pull down to refresh
Good write-up. Many of the issues you mention are already well understood, and, as always, this comes down to trade-offs and probabilities.
From my perspective, the probability that Spark would rug users and prevent them from exiting is very low. By contrast, I saw an order-of-magnitude higher probability of a government raid on our office and the seizure of keys when we were operating a custodial service. That is why we stepped back from that model.
Piggy is not designed to be a tool for storing life savings. It is a piggy bank. There are many risks associated with it, and we understand that clearly. Many of those risks are disclosed in our Terms of Service. Even in the unlikely scenario that Spark became fraudulent and unilateral exit failed, which I believe is close to zero, we would likely be the biggest losers, given our multi-bitcoin investment in building this project. No individual user should be keeping anywhere near that level of funds in Piggy, not even a hundred times less. In that kind of worst-case scenario, the loss should be thought of more like someone stealing a ceramic piggy bank from your kitchen, not like losing a serious long-term savings account.
More broadly, Lightning is not meant for savings. It is meant for transacting. If I were building a tool for storing life savings, I would not rely on current Lightning technology, including fully self-custodial Lightning setups. That problem is already well solved by other tools, including hardware wallets, multisig setups, and similar approaches.
Hug
(By the way, we don’t use Breez, and users can still exit even if our servers are down, so the only dependency is Spark)
I’m openly explaining how it works. Nothing is secret. If you check the ToS, it describes everything in detail. None of the mobile wallets use enclave to sign transactions, yet they’re still considered self-custodial. Primal, your god of nostr, lightning, and sovereignty, uses exactly the same technology. So why do you want people to keep their pocket change in a hardware wallet? We can develop any kind of wallet and this one is a fucking piggy bank…
Education needed: https://www.passkeyprf.com, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/breez-sdk-launches-passkey-login-for-seedless-bitcoin-wallets, natively supported by iOS 18.2+
It says “no strings”, yet right before that it says “21 sats per piggy, every day”.
Requiring the app download is the only way to keep the faucet from being drained in seconds.
Android app coming soon! Hug
Thanks for giving it a try! That’s also a very good idea. Unfortunately, in-app purchases don’t allow selling Bitcoin or anything that has real-world value outside of the app. So our upgrade only gives you more features and a visual update.
Thanks for the report. We’ve already received similar reports about Proton Pass. You need a passkey provider that supports PRF, such as iCloud Keychain or the Passwords app. That’s how the passkey can sign a transaction locally.
There is a $9.99 in-app purchase if you want a custom Piggy, web profile and AI personality. If you break it to withdraw, your purchase is “consumed”, like breaking a ceramic piggy bank. You need to buy a new one. This is intended to mimic the mechanics of a real piggy bank.
Hey @ZezzebbulTheMysterious @m0wer @Scoresby @south_korea_ln @DarthCoin - you guys lit us up last time and we deserved it. just wanted to make sure you see this one. self-custody now. no more trust me bro. would love your honest take again.
Piggy’s passkey-based approach is safer than a seed phrase in many cases. Onboarding is instant after you download the app. A seed phrase is available, but backing it up is not strictly required if you have a reliable recovery method for your device.