We're rebooting a lightning wallet project that's lnurl and nostr native. The idea is that you can connect to all your lightning address / custodial accounts, and your home node, to use the balances together opportunistically from a refined and unified interface.

Because it's nostr native, you'll be able to give friends and family access to your node- without a dedicated webserver or hectic networking configs. Just provide an npub and relay for your node, and very light node app will handle the connections and accounting.

Having been around Lightning a long time, the state of wallets is still very sad. To that end, they've actually gotten worse in many cases.

It used to be that wallets emphasized connecting to a remote node, but UX for this never panned out and the incentives for users to run their own node really never materialized as a result. Running a node for $20 in fuckaround sats just hasn't been worth it.

This resulted in most every major wallet pivoting to mobile nodes, which are a disaster in concept. Lightning loses all meaning when you go to make a payment and it takes 5 minutes for the wallet to boot, only to fail at pathfinding because it's graph is out of sync and the LSP is a bottleneck.

Mobile nodes are also not very useful for receiving payments or connecting to web apps. As a result, we see hair-brained hacks like Bolt12 being proposed that effectively just re-invent Tor. The same Tor which is notoriously unreliable, and who's false privacy narrative subjects users to intel agency sybil surveillance. It's madness pushed by a select few that seemingly want to the network to be more centralized and custodial by breaking it further.

Nostr based accounts however makes remote connection easy, and this re-incentivizes Uncle Jim nodes now that they can easily share access to friends, family, and web applications.

The wallet is a simple PWA, but we can get around some PWA limitations if needed by wrapping it up as a native app with something like Ionic- ensuring continuity across all platforms.

Lnurl-Pay and Lnurl-Withdraw are basically all one needs to use a site like stacker news as a wallet source. Scan a withdraw link -> prompt user to add this to spending sources. Enter a lightning address -> add this to receiving sources.

Just like that, stacker can decentralizes the network away from Wallet of Satoshi.

Using a Nostr based RPC for home nodes requires the additional daemon on nodes themselves, but completely eliminates the web server requirement and is much lighter than alternatives like BTCPay. Nostr is much less complicated than proprietary stuff like LNC/Macaroons, and can easily be dropped into existing Nostr apps.

What do you think of this effort? are you a likely user? how do you feel about a nostr daemon on your node? If you don't have a node, is the ability to do more with it more likely to entice you to set one up?

edit: Spare me the Bolt12 defense, there's maybe 3 developers that know more about it than I and they aren't risking their paycheck to debate it.