Dario from Muun here.
We should be careful to analyze the current lightning costs properly before calling economically rational pricing an "attack".
Being a non-custodial lightning mobile wallet during a bear market has costs that are usually overlooked: to provide inbound capacity, as a wallet, you are locking your own money into a depreciating asset, which has a very high financial cost. These locked assets have very low utilization since mobile nodes are not routing third-party payments.
Most lightning wallets and nodes either do not account for these costs or subsidize them. And that's fine if you can spare the money.
At scale, it's just not sustainable.
We can wish that lightning had "almost zero fees" and ignore the actual costs, or we can accept the real costs (both operational and financial), talk about them openly, and get to work on optimizing them down.
Allow users to open their own channels
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Why you need to submit everyone to your submarine-swap service... Make this an in-app service!! And relieve the rest of the people who just need those lightning sats available in the LN itself!
The idea of forced-fees is agains the btc idea! muun charges 2500 ppm or 0.25% just for Muun HOP.
You can measure like this:
Onchain transaction: 1 sat/vb = 500 satoshis (for ANY AMOUNT of bitcoins you wish to spend) - blockchain is empty nowadays... You can have 1 sat/vb confirmed within hours!
If I send 5 million satoshis (0.05 btcs) to someone on giveas a muun invoice: should cost 12,500 satoshis... the usual onchain fees to confirm next block is around 10 sat/vb and thats around 2600 satoshis, it means that by using lightning through Muun which meant to disrupt the high-fee blockchain you end up paying 5 times more fees than the previous one tech!
Please Muun, stop abusing the noobs!
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Muun is fee siphoning attacking any sender to Muun wallet. There is a mandatory hop through a private channel with a fee of +1500ppm.
Dario regarding this. Every time I tried to open a channel to your node, it was immediately closed. Almost as if you in fact did want to monetize your app via the excessive routing fee you charge on the last step. Can you talk about this?
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We used to have our node open to anyone's channels!
The problem was that we would have some peers use us as a high-throughput routing node, depleting all liquidity fast. External peers constantly unbalanced channels, worsening Muun users' experience.
For that reason, we decided to optimize for Muun users' payment reliability, and restricted who could open channels to us.
Notice that having a direct connection from your node to ours doesn't lower the costs much. If your node were directly connected to ours, the payment route from your node to a Muun user would be {your node} ---> {muun's node} ---> {muun phone wallet}. Providing inbound liquidity for the last hop is what has really high financial costs, because Muun has to lock its own funds in advance.
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Ok, here's where my understanding of the inner workings of muun might be lacking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought there were no channels in a muun wallet and that everything were just UTXO's in my wallet. From what I understood muun's interoperability with the LN was just that, interoperability, supported by submarine swaps.
Now if you say there's muun's capital locked between {muun's node} and {muun phone wallet} then this truly sounds more like a channel. Do you for instance keep a commitment (refund) transaction and might deploy it to get your capital back in case the user becomes unresponsive?
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