This version introduces a set of UI modifications that simplify the use of Lightning. The idea is to abstract payments from the payment layer, and to suggest solutions when a lightning payment is hindered by liquidity issues.
Invoice unification: on-chain and lightning invoices have been merged into a unique type of invoice, and the GUI has a single 'create request' button. Unified invoices contain both a lightning invoice and an onchain fallback address.
The receive tab of the GUI can display, for each payment request, a lightning invoice, a BIP21 URI, or an onchain address. If the request is paid off-chain, the associated on-chain address will be recycled in subsequent requests.
The receive tab displays whether a payment can be received using Lightning, given the current channel liquidity. If a payment cannot be received, but may be received after a channel rebalance or a submarine swap, the GUI will propose such an operation.
Similarly, if channels do not have enough liquidity to pay a lightning invoice, the GUI will suggest available alternatives: rebalance existing channels, open a new channel, perform a submarine swap, or pay to the provided onchain fallback address.
A single balance is shown in the GUI. A piechart reflects how that balance is distributed (on-chain, lightning, unconfirmed, frozen, etc).
The semantics of the wallet balance has been modified: only incoming transactions are considered in the 'unconfirmed' part of the balance. Indeed, if an outgoing transaction does not get mined, that is not going to decrease the wallet balance. Thus, change outputs of outgoing transactions are not subtracted from the confirmed balance. (Before this change, the arithmetic values of both incoming and outgoing transactions were added to the unconfirmed balance, and could potentially cancel eachother.)
In addition, the following new features are woth noting:
support for the Blockstream Jade hardware wallet (#7633)
support for LNURL-pay (LUD-06) (#7839)
updated trampoline feature bit in invoices (#7801)
the claim transactions of reverse swaps are not broadcast until the parent transaction is confirmed. This can be overriden by manually broadcasting the locakl transaction.
the fee of submarine swap transactions can be bumped (#7724)
better error handling for trampoline payments, which should improve payment success rate (#7844)
channel backups are removed automatically when the corresponding channel is redeemed (#7513)
by far my favorite desktop wallet still after many years
Good, a lot of new stuff
Release notes:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES
Here's the Tweet that kicked off a Twitter thread regarding the prompt to rebalance:
https://twitter.com/ElectrumWallet/status/1555642692901765121
https://nitter.it/ElectrumWallet/status/1555642692901765121 <-- Shows the thread in a single, easy-to-read, web page