0 sats \ 1 reply \ @KenyaCoin OP 3 Jul 2022 \ on: Machankura - LN custodial wallet accessible via any phone in six African countries bitcoin
Here's a Twitter spaces discussion by Machankura:
This discussion provided some additional information.
- Operated by a South African, who spent under one month from ideation to launch.
- The LN Nodes (Core Lightning) run on Raspberry Pi
- Due to load shedding by the power utility, but on a schedule, an nginx reverse proxy is used to ensure traffic goes to a node that is expected to have power
- The Machankura service charges a 1% fee on transfers (out ?) to cover USSD fees they pay, hopes to reduce that in the future.
- USSD sessions have a 20 second timeout, so commands must be sent promptly. [I'm curious ... how could I type a Lightning Address on a feature phone in 20 seconds?]
- Wanted to have support for an additional country (Zimbabwe) but the USSD service provider used, Africa's Talking, does not have USSD support in Zimbabwe.
- Work had already been underway by a separate group on an open source SMS based LN-enabled (?) bitcoin wallet (bittext). Machankura is supportive of that as well, since it will provide coverage where USSD may not be either available or allowed.
- As a custodial wallet, there may be VASP (virtual asset service provider) regulations in certain countries (e.g., Namibia).
- Researching innovations (e.g., Blockstreams's GreenLight) to make non-custodial work as well.
- There was discussion about running LN nodes -- I wasn't paying close attention. Not sure if they were asking about opening a channel to provide liquidity, or what.
- Support for forgotten PIN does not yet exist, will cause user to lose any balance. Not sure yet if that will be added.
- When a user loses SIM, they can get a replacement (provisioned with same mobile number) and as long as they know the PIN they don't lose anything.
- If lost SIM and cannot replace (e.g., for reasons), user loses any balance.
- No insurance on BTC balance. [Something to the effect of best effort to protect funds or something to that effect, I'm not sure what was said.]
- Only similar is in Venezuela.
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