Thanks again to nc50lc and to this forum for your help!

Thank you for your reply.

Earlier today I received a reply from coingate that included: "We are aware of the performance issues on the LN network. Our team are working on a resolution for this and will have it solved ASAP.".

Within the last few hours the ability to select the lightning network for bitcoin payments on their web interface was returned, and I was able to complete my payment (acknowledged by the vendor) using the lightning network.


I'm using electrum 4.2.2, however the channel was created with version 4.0.9. How do I know if the backup file it creates uses a non-static backup? Or, what does it mean that the backup is "non-static"? The application says that the channel type is STATIC_REMOTEKEY. There's also notation that says "This channel cannot be recovered from seed. You must manually back it up." Do any of things definitively tell you if it is of the non-"safe" type for performing a force close?

Is there any advantage, since the channel connection is now active, in force-closing the channel, upgrading, and then establishing a new channel?

Thank you again for your help,
Chris

I have a BTC lighting channel that's DISCONNECTED. I've never closed a BTC lightning channel before and want to know how to recover the unspent funds. I've looked far and wide, but can't find anything useful that explains this. I see "Force-close channel" as an option, but is that safe to use? And if so, how long does it usually take to recover those funds?

Background: I've had an open BTC lightning channel with coingate for almost two years that I've been making a monthly subscription payment from. Electrum hasn't been running for probably a week. In the meantime coingate has apparently quietly withdrawn from using the lightning network--the option to pay invoices with the lightning wallet has been removed from their interface, they haven't responded to queries about it (so far), and I guess they've closed their end of lightning channels (or whatever they've done has caused an electrum indication of DISCONNECTED on my end).

Thank you for your help,
Chris

Thank you for your response!

Yes, I'm paranoid enough that I did it offline. Doing it on an offline linux machine that would otherwise use a package manager has its added difficulties. I ended up just downloading the source for all the additional packages I needed onto a thumb drive and built them as that was easier than the alternative.

After a couple hours of no luck trying to figure out how to do it, and before finding this posting, I'd considered just performing an on-chain move of all wallet funds. But Schildbach's app doesn't offer the ability to select the exact transaction fee or another way to move the entire contents of a wallet and that was my goal.

Additionally, the Schildbach app had recently crashed in such a way that it would immediately crash every subsequent time when starting. This made it completely unusable. So I would've needed to uninstall, reinstall, and I'm guessing recover from an encrypted backup. This crash was the final straw for me for the Schildbach app.

For context: in my quest to remove Google from my life I've been using MicroG for LineageOS on my phone. I don't use the Google Play Store anymore, and have been relying on F-Droid. There's been some ongoing issue with getting the Schildbach app from F-Droid. The short version is that Schildbach blames F-Droid and posters to the F-Droid forum say there's "reproducability issues". It feels like both sides are pointing fingers at each other and refusing to fix the issue, but the end result is that it hasn't been updated there since 2019.

I'd been fine with that for a while, but a few months ago I decided I wanted to start storing BTC offline on paper wallets. Imagine my frustration when, as a test, I tried to sweep a paper wallet back into the app and it gave me an error. After searching for a solution and finding nothing I looked at the code for the error message, and when trying to correlate that with commit messages my best guess was the version of the app I was using used an outdated API to get some blockchain information needed for the sweep operation. I could be misremembering the details, but I tried it multiple times over a couple weeks with the same failure each time. Whatever the cause was, this was an issue that had been fixed for many months.

While many later versions of the app had this issue fixed, they weren't available to me since they weren't on F-Droid. I later spent an entire evening trying to build the Schildbach app without success. I ended up coming back to it later and eventually had to create a new VM just to build the app. This worked after struggling through a number of frustrating issues with the Shildbach's brief but outdated build process. It's like so many other things: it's an easy thing to do if you know how to do it.

As I'd never built an Android app before I didn't realize that I had to sign the app. IIRC my signing key has to be signed by Google or something like that such that I was never able to get the app installed.

Since I'm venting about my issues with Schildbach's app I'll add the following. With all my other issues I needed to upgrade my phone's firmware at one point and decided it would be best to just completely wipe it clean and start over. Imagine my frustration when I tried to restore the wallet backup and when selecting the wallet backup file I get an error that the file can't be found. There was no help to be found on this issue. After pouring through hundreds of commit messages I finally found a clue that suggested there was a change in the app that was causing it. After installing the oldest version of the app from F-Droid I was able to restore the wallet and subsequently install the "new" version (from 2019). This seems like the sort of thing that should've been documented somewhere other an obscure commit message.

That was the long way of answering your question. No, I'm not trying to permanently move to Electrum--you might someday find a similar rant about the difficulties I've had with Electrum. But I'm done with Schildbach's app and can't imagine I'll ever want to come back to it.

I appreciate all that Schildbach and his team do, but it sure as heck seems to suffer some of the same lack of cohesiveness, purpose, direction, and diversity of skills that open source projects are known for.

I'll step off my soap box now

... until my next post.

Thanks again!
cdoug

All,

Can anyone recommend any practical presentations for using bitcoin that I could provide to my friends or family?

Can anyone recommend any practical presentations for using the lightning network for me?

The following is context for what I'm asking.

I've been using bitcoin for less than two years, and I've only ever made payments to two different recipients. Yesterday I used bitcoin with the lightning network for the first time. I've watched a number of videos and read a whole bunch of articles and tutorials on the lightning network before I was comfortable enough to open my first lightning channel. I did the same before I bought my first bitcoin. I felt that I didn't really have any understanding of bitcoin until I bought and started using it. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it seems that practical experience with using bitcoin is so much more effective for understanding it than the sum of all I'd read, seen, and heard before I'd experienced it.

I feel like a video or account of someone actually using bitcoin for everday practical things would go a long way towards helping people understand it better and become more comfortable with starting to use it. Much of what's out there approaches it from an abstract perspective. I understand that these are abstract concepts, and there's a place for those types of instructions and tutorials just as there's a place for the more technical presentations, but I'm hoping to find something that's more practical.

As an example, related to the lightning network I'm sure most of you are familiar with the presentations that talk about Alice, Bob, and Carol. Most of what I've seen use these stories, and this method was really good as it gave me a very high level understanding of the basics quickly. But it seems like this abstract description steers the discussion towards the very high level and somehow avoids the practical altogether. I have many questions I'd like answered that I can't seem to find the answers to. I won't list these questions in this post, but I feel like some practical, real-world (i.e. not in a lab) presentation might cover some of those questions or perhaps make obvious why some of them may be moot. I also think such a casual presentation could give others enough confidence to take the steps necessary for their first experience.

Thank you for your consideration,
cdoug

Thanks so much for this! I'd been banging my head against the wall for hours, trying different things I've found elsewhere.

I think the actual missing step for me--for at least one of the methods that I'd tried--was HCP's instructions for the wallet type to use (native segwit) and his specific, and correct, derivation path (m/1') to go along with it.

I did have some issues completing the last steps of exiledotome's method, but once I completed his step 4 I was able to find and read the 12 seed words within the unencrypted binary file using a text editor.

So I essentially ended up doing:
1. exiledotome's steps 1-4
2. Read the words from the unencrypted file
3. Followed this procedure: https://bitcoinelectrum.com/restoring-your-standard-wallet-from-seed/ but I used HCP's instructions of using a native segwit wallet and a derivation path of m/1'

Looking at my new electrum wallet, it looks like I have everything, and it looks to me like I didn't really need the private keys to transfer the wallet to electrum. Assuming nobody can get hold of the unencrypted seed words, are there any shortcomings to the way I did it?