Hello everyone! My name is Michael and I am Co-Founder and developer of Boltz.
We started as a non-custodial, privacy first and account free crypto exchange in early 2019. Since the very beginning, we have been focused on pushing the adoption of the Lightning network and by now we are running one of the biggest Lightning nodes on the network.
These days we mainly facilitate atomic swaps between Lightning BTC to onchain BTC and vice versa.
Topics to ask me about:
- Bitcoin
- Lightning
- What running a big Lightning routing node entails
- Developing applications on top of the Lightning network
- Bitcoin onchain scripting
- Atomic Swaps
Let us all welcome @michael1011,
Lightning is the future, don't worry about a bank run
Don't take this personally, I'm just having fun,
Almost all nyms are available, yet you chose a long one!
I just wanted to use your service to withdraw from SN directly onto an on-chain address.
But the minimum withdrawal is 0.0005 BTC. Why is that?
Boltz offers atomic swaps. Those swaps require 2 transactions to be made onchain and in our opinion the cost for 2 transactions can be too high for very small amounts.
In case you wanna read more about why 2 transactions are needed: https://medium.com/boltzhq/brewing-boltz-hold-reverse-swaps-fea0fadbf041
Ah, I see. Thanks for your reply! Guess I need to stack more sats here first, haha
Hey @michael1101, spotted some typos in the 'What is Boltz' section of the Boltz FAQs: "Boltz neither
usersuses any trackers norloglogs any data that could potentially be traced back to the identity of the users."Hey Michael! Thanks for Boltz!
How can I receive the exact ammount of sats when I use lightnint to on-chain swap? It's never the same and hard to predict.
What separates good Lightning node operators from great ones?
Being online 24/7, having balanced channels, etc makes you a good operator.
But I think a great one constantly figures out where liquidity in the network is missing, how flows change over time and can quickly adapt to that. Pretty much "frontrunning" the routing competition and achieving capital efficiency.
Curious your thoughts about Stacks (STX) and if you see any value for tokens built on top of bitcoin that allow for more scripting?
Tricky question. I don't know a lot about Stacks, only that there is some Boltz fork out there doing swaps between Stacks and lightning.
Bitcoin scripting is certainly very limited and I can imagine use cases for applications running on sidechains or L2s that allow developers to build more advanced applications. Like for example this one, which is allows you to borrow a stablecoin with BTC collateral on Liquid (it's in private beta right now): https://twitter.com/fuji_money/status/1574766200948768769?s=20&t=6vQxLEmQ6oZ9kY2rnJvQnw
If such sidechains, L2s or projects building on top of them need their own token or if those tokens have any value, is a different question. I guess that is up to the market to decide. But I am a proponent of keeping BTC the main asset on all layers across the stack
Thanks for your thoughts! Agree BTC should always be the base layer but it will be interesting to see what is built on top. I think it will exceed our current imagination.
What does boltz offer? I never used it but should I? Also LND or CLN? Who you got and why?
Boltz mainly offers atomic swaps from lightning to onchain and vice versa. That effectively means you pay a lightning invoice and receive the coins in your onchain address (and the other way around; send coins to an onchain address and get them back via us paying a lightning invoice). All of that works in a way that you don't give up custody over your coins and we cannot steal from you.
Boltz is running LND because it was more mature back in the day, when we started our node. Personally, I am running a CLN node. I gotta say, if you want to have the low level control over your node CLN offers and can get used to the less friendly command line interface, I'd prefer CLN.
Thanks I been using a blue wallet and Muun to swap out to onchain and getting killed on fees. I’ll give this a chance
Do you have a favorite next Bitcoin upgrade?
Bitcoin development is happening very slowly and I am not sure what is planned for the next soft fork. One thing I am looking forward to though, is the Eltoo upgrade for the Lightning network. Eltoo requires a soft fork for SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT, so I guess that is what I am looking forward to the most.
Apart from that, I am hoping for more developer tooling for Taproot to make it easier to leverage all of its capabilities.
Favorite Sci-Fi novel?
I gotta admit I don't have as much time for reading books as I would like. My reading list is endlessly long. So my answer is pretty basic:
And I also enjoyed reading Ready Player One.
Hi Michael,
I've been using Boltz for a while now through TOR in order to not leak my IP, and from my own node.
Thanks and congrats for the great service anyway
Hi! And thank you!
Yes. Pretty much untraceable if you use your own node and TOR
Unlike Boltz, it is a custodial, trusted solution. Whatever works best for you I guess
Oh I see, I thought swaps with Deezy were atomic too. I didn't know thanks for the answer
What implications does TARO have for the operation of the Lightning Network?
I guess nobody can tell before we actually see it live in production on mainnet.
From what I have heard, I guess that small "subnetworks" for routing TARO tokens will emerge at the edges of the existing lightning network. And there are also going to be exchange-like routing nodes where you can route from your TARO token subnet to BTC or vice versa.
huge fan of your work! thanks for all you do!
do you plan on supporting taproot in boltz? Is there any way taproot would help with privacy or fees?
Thank you!
Yes, Taproot support is planned! Taproot swaps would look like normal onchain payments, hence better privacy and lower fees :)
When?
deleted by author
If there were a tried and tested library to send on-chain withdrawals over P2EP PayJoin, Would you entertain a PR?
PayJoin improves privacy, helps mange utxoset blowup, and lets (even new) nodes open many channels in one transaction
That would be great! Even better if someone opened a PR for that!
People have been using Boltz for privacy reasons, like for example swapping toxic change from coinjoins to lightning. Supporting P2EP would take another step towards making Boltz a privacy preserving service
feeling optimistic about bitcoin lightning network?
Yes. The lightning network has grown pretty steadily recently and new services utilizing it are popping up left and right. Can't wait to see what comes next :)
Since youre already in rhe atomic swap business, any plans for L-BTC?
Do you mean Liquid-BTC?
If so, yes that is planned: https://github.com/BoltzExchange/boltz-backend/pull/276
Working great on testnet already and is gonna launch on mainnet in the coming weeks :)
Boltz looks great and I am looking forward to using it. Thanks for doing this AMA and providing info on fees in the FAQ of the site. Over time, as Boltz gains more use, will fees likely decrease or stay the same?
Decrease. When we get more traffic over our channels and have the same costs, fixed (hosting, etc) and somewhat variable (channel force closes, etc), we can decrease our fees.
And a new swap protocol taking advantage of Taproot and Schnorr signatures will decrease onchain fees by quite a bit.
Any thoughts on River Lightning Service from your point of view?
Certainly a good option for developers trying to focus on building their application and not the lightning infrastructure. Managing a node can be tricky and cause quite a few headaches. Lightning as a service can make sense for some businesses
My swaps out with boltz on my umbrel lnd node have worked flawlessly and very fast thank you!!
However for bigger amounts they are a bit more expensive than doing it manually with for ex: muun wallet. But under 0,5M sats boltz is my choice!
boltz is a fantastic service. I use it for managing my node liquidity and for refilling/cashing-out my mobile wallets. Big fan!
Thank you! <3
What was the most surprising thing you learned building Boltz?
How quickly Lightning grew in the last year and a half. Maybe some of you didn't notice it as much as we did. In the very beginning of Boltz there was nothing going on. But nowadays, there is always some swaps happening, sats are constantly routed through our node and people open and close channels all the time. Pretty amazing to see. Especially in contrast to the early days. I had almost lost hope before that uptick :)
I've always had the impression that swaps are really powerful and underutilized. Is that your impression too or am I just naive? Have any novel uses of swaps occurred to you?
Swaps can only do so much. Trustlessly exchange one asset from one chain or layer to another. And they have their downsides. Like for example the free option problem
Not question. Boltz is awesome.
Can we running cloud node without hardware , for liiquid providing ?
Directly providing liquidity for Boltz is unfortunately not possible :(
Apart from opening a lightning channel from your node of course