Where to ask some really basic questions on the Phoenix Wallet? \ stacker news ~lightning

Where to ask some really basic questions on the Phoenix Wallet?

3065 sats \ 18 comments \ @Signal312 29 Jan lightning

I installed Phoenix and some other wallets months ago, but never learned how to use them, and frankly am pretty rusty on self-custody lightening as well.

So - where to go for basic questions? Is there a telegram group or something?

More details - I'm just trying to withdraw from Stacker News, so I'm submitting a Phoenix invoice to Stacker.new, and it fails. Phoneix says "Payment rejected. The fee was 6944 sats, which is more than 50% of the amount"

My inbound liquidity is more than the amount I'm trying to receive into Phoenix. So shouldn't that be good?

There is email support, but if there's a group of Phoenix Wallet enthusiasts online somewhere, answering questions, that would be ideal. I don't want to bug developers.

Meanwhile, I will go watch some phoenix videos...

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0 replies \ @Signal312 OP 30 Jan

So - somebody pointed me to this telegram group:

https://t.me/phoenix_wallet

It doesn't appear to be official, but does anyone have experience with it?

Initial impressions are reasonable.

62 sats \ 2 replies \ @quark 29 Jan

Do not miss these videos

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @030a29f333 30 Jan

The hour glass visual was excellent (believe that's in the 2nd vid?). Probably the most helpful way of explaining channel capacity that I've seen.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 OP 29 Jan

Thanks, I watched the videos and about 13 minutes into the second one, the whole inbound liquidity issue came up.

I'm still not really getting it, because the amount I was requesting to come into my Phoenix wallet was way less than half of the inbound liquidity. I finally got it to work with an invoice of 1000, where the inbound liquidity was around 8000.

I wonder if things would make more sense if I tried another wallet, just to have a comparison between 2 self-custody lightening wallets. Like maybe Mutiny or something?

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @OriginalSize 29 Jan

I had that problem when the amount was close to the inbound liquidity. Just made a withdraw that was the amount i tried before and it worked. My inbound liquidity has 5x'd since the first time i tried.

12 sats \ 6 replies \ @cleaningup12 29 Jan

You could open a different lightning wallet, maybe a custodial one, just to get a few sats built up. And withdraw your sn stash to that, just for the time being.

Because when you open a phoenix wallet, it'll try and open a channel for you, meaning, that's gonna cost a bunch! Like 20k sats or something

So if you're withdrawing your sats from sn to phoenix, it's trying to open a channel but you don't have enough sats yet and it'll cause an error

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @0313029d5d 30 Jan

As far as I can tell Phoenix tries to open a channel (or expand a channel) every single time you receive. It honestly makes it kind of a weird experience for people that are mostly receiving sats. I haven't managed to come up with a solution for this other than withdrawing directly to my node, which already has inbound liquidity available. Unfortunately, this is pretty bad privacy.

20 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullama 30 Jan

Previous versions of the wallet did that.

Current Phoenix only opens one channel only and varies the amount dynamically in it.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @cleaningup12 30 Jan

Ah was that was my legacy changeover thing that cost me a few sats!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 30 Jan

Probably, yeah, there were some on-chain transactions required for the migration.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0313029d5d 31 Jan

I only started using Phoenix after they added splicing, and I always have high fees when receiving, but never when sending. If they're not doing a new transaction for each deposit into the wallet, then they're definitely being way too conservative with channel sizing.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @030a29f333 30 Jan

In phoenix you have 1 channel, which can be grown or shrunk through a method called "splicing." When you have maxed out your inbound capacity, phoenix will make an onchain payment to grow the size of your channel.

A good practice here is to open a large channel (say, 500k-2m sats) and only need that on chain payment 1 time. If your channel is already open, expanding it (through splicing) to that range now while fees are relatively low is advisable.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 30 Jan

You could also try to use the autowithdraw functionality of SN

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 30 Jan

Good tips here, thanks! Long story, Exodus is my lighting wallet after I couldn’t use Blue Wallet, now so want to look at Phoenix!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @030a29f333 30 Jan

I would try to build up a balance of sats in a custodial wallet (or on Liquid) to where you can make a large channel (maybe 500k+ sats). Self-custodial lightning isn't gonna be worth the tradeoffs with a channel of like 10-50k sats imo

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @02bcd3eeb0 30 Jan

https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @endothermicdev 30 Jan

Lightning UX is hard, but channels have a channel reserve, which cannot be spent (but can be used to pay closing costs.) I don't know your channel size, but this may have been an issue. It's 1% of the total channel capacity typically.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @windward 30 Jan

Is automated channel management on? If so it may try to open a channel with your withdrawal