ponymontana🦄⚡ on Nostr: phoenix wallet is moderately bad for lightning environment cause it is a good and ...
phoenix wallet is moderately bad for lightning environment cause it is a good and smart service that can be shut down/require kyc/enshittify from a moment to another.
This will last people with not much viable alternatives cause for now all other solutions are a lot more complicate, works worse or, at the opposite of the spectrum, are custodial.
No problem, market will figure out quickly and the inefficiency and "supply shock" will be filled.
But using phoenix is not so bad for the individuals, it is pretty good instead. With lightning you are never "totally autonomous" and you need to find some peers to connect with.
These peers can do DOS attack on you, can spy and extrapolate data about you, can close your channels and even try to cheat.
With phoenix you are in a pretty similar situation. Except you cant choose different peers from acinq and you leak more data about payments cause of remote pathfinding calcs.
But in the end, you are risking pretty the same as "owning your own node, choosing your own peers". Its just a slightly worse situation, and, being paranoid, acinq could attack you in some particular ways (compromising the app itself).
But the most dangerous thing that can happen to you using phoenix is the same that can happen to you using your c-lightning or your LND: your peer can close your channel and you will loose money (cause tx fees for closing/reopening).
So I'm a huge fan of phoenix, its a really good product and I think its useful for newbies, as a " first non-custodial wallet" and even for experts that want to have a reliable option to send/receive payments.
The problem is that bitcoin software should be open and interoperable to avoid monocultures, and phoenix is locked down to acinq.
But analizing better, we can see some patterns that minimizes damages and maximizes the advantages of this software:
Phoenix is built openly and every aspect of his working is standardized and acinq contribute to A TON of documentation to the lightning spec.
So the walled garden is not so walled, and acinq spend a lot of resources try to facilitate other competitors to reimplement how phoenix works.
Phoenix, in that sense, is absolutely net-positive.
But why dont open the garden and permit phoenix to connect to other peers? Cause that would mean a total degradation of the UX.
Acinq is pioneering a lot of new features, standardizing them in the lightning specs and then use phoenix to implement it.
Notable example are splicing, bolt12, liquidity-ads...
Pretty no other implementation has implemented a lot of these things... but they probably will, now that acinq has contributed so much to give them documentations and an example implementation to show them how to do.
To finish, my point is: seems that acinq/phoenix could represent a centralization problem, and in some way it is; but it is also an absolutely blessing for all the lightning network, and it is contributing a lot to other implementations advances.
I use it and will use it unless, at some point, they will (be forced to) enshittify their service.
Hope other competitors will reach maturity in the meantime: acinq is working hard to ensure that.
This will last people with not much viable alternatives cause for now all other solutions are a lot more complicate, works worse or, at the opposite of the spectrum, are custodial.
No problem, market will figure out quickly and the inefficiency and "supply shock" will be filled.
But using phoenix is not so bad for the individuals, it is pretty good instead. With lightning you are never "totally autonomous" and you need to find some peers to connect with.
These peers can do DOS attack on you, can spy and extrapolate data about you, can close your channels and even try to cheat.
With phoenix you are in a pretty similar situation. Except you cant choose different peers from acinq and you leak more data about payments cause of remote pathfinding calcs.
But in the end, you are risking pretty the same as "owning your own node, choosing your own peers". Its just a slightly worse situation, and, being paranoid, acinq could attack you in some particular ways (compromising the app itself).
But the most dangerous thing that can happen to you using phoenix is the same that can happen to you using your c-lightning or your LND: your peer can close your channel and you will loose money (cause tx fees for closing/reopening).
So I'm a huge fan of phoenix, its a really good product and I think its useful for newbies, as a " first non-custodial wallet" and even for experts that want to have a reliable option to send/receive payments.
The problem is that bitcoin software should be open and interoperable to avoid monocultures, and phoenix is locked down to acinq.
But analizing better, we can see some patterns that minimizes damages and maximizes the advantages of this software:
Phoenix is built openly and every aspect of his working is standardized and acinq contribute to A TON of documentation to the lightning spec.
So the walled garden is not so walled, and acinq spend a lot of resources try to facilitate other competitors to reimplement how phoenix works.
Phoenix, in that sense, is absolutely net-positive.
But why dont open the garden and permit phoenix to connect to other peers? Cause that would mean a total degradation of the UX.
Acinq is pioneering a lot of new features, standardizing them in the lightning specs and then use phoenix to implement it.
Notable example are splicing, bolt12, liquidity-ads...
Pretty no other implementation has implemented a lot of these things... but they probably will, now that acinq has contributed so much to give them documentations and an example implementation to show them how to do.
To finish, my point is: seems that acinq/phoenix could represent a centralization problem, and in some way it is; but it is also an absolutely blessing for all the lightning network, and it is contributing a lot to other implementations advances.
I use it and will use it unless, at some point, they will (be forced to) enshittify their service.
Hope other competitors will reach maturity in the meantime: acinq is working hard to ensure that.