With @ekyzis posting a reminder that it's a good time to open Lightning channels the other night, I bit the bullet and attempted to withdraw some of my SN rewards to one of my hot wallets via Lightning. Here's my account of the experience...
I posted a story about how to cater for the weakest among us to road-test prototypes is a good idea. In that real-world situation they used a 'little old lady' to test how suitable prototype trains were. Well, last night, a bit of that 'little old lady' was lil ol' me!
Firstly, I must admit that I was two-timing SN last night - I had a brief 'quickie' with the Bitcoin Magazine app and quickly withdrew my first sats via Lightning from them not SN. I know, I know I'm a tramp! But let's get back to my withdrawal experiences...
I went for the QR code method first. I must admit i was Flummoxed - I couldn't work out how to introduce the QR code to the wallet. So, scratching my head to get inspiration I went for the full-on Heath Robinson solution...
*Camera capturing QR code issue"
Sadly, unlike in Heath-Robinson picture, I didn't deploy any pulleys in my solution. Instead, my labyrinthine solution was this (sigh) I took a photo of the QR code on my main phone with a secondary phone and then aligned the photo of the screen of the secondary under my main phone with the wallet using the camera to see the QR code. You gotta give me full marks for inginuity though - Heath Robinson himself would have been proud of me!
Max fee issue
*Although I'd done some homework I made the n00b mistake of attempting to move an amount of sats that was too big for the default 10 sats - I only noticed the red feedback message "increase the fee amount" when I came back to the page from my hot wallet. I've a got a suggestion for the SN's devs - would it be possible for the withdrawal page to calculate/generate/show a suggested fee whilst/after the user types the withdrawal amount in? - so that in theory when each withdrawal size thresholds are reached a pretty accurate maximum fee suggestion could appear - so that user experience is a bit sweeter? Thanks.
Although I failed four/five times I persevered and by following the red suggestion to increase the Max fee (far, far higher) I was pleased to see that it worked. Yay! But I had to do it four/five times boo! But I was going for about 50,000 sats at first (the withdrawal amount, not the fee!)
Well, although, it was long-winded, maybe even stupid and dumb in the eyes of some - it did work!
However, if someone could post the proper (less steam punk) solution to my problem, I'd be very grateful.
I did find the second (non SN QR) route of copying/pasting the invoice from the wallet's QR code to SN was the easiest for me - I tried that later. But I'd still like know the proper QR route using the camera...
For those trying to help who needs to know what wallet I was using it was the OBW by fiatjaf - if I'm correct it's the same dev who developed Nostr!
*Conclusion"
It would be good to cater to the weakest/oldest/youngest of us. It'd also be nice if SN gave us a bigger, warm and fuzzy feeling when we do succeed in withdrawing - a novel congratulations message.
But again, thinking about my experience withdrawing from Bitcoin Magazine a little earlier, I don't remember there being any problem with guessing maximum fees there - so their whole withdrawal process went without a hitch. I think simpler is better - especially if we're trying to onboard people.
It was only then that I realized that the fee had found it's own level and I was charged far less than my proposed maximum. I guess this stems from people people running their own Lightning nodes and used to setting their fees. If this is the case, and the suggesting/calculating/displaying a max fee is too difficult, maybe have a 'simple' mode and an 'expert' mode choice?
BTW I did look for OBW YouTube videos to do the above (and look on it's github page) but I guess as it's a recent fork of the older, (possibly more documented) SBW app - I could have looked for 'how to' videos related to SBW instead. My bad.
Overall, as the goal of withdrawing was accomplished in the end, the experience was a pleasurable one - but that could be only because I kept on persevering. I've seen plenty of Bitcoin related videos that looked ridiculously difficult and that the videos comments have called out the process as being far too difficult. This video on inbound liquidity comes to mind. Darth certainly was right on advising people like me not to venture into that part of the system (for our own good and for that of the system - just yet anyway 😰
It would be great for as many apps and projects to have as many how-to videos as they can when people need help - especially when they're available on multiple media platforms (especially common ones like YouTube) as the Bitcoin space needs to encourage new people into the space, to disolve the mystique and to prove that even the average Jenny and Joe can use the space.
I hope I've not bored you all rigid. I hope that @k00b, @kr and @ekzyis make sense of what I've put. I just hope that posting a 'warts & all' account of my failures, success and overcoming my fear of losing precious sats might be useful.
I still haven't paid/opened a proper non-hosted channel yet though (I'm still on 'hosted' channels to get me to that space). I'll have to do a bit more research. If anyone can point me in the direction of a good video, that'd be great. 🧡