? How so?
Prices are crazy...
Nah. It's stupid easy now. You can literally roll your face across your phone and be all setup on Wisp or Primal thanks to Spark.
I paid like 15,000 sats to open my channel and it’s been running for like two years now with only brief downtime when megalith had issues. That’s pretty affordable? If you’re opening and closing all the time that just seems like bad management?
Spark isn’t lightning tho
People are getting 21 sats, when they get anything in their post. 15,000 is a lot.
Coin OS is free...?
> $300 dollars
I thought zaps were Bitcoin or sumthin
If you’re only using lightning for zaps on nostr then I don’t know what to say to such people. Of the concern is we need to make it cheaper for people to pretend to send eachother value then we might as well make NOSTR bucks having nothing to do with bitcoin and just zap that around to eachother.
Yeah, it's hard. That's what we need to sell when onboarding people. They cant even receive anything before they sign up for a service.
The problem is with zaps themselves. They already feel redundant.
Not going to lie, they are kinda crazy somehow. Phoenix Wallet prices aren't that bad, but unfortunately they do not support NWC :(
It's the wallets that don't work.....we get annoyed and stop clicking it....😒🤷
Having to log in in other clients to zap is ...well....the moment is gone....
Cashu.me does a pretty good job with this in my opinion. If people are only concerned about sending and receiving fractions of a penny USD then it being custodial doesn’t seem like something we should be concerned about
Refusing to acknowledge that there are still problems to solve doesn't make Bitcoin better.
What now? Did LN really became expensive already?
100 sat zap costs a 3 sat routing fee. Almost the same percentage my local country store charges to pay with plastic.
It's literally Lightning. I have built apps with the Breez SDK and sent sats to my wallet from my node.
I feel you !
It seems that no one cares....there is a problem but it is not being sorted ....many people changed to wisp because of this ....
@ZEUS makes it super easy to run a self-custody node on your phone as well if you didn't want to run a standalone btc/ln node combo on hardware yourself.
I misspoke I just mean the implementation is significantly different than noncustodial Like at some point when you’re pouring milk into coffee it stops being coffee with milk and becomes like a flat white or whatever.
Phoenix is the greatest lightning wallet but it can't work for receiving nostr zaps.
I love how cheap it is to purchase inbound liquidity though. Cost less than a tenth of what it cost me to rent inbound liquidity from Zeus in Alby Hub.
But it is not free though. Their fee structure is quite a thing. You just pay as a % of your transfer. Plus privacy is pretty much gone.
You do pay a few sats but it's not like you're breaking the bank paying 3 sats on a zap. How is it not private?
you can just add your payment targets and send whatever you want.
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If that $300 were done on chain it'd be just about cheaper than processing it on lightning at ~1sat/vbyte assuming lightning fees of 1% and average transaction size for single input single output.
You clearly haven't looked at Ditto lately.
Bark on mainnet with NWC seems to be out today basically, just in time to save us from the death of Lightning 😀
From a thread involving @Derek Ross and Matthew Vuk
https://xcancel.com/matthewvuk2/status/2057479294301945999
https://xcancel.com/matthewvuk2/status/2057479294301945999
yep. im really excited about this. matthew is coming to AOSConvergence next week too :) really excited for it.
I am lost, what is that? Looks like Alby Go doing something.
haha no it's a new layer two solution, ARK, and this is an implementation of it from Second, called Bark. i met one of the devs in Vegas and told him we needed NWC and zaps. and he's been working on it hardcore.
cool! how expensive is it? :)
Sorry if this is dumb, but when I zap here do I get charged a fee I had no idea about?
Yes, more if you use Spark.. up to 1% of all the fees are enabled.
But I don’t see a fee/cut in my transactions, just the zap amounts going out?
Usually yes. The receiver gets less.
I have to try this.
Phoenix can receive to a Bolt12 offer
But I think the problem is that only a few Nostr clients are able to send zaps to Bolt12. But that will improve
In fact, I'm not even sure where in the kind0 (or suitable alternative kind) a user is supposed to advertise their Bolt12 offer
I'm seeing good reviews for it recently. Not sure what you're looking at. There are like a couple 1 stars, but the rest being 5 stars. One of the 1-star reviews said:
"where's the option to convert fiat to BTC? trash, overcomplicated UX for no reason. people want simple things, not everyone is born with a crypto encyclopedia in their hands ffs"
Not sure why this idiot thinks the wallet is an exchange. Best to just ignore reviews like that.
I use phoenix as like a cold (?) wallet and cashu as a wallet for like day to day spending. To be honest I think onchain can be less of a privacy nightmare considering like.. when you send onchain to phoenix, it gets swapped to LN, also onchain address itself rotates too afaik so.. I think it's fine to use it this way? I dunno, I know nothing about Bitcoin.
Channels are super cheap now
What's wrong with ln?
Wow, that’s a bit deceptive
Nothing is ever free.
That’s not the point to my reaction though. Being opaque with fees is misleads users. I’ve been zapping generously for over a year not knowing there was a fee associated, because it was never communicated anywhere. Hiding that is deceptive and breaks trust.
not really. it's standard. every single lightning transaction has fees.
it's not hidden. it's not hidden at all though.
"good reviews" doesn't tell the whole story, are the stars all you're looking at? I read what the reviews actually say to determine if it's a good fit for me. If 2/6 this year are running Zeus with nodes separate from their phones, why not all-in-one if it's super-easy to do so?
1/6 says: "not syncing" - syncing with what?
The more-substantive 1/6 says: "this is a scam project and should be delisted from play store the Wallet only Recieve funds and doesn't work or do anything, even to close the channel i can't so I'm stuck and unable to withdraw or do anything" - um WTF is that a Zeus problem or a Lightning problem Zeus had no warning/mitigation instruction for?
The remaining 2/6 are 5-stars but vague; no description of their use cases, just reviews that read like ad copy.
But yes, I voted that one you quoted from Dec 2025 as unhelpful. Not sure if the one right before that said "Use the custodial Wallet of Satoshi instead" because everything before that was true & they were really driven over to custodial, or if it was just made up, though I have had that happen on Android apps before.
Didn't want to look too far back because at some point, the reviews are only about issues that were resolved in newer versions.
fwiw a lot of these issues are with the old Embedded LND architecture. The private Neutrino backend that feeds the clients backends doesn't fare well if you have a high latency connection.
As of v13.0 we added a new LDK backend that doesn't suffer the same issues.
Review score go up. 
No the stars are not all I'm looking at since I clearly copy and pasted a direct quote from one of the reviews. Not sure why you would insinuate that in bad faith when that's clearly not true.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you would discount 5 star reviews that lack detail but then weigh heavier1-star reviews that equally lack detail such as one that states nothing but "not syncing".
At the end of the day, the app receives great reviews (take a look at reviews also on Apple's app store). Which review specifically made your hair stand up (a bit dramatic perhaps)? Furthermore, the app is free to use and try out. So why even worry about your hair standing up when it is a free and open source app that you can try for yourself? It isn't like it doesn't have a good reputation in the bitcoin community (what really matters). Check it out on the Zap store to see who among your follows also trust it.
Anyway, I don't really care whether you like the app or not. I have no vested interest in it. I simply put it out there as another low/no cost means of using LN.
Care to share where it’s shown?
Not sure why you're so hostile toward me. I simply put out a recommendation and you went on the offensive.
TBF, it seems like I was arguing with a wall.
Spark is a statechain that is interoperable with lightning, but it isnt lightning. Similar to how ecash itself isn't lightning but you can interact with the lightning network.
I did something similar with Cashu and #nostr #safebox - it looks like a regular Lightning wallet, but under the hood, the ‘state’ for each user is stored as proofs encrypted on relays. The mint, and Lightning node are used to clear payments out of the system. Other Lightning wallet providers use an accounting database, or in the case of Spark, some sort of state chain, which I don’t fully understand yet.
But in all cases (including mine), the operator is responsible for maintaining a state for the user. The operator might not be able to access the specifics of that state, but they can lock out the user and keep their funds. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to minimize the trust for users to only availability, but it’s hard.
No it's not. #Spark is confiscateable and has no unilateral exit.