Attaching a wallet to SN using Alby Hub Desktop | Complete Beginner's Guide \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Hi, despite numerous guides out there about this already (see bottom for links), I thought I'd write another one because I had a bit of trouble that the others guides didn't mention.

This guide is designed for a complete beginner to LN, and the guide will walk you through the steps to:

Set up Alby Hub Desktop, which acts as both a local Lightning Node and Bitcoin/LN Wallet.
Receive Bitcoin into your new Alby Wallet.
Open a channel from your Alby Node to Stacker.News (because we want the shortest possible route to send and receive sats on SN right!?)
Generate some inbound liquidity on your SN Channel (optional).
Attach your Alby Wallet to SN via NWC. (Note that this is not the same as opening a channel to Stacker.News).

This guide was written for Windows 11, but the steps are probably same or similar for other OS.

Prerequisites

You must own some Bitcoin and know how to send BItcoin to an address on-chain.
You must have a Stacker.News account.
You must have a computer and OS capable of running Alby Desktop.
You should block out an hour or so, since you'll have to wait for on-chain confirmations.

That's it. No other prereqs.

Download Alby Hub Desktop.

Go here in your browser: https://guides.getalby.com/user-guide/alby-account-and-browser-extension/alby-hub/alby-hub-flavors/desktop
Follow the instructions to download Alby Desktop for your OS.
For Windows, it looks like this:

Just click "Get Started" and follow the instructions
You should end up with albyhub-Desktop-Windows.zip.
Unzip it anywhere. I chose C:/Users/Username/AlbyHub
You should end up with albyhub.exe. Double click this.
- You may see a Windows Defender popup. Just click "More information" and "Run anyway".
- You may also get a Firewall popup. Allow Alby to communicate via your network.
Further note for Windows users: Alby stores data in C:/Users/Username/AppData/Local/albyhub

Set up your Alby Desktop password.

Click through all the welcoming screens.
When you get to "Get Started" vs. "Advanced Setup", click "Get Started."
Enter a secure password. You must remember this because there is no way to recover!
Click through to create the password.
When you hit the screen that asks you connect an Alby account, just click "Later".

Receive Bitcoin to your Alby wallet.

You should now be on a screen like this:
Ignore the "Get started with your Alby Hub" steps. This is where I got tripped up since it wanted me to buy liquidity from a list of pre-selected providers. You shouldn't have to do this, so don't.
Instead, click "Node" on the left.
Click "Deposit" on "Savings Balance".
Alby generates a Bitcoin receive address for you. Use it to send Bitcoin to your Alby wallet! It will wait for a few confirmations before it shows up in your Alby Wallet.
Once you have enough confirmations, your deposit will show up in the "Savings Balance" part of the "Node" screen:

Open a channel to Stacker.News

First, you'll need to find the pubkey of Stacker.News. You can find it on Amboss: https://amboss.space/node/03cc1d0932bb99b0697f5b5e5961b83ab7fd66f1efc4c9f5c7bad66c1bcbe78f02?section=General
Copy the pubkey by clicking on the copy button:
Go to the "Node" page in Alby Desktop and click "Open Channel"
Enter the channel size.
Click Advanced Options
A "Channel Peer" menu shows up. Click "Custom".
Enter the pubkey of Stacker.News in the "Peer" field.
I checked "Public Channel," but I don't think this is required.
Click Open Channel.
Alby will wait for 2 confirmations before the channel appears as open.
You now have outbound liquidity on the SN channel.

Get inbound liquidity on your SN channel (optional)

Assuming SN is your only open channel, you need this step to get inbound liquidity.
Simply buy something online which takes payment via Lightning Network.
Click "Wallet" in Alby Hub (on the left sidebar.)
Click "Send"
Enter the invoice or lightning address that you want to make payment to.
Hit continue.
Assuming SN was your only open channel, you will send the payment via that channel. You now have inbound liquidity on your SN channel and you are now able to receive payments on LN!
On the "Node" screen, you see a channel status that looks like this:

Attach your wallet to SN

On the left sidebar in Alby Desktop, click "App Store"
Find stacker news and click "Connect"
The instructions you see on Alby may be buggy, so follow what I write instead (as of 2024-10-14).
Navigate to wallet in Stacker.News in your browser:
Click "Attach wallets"
Under NWC, click "Attach"
You need to create two connections by pasting in NWC pairing strings. One for send, and one for receive.
First, we will create the send connection.
- Go back to Alby Desktop. You should still be on the stacker news app page. Click "Connect to stacker news"
- Change the "Name" to "stacker news send"
- SN recommends keeping "Full Access" selected, so I will also recommend. More advanced, security conscious users can modify permissions if they like.
- You can optionally set a budget so that you don't accidentally spend too much via this connection (i.e. due to a bug or attack.)
- Click "Next"
- Copy the pairing secret.
- Paste it in "Connection for sending" in Stacker.News in your browser.
- On Alby Hub, it will keep saying "Waiting for app to connect." Wait until a "Continue anyway" pops up and click that.
- Your "stacker news send" connection should now have been created, but it's not attached yet to SN because you didn't finish configuring on SN yet.
Now, we will create the receive connection.
- Go back to the "App Store" in Alby Desktop.
- Find Stacker News again and click "Connect".
- Change the name to "stacker news receive"
- This time, don't select "Full Access". Instead, select "Custom."
- Enable the following: "Read your node info", "Lookup status of invoices", "Create invoices". (This may not actually be the minimum requirements, but I found that if you just do 'Create invoice', you will get an error on SN.)
- Get the pairing string and paste it in "Connection for receiving" in Stacker.News.
- As a test, set your autowithdraw limit to something under your current SN wallet amount.
- Click "attach".

Congratulations! You should have successfully attached your Alby Wallet to SN via NWC. Your sats should withdraw automatically within a few seconds.

I hope this is helpful to any newbies and non-technical folk who were feeling too intimidated to set up and attach a LN wallet.

References

@DarthCoin's guide on AlbyHub: #701233
@supratic's guide on attaching wallets via Alby/NWC: #698497

162 sats \ 1 reply \ @Alby 23h

Very nice guide, thanks @SimpleStacker!

We're happy to answer any questions and/or doubts :) Let us know aso how can we improve Alby Hub!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 18h

Thanks :)

Overall, it was a pretty smooth experience.

My main two feedbacks would be:

After the initial welcome screens you're asked to connect to an Alby account. This was a bit confusing because it made it seem like you need an Alby account to use the desktop app, but you don't actually need to.
Step 1 of "Getting started" suggested by the app is to increase inbound liquiidty by buying liquidity from a provider (i.e. paying someone to open a channel to you.) I don't have anything against that, but I think it's confusing to LN beginners. Especially because the payment for the channel is itself over lightning.

My guess is that a more "comfortable" experience is for beginners to deposit their own bitcoin into the LN wallet and then open a channel with outbound liquidity. Maybe the suggested first steps could be 1) deposit bitcoin 2) open a channel, and you can provide a list of suggested channels. (That's just my two cents, you guys are the experts.)

45 sats \ 10 replies \ @TheMorningStar 15 Oct

It's quite technical and not for beginners I think.

10 sats \ 8 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

Some technicality is unfortunately unavoidable. But I tried to lay out everything as step by step as I could, without assuming any prior knowledge (except on-chain... I do assume knowledge about how to send bitcoin on-chain and what confirmations are, etc.)

20 sats \ 7 replies \ @TheMorningStar 15 Oct

Yes, you did a very good job. I appreciate. It's my side. I'm too new. How about coinos? Would that be easier to attach to SN?

31 sats \ 6 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

I am not sure about CoinOS since i've not used it. @supratic has a guide here: #694593

I'm also happy to help answer any questions about getting Alby set up, if you're following along the guide and get stuck.

11 sats \ 5 replies \ @TheMorningStar 15 Oct

I think to setup Alby Hub I need a computer which I don't have.

Or can I set it up on mobile?

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

Yes, this guide would require a desktop computer. I am not sure what the best choice for mobile is. Maybe check out this #723218? That post has got many links to different setup guides.

38 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheMorningStar 15 Oct

Thank you sir. I'll do it today.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Alby 23h

Unfortunately the Alby Hub node doesn't run on mobile... You can run it in our cloud, though - and access via browser.

https://getalby.com/subscription

52 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheMorningStar 23h

No problem sir. When I'll have a computer, I will definitely use Alby.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @supratic 15 Oct

Not sure you can install it on mobile, probably not or it could be a good challenge! Ideally you need a lightning node to plug it in. If you don't run a node you can always play around with hosted services that provide the service.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 15 Oct

not technical at all. I find the steps very well explained and simple.

37 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 15 Oct

+1 for opening a channel

I checked "Public Channel," but I don't think this is required.

It’s not, I’d recommend keeping it unchecked unless you want to participate in routing payments

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

Makes sense.

Stacker.News has been a huge liquidity source for me so I find it hard to maintain any inbound liquidity on public SN channels. (They get routed pretty quick.)

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Cje95 15 Oct

For what it's worth I struggled with Alby Hub. I was a bunch of version behind and when I tried to update it was a mess. They are running a special though for the first three months I want to say it was 9k sats instead of 21k sats a month but it works so much easier and better. Having everything going 24/7 makes it much much easier than how it was just running it on my laptop!

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

Hmm, I haven't gone through an update cycle with Alby yet, so I am not really looking forward to that!

I can see how running it on a laptop might not be great, especially if your laptop has to go offline frequently. I'm running my Alby on a home desktop computer which hopefully won't ever have to go down unless in the event of a power outage.

14 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cje95 15 Oct

Yeah when I was talking with them there was something about I needed to be on when it was pushed so that my Hub was active and since it is a laptop that isn't always the easiest thing. The desktop should be a huge improvement! I looked at if from not only the experimentation standpoint but also how many sats was I earning via SN and since I have become much more active esp during the weekdays its a higher cost but I am able to knock it out.

I am looking to add a couple other LN earn opps that I could also link to this and if that ends up not happening then it could be in a few months that it isn't worth it for me but esp with the 3 month discount it isn't bad at all!

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 15 Oct

I would not call it optional. Is a must if you expect to receive sats from SN. Is not necessary to "buy something" with those sats. You can simply swap them out (using any of those multiple swap services or simply send some sats to any of your LN wallets, as a buffer cache.

I am still surprised to see that people do not use multiple LN wallets and are stuck with just one... some of them even ONLY with SN account LOL.

As I explained here in this guide how to manage your multiple wallets liquidity

19 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 15 Oct

Thanks for this guide

Hope it helps. The more people we can onboard to non-custodial LN the better.

38 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 15 Oct

I bookmarked this post, so I can follow your instructions for opening a channel to SN.

144 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 15 Oct

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 15 Oct

Excellent!