OK, can one of you bitcoiners help me out here?
If someone has some sats in a lightning wallet and they want to use them to pay a company who only accepts on-chain transactions...
Do they have to find someone to trade the lightning sats for on-chain sats as if it were an altcoin trade?
Assume they don't run their own lightning node, they're using LNBits, hosted by someone else.
Is there some service that can do this for people, ideally with minimal trust involved?
I'm asking for a group who is new at this and jumped straight into lightning, but njalla doesn't accept lightning, only on-chain (with no plans to start accepting lightning). So some solution that involes 20 steps, installing a desktop app, and jumping through a bunch of hoops is a non-starter. Going to a clearnet website, zapping someone, and having the on-chain address get paid, that'd be doable. Better if the software just handled this for a nice UX, but that seems unlikely based on what I've read.
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Well it looks like my phoenix wallet recognizes unchained addresses, and looks like it will pay to them.
(Can’t check my Zeus wallet atm)
I was under the assumption that any ln can pay to a on chain address?
Not sure what the best option is after boltz.exchange shut down a few months ago.
Zeus payments to an on-chain address come from the on-chain wallet, not the ln side. I just tested it to be sure.
Interesting
And in retrospect, it makes some sense. In order to get money from ln to on-chain, either a channel would have to get closed, or there would need to be an on-chain wallet sitting around with funds in it (as opposed to dumping all the funds into channels).
It just seems like there should be a way to solve this problem that solves this, or at least hides the complexity.
Splicing, that’s probably why Phoenix wallet would work?
Maybe? I don't know what splicing is, but if it cooperatively moves part of the channel funds to a new address and reduces the channel size accordingly, that'd make sense.
It looks like, from a technical perspective, it is possible in a trustless way:
It turns out boltz wasn't just an altcoin swapping thing, but it also allowed trading BTC in lightning for BTC on-chain. But as someone else in this thread mentioned, they're gone.
There's reportedly software called Loop, which Loop Bitcoin service is a self-hosted thing that will solve this problem (I didn't look into the technical details, but presumably it works the same as bolz, with the hash lock).

Knowing Bitcoin
Lightning Payments in Practice: Sending, Receiving and Troubleshooting - Knowing Bitcoin
Lightning Payments in Practice: Sending, Receiving and Troubleshooting: lesson from the Lightning Network & Bitcoin Nodes course on Knowing Bit...
And yes, I guessed what splicing is correctly.

Splicing
A technique to add or remove funds from a Lightning channel without closing it, maintaining channel uptime and routing capabilities.
First, I would say you may have started with the wrong wallet for this. What wallet do your people run?
We built two wallets—Lightning in a Jar is the intermediate one that lets the owner move between lightning and onchain.
Lightning in a Jar — Setting the lightning wallet standard
A bitcoin on-chain and pure-Lightning wallet that runs anywhere, no intermediaries. Your key, your money.

Wallet of satoshi
But what I think you might be looking for is the other—more simple—wallet:


Bitcoin Ripcord — Share Bitcoin Instantly
Put real sats in anyone
I've never had a problem with this swap service. A lot of wallets have leaned on them. You can swap from Lightning to Bitcoin or Monero. They also have a Tor site.
https://trocador.app
I'll put it on my list of things to check out. The simplicity seems like it might be something they'd be comfortable with.
Zeus wallet still has swap functionality… had to use it recently…