Exploring Bitcoin ownership in rural areas with a focus on self-custody Lightning wallets. I ventured 40km from the capital of Zimbabwe to test Blixt, Green, Mutiny, Phoenix, Zeus, and Wallet of Satoshi. Discover how I opened channels, managed transactions, and evaluated costs across different wallets, finding the best options for bitcoin ownership in remote areas. Watch to see the results and to understand why self-custody is crucial for true ownership and how it fares in less urban settings. (Test conducted in January 2024)
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TRANSCRIPT
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I asked myself in Zimbabwe, I did that last year already, is Bitcoin ownership possible also in rural areas where you might not have the best Internet connection? And that's why I set out to do a self-custody Lightning wallet test. 40km from capital. And I tested Blixt, Green, Mutiny, Phoenix, Zeus, and for the fun of it, Wallet of Satoshi. I have to add that Green and Mutiny say they are still in the experimental phase. So first you need to open a channel, and there are several ways you can do it. And I tried all those three that I know of. It's like you can open a transaction directly from the blockchain, you can send Lightning from your custodial or non-custodial Lightning wallet to the wallet to open channel, or you also can swap your Liquid bitcoin via an exchange called boltz.exchange and open channel. So I tried that with different wallets in different ways. With the Blixt wallet I had to use on-chain, they didn't have another option than just buying Liquidity, and I didn't want to do that. With Mutiny, I used directly Lightning from another Phoenix wallet I already had. With Green, I used Liquid via boltz to Lightning. With Phoenix, I used Phoenix. And with Zeus, I also tried to use Liquid. And the results are very interesting. So the Green wallet actually was the cheapest. I opened a channel for 100,000 satoshis for every wallet, and I had 97,500 satoshis in my wallet then that I could spend. So the cost to open the channel was 3.5%. But Zeus, for instance, cost me almost 50% of the funds I sent in to open my channel. Okay, now, I had this open channel, and I did that in Harare, not out there, because I thought that won't be possible to open the channels there. So this is how I sat for about 2 hours and I had a protocol like I started with sending and receiving Lightning. I sent 50,000 satoshis to Phoenix, and then I tried to receive 30,000 back. And the interesting thing is that the fully custodial Wallet of Satoshi took 9 seconds to complete the payment, whereas Phoenix used 3 seconds. And it's fully sovereign. Fully sovereign. Then I tried to send to a Lightning address because I thought for any reason it might give different results. And it did. Green was able to send to the Lightning address. It took 40 seconds, but still it did. And Mutiny, Phoenix, and of course, Wallet of Satoshi did it very well then, because I'm speaking now of Liquid, because I think that if people can't afford high transaction fees, we should give them the opportunity to own something like bitcoin as well in cold storage also. And that's why I sent 20,000 satoshis to swap it into Liquid. And Phoenix did well as before. So then I thought, okay, I give those three wallets who didn't complete any payment out there a second chance, and tried the same in town with LTE and sadly they failed again. So my results, my recommendation at the moment for self-custody on the Lightning network is Mutiny and Phoenix. And as I said before, Mutiny is interesting from the fact that they also now integrate Fedimint. So self-custody, even in the test, trumps custody because it gives you ownership. And also because Wallet of Satoshi recently seized its operations in the US, because for regulatory reasons. I believe the US authorities told them you must KYC your users because you are a custody. You hold custody for their bitcoin and they didn't want to do that. But this can happen anytime in any country. So always be aware, if you're using a custodial wallet, only have small amounts in it. Hello, my name is Anita Posch and if you liked that video, please subscribe to my channel now to inspire me to create more content like this. And if you want to learn more about Bitcoin, then sign up for my free weekly Bitcoin newsletter at anita.link/news.
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No financial advice. Do your own research.
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#Bitcoin #Lightning #Self-Custody