Stacker.News if a website that may be familiar to most nostriches. But in case it is not, stacker.news is effectively a forum-style website that functions similar to reddit. But, with the very cool feature that sending sats works as the 'upvote' function. It's a great site, so check it out regardless of what I am about to break down.
One of the great features of Stacker News is that you get a custodial lightning wallet with your account. This wallet comes with a lightning address as well. Now, this alone is not unique or entirely useful. What makes Stacker News stand out is the way you can configure this wallet to interact with your self-hosted lightning stack. Now, I'm not just talking about the power user that is running their own node (although they do have useful configuration for those users). But, the lighter users that may be using a mobile wallet, such as mutiny, zeus, blixt, phoenix can use Stacker News to improve their zap receiving game.
Before I get into how, I want to highlight two great options to receive zaps via ln address if you are using a 'node in the phone solution.' The two options are zaplocker, provided as a solution for users of Zeus' embedded lightning node wallet, and lightning box, provided as a solution for users of the Blixt embedded lightning node wallet. Here is a summary of these two ln address solutions:
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Zaplocker: Zaplocker is an ln address provided for Zeus embedded node users. The way zaplocker works is that the sats are held temporarily in Zeus' node (for up to 24 hours), and once you log into your Zeus app and access the embedded node, you can redeem the sats. This can be made easier by setting your Zeus app to automatically redeem and sats awaiting redemption upon logging in, and there is also a persistent mode that can help the app stay on in the background. If the app is on in the background and you have turned on the auto redemption feature, it will function more or less to automatically receive sats much like a custodial wallet or a node you are running on a server
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Lightning Box: Lightning Box is an ln address provided for users of Blixt wallet. The way lightning box works is that, as long as you have a channel opened with the blixt wallet node and it has inbound liquidity, you can receive sats to the lightning box ln address. You have to set blixt wallet to persistent mode as part of using lightning box, which makes it more likely that your app will be running in the background and will successfully facilitate receipt of sats sent to the lightning box ln address. Unlike zaplocker, there is no 24 hour redemption time ; if your blixt wallet is not running in the background when the send is attempted, you will not receive the sats.
So, these both sound like great solutions and a pleb need not do anything else, right ? Wrong. Both are not perfect solutions, with the main issue being that even with persistent app settings, the apps will inevitably close because phones seem to do that for one unknown reason or another. Or a connection will be lost, and your app will not be running to receive the sats. Or if you want t run the apps over tor, your very likely to have a connection inturrupted. Now, with zeus you still have 24 hours to open it up, sync up your node and receive but we want to up our game so that a user does not have a chance to lose zaps.
Enter Stacker News. By Creating a stacker news account (you can even do so with using your blixt or zeus wallet to log in and create your account!), you now have an ln address you can use in place of your zaplocker or lightning box address. Use that stacker news address for receiving zaps on your nostr account. In your stacker news account, go to the wallet link, and click 'Attach Wallets'. Next, click 'configure' under the ln address option. Input your zaplocker or lightning box address. If you want, you can configure stacker news to withdraw automatically by setting the 'desired balance' to 0 sats. There will be a moment of custody, but it is a few seconds in my experience.
So, what have we just done and what's the improvement? Well, zaps you receive are going to be received to your stacker news ln address now. The improvement is that the stacker news node is on all the time, and you do not risk missing payments much like one can expect from say a Wallet of Satoshi ln address. With the configuration we made, the stacker news wallet is going to automatically withdraw sats received to your custody in your zaplocker or lightning box. For example: In the event that you are asleep, and your zeus or blixt wallet is not online for hours while nostriches across the globe are zapping the crap out of your viral post, your sats are sitting comftorably in your stacker news wallet. You will fire up your Zeus or Blixt app, and proceed to watch the sats flow into your custody from your stacker news wallet.
The result of this setup is a pleb who is not running an 'on all the time' node can experience a comparable receiving experience with minimal custodial exposure. I encourage any pleb, especially those using zaplocker due to the potential harm it can cause to the lightning network, to consider this setup. Let me know what your experience is or, for users already leveraging the Stacker News ln address, I'd be curious to hear about your configuration. Thanks for reading, hopefully someone finds this article helpful!
#bitcoin #lightning #zeus #blixt