Submarine Swaps(on-chain to LN) not ready for prime time? \ stacker news ~lightning

Disclaimer

I am new to Lightning and started diving deep into it after abandoning it a couple of years back. I learned about swap services and wanted to try them, but I had a problematic experience losing(kinda, not completely) control of my sats(500K) for 30hrs.

Issue

I used a site to swap from LN to onchain, and it worked like a charm without a hiccup. However, when I tried to do on-chain to LN, despite having six confirmations of me transferring my sats to the swap service provider's address, I started to worry. I reached out to middleway(a swap service provider working with Boltz software), and he was invaluable from the start till the end, where he was debugging the issue in real time with me.

Resolution

He had to raise a GitHub [issue] (https://github.com/BoltzExchange/boltz-backend/issues/782) and tweak some code manually(I don't understand the details), and it worked. I finally have my sats back after 30 hours of not having it with me(though I had the recovery private key for the escrow that held the sats, so I never felt scammed or cheated). If that manual tweak had not worked, I would have had to wait 7 days(block height till timeout) to get back my sats. I did not know all this as I was new to Lightning and Swaps, so this was a little stressful, not knowing if I would get my sats back. I still do not understand what technically happened in detail, but I learned a lot from swaps.

Summary

In summary, if a user's feedback for production software leads to a GitHub issue, I conclude that swaps(at least on-chain to LN) are not ready for prime time. The other conclusion is that not enough people are trying these services, which leads to users becoming beta testers. I am too new to LN to give a definitive answer. However, I appreciate the middle-way person sticking with me(having some tough conversations) until the issue is resolved. I have my sats back, so I am relieved. The positives from (non-custodial) Lightning so far have outweighed the negatives, but I feel there will be a few more hiccups along the road, for me at least. PS: I tried to document the process in real-time in another thread, which you can find on #847217

121 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 13 Jan

Atomic swaps for LN have been around nearly as long an LN and pretty stable, the Boltz implementation of them has too and the service run by Boltz is suprisingly reliable... I imagine the changes you needed to make were a customization, because you were using a clone that wasn't configured properly, and as an early user of that particular clone to it you got to find the bug.

That said, it's never going to have the UX people have become used to in crypto more broadly, where stuff is completely trust-based and centralized.

Per your other thread:

The LN invoice was raised from Wallet of Satoshi

Since you're using a trusted wallet already, there was no point in trying to do a trust-less/atomic submarine swap... you would just generate a chain address in WoS to round out the custodial UX.

Submarine swaps are really for node operators doing advanced liquidity management and generally have better grasp the end-to-end machinery, while end-users will unavoidably continue using the trusted versions for better UX.

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @charonnakamoto OP 13 Jan

you would just generate a chain address in WoS to round out the custodial UX.

I did consider that, but the fees for moving from on-chain to WoS LN were more than twice(or even thrice) the cost of doing it via Swaps. Plus, since re-entering the world of lightning with vigor, I have been keen to experiment with services. When I get obsessed with something, I go deep into the rabbit holes, and I feel I end up learning something from that. But I appreciate you reviewing the earlier post and agree it must be an issue with that particular implementation.