Some nodes live off the clearnet. It would be nice if there was a way for Alby Hub to be able to connect to those nodes in some way.

As a Hub user I can peer with a publicly reachable node so that this node can open a channel to me.
If I had public IP a node could open a channel to me without me having to peer first.
(based on user feedback)

I have an Isolated Balance for a friend. Both of us receiving notifications about sats received and I can see their transactions.

I would like it to be separated

Alby Hub focus on showing the user the amount of sats, but on the day by day usage people want to know how much that equates in their Fiat currency.

Simply add a configuration to set a default Fiat currency and be able to show users that amount converted.

Equally important is to give users to ability to enter that amount in Fiat and have that automatically converted to sats when generating an Invoice.

For an employee creating an invoice to show to a customer it is not practical have to use an external tool to make the conversion.

I understand you wish to preserve the traditional way to deal with a Node for receiving or spending sats via Lightning Network and eventually funding it via Deposit function via Mainnet, but in the other hand it may be simpler to the user to abstract these two operations, in and out, via Bitcoin mainnet.

So if an user has received a fair amount of sats via Lightning allow him/her to withdraw it more easily to a BTC mainnet wallet and automate all the necessary stuff to make that simpler instead of forcing it to do in and out via Lightning all the time and limited to channel sizes.

This is specially important for merchants or people who receive higher amounts via Lightning not have to worry about channel sizes.

In the hub settings I think I would be neat if we could set a custom block explorer rather than defaulting to mempool.space. People hosting a hub may also be hosting their own block explorer so it would be nice for the to have an option to open to it directly. Even if this was just to work with a self hosted instance of mempool.space.

from user on nostr:

"I use Zeus to view my incoming alby activity. I see expired invoices 80% of the time. "requested payment" and "expired request".

Alby dashboard shows only successful send/receive. No timeouts..."

this
https://boltcardwallet.com/

but with alby not LND

This's one of the important privacy steps for Bitcoin. So, it would be great to have this option.

Majority of my personal use case is getting variable amounts over lightning from people. I really need ability to generate zero amount invoices on Alby Hub to use it. Or if there's any other current way to do it, w/ an app store app or something. I'd be happy to learn.
Thnx.

When withdrawing sats from the Savings Balance to an on-chain address, you can't see or decide what the miner fee is going to be – it doesn't show on the first screen (where you enter amount and address), nor is it on the popup (after clicking Withdraw, to confirm the on-chain transaction).

It's unclear whether the fee is taken from the amount you entered, or from the remaining savings balance.

The uncertainty can be a problem, for example if you're withdrawing to a Boltz atomic swap or similar, where you should send an exact amount of funds. Not knowing the fee (or where it's spent from) means you can't know how much money is actually going to the destination.

It would be helpful to see the fee at minimum, but ideally we would be able to set the miner fee based on existing fee rate and personal preference around time-sensitivity.

Thank you team 🐝

I'm not 100% sure it "works this way" but it would be wonderful if we could define (i.e. increase) the routing budget when paying an invoice. Many larger payments (over 100K sats) fail for me frequently, and I would assume it would have a higher success rate if a higher routing fee were permitted.

My only question is whether it's actually the sender who defines the routing fee/budget, or if it's built into the receiver's invoice when the invoice is generated?

The only time I've seen this "controlled" before is when creating a payout invoice within swapping services like RoboSats, where the user can choose to submit a payout invoice for a slightly lesser amount, and increase the routing fee budget accordingly.

So, I'm not sure this feature request is actually an option for the payer of the invoice... But if it is, then it would be awesome, and I would be deeply satisfied if I'm someday able to pay invoices of 100K to 1M sats with a decent success rate.

So user can keep keys inside Hub and connect to Nostr apps safely (without the extension)

Lets say i

1. have a channel open with inbound liquidity
2. add a "Friends & Family" subaccount and
3. add some funds to this account

Now the node owner still has FULL ACCESS over these funds and can spend them as he likes. They are not "isolated" at all. And the next time the friend wants to spend his received funds he can't because the node owner already spent it.

It all depends on the node runner exclusively using "isolated" connections for everything or he runs into the danger of spending the funds of the "isolated" subaccounts/connections.

more management options for isolated "account", starting balance, lightning address etc.

This is implemented in RTL.

It could be useful to have the option to return the remaining budget balance to a NWC connected app rather than the full node balance.

For example if I set a XXXXX sat per month spending balance for a mobile wallet it may be more useful to me for the wallet to display my current remaining balance to spend than it is for it to show me the full balance of my hub.

Great work on everything, Alby team. One thing I'd love to be able to control (or at least see) is the expiration time for invoices I create.

I do not know if any of this is possible or how hard these ideas would be to implement but I will share my thoughts from a user perspective.
I believe it would be a great benefit if there was the possibility to either see the NWC connection secret again after it had been created or even better to have the ability to create sub-connections within Hub isolated connections. These features would greatly enhance user experience especially with the introduction of the Friends and Family feature.

The key problems with not being able to see the NWC secret again are:

1. The need to onboard someone to all the friends and family features at the same time.
   If someone first only wants connection to a mobile wallet but then later decides that they want to try out the ally extension or nostr apps they will be required to set up an entirely new isolated connection requiring their balance to be manually transferred across.

2. If you lose a phone or want to connect to a new browser
   For example if a user has an isolated connection linked with AlbyGo but then get a new phone they would have to create an entirely new isolated connection and would need to re-link every NWC connection and nostr app they have connected, losing their balance and transaction history in the process. The same issue would occur if they have a NWC connection to the Alby browser extension but want to also connect on a new computer or a different browser on the same computer. If a user is required to re-connect any single app connection they are required to re-connect every connection.

3. Ability to link isolated spending balance to many apps.
   For example what if a friend initially sets up their account to be connected to one nostr client but later want to connect on another they would be unable to do so. One of the key features of nostr is the ability to try out different clients and seamlessly transition. Not being able to reveal a users NWC connection secret prevents this or at the very least makes the transition much more difficult.

4. Poor security as users are incentivised to save the NWC connection details in insecure ways.
   To overcome these problems it is tempting for users to just store the NWC connection secret so that in the future they are able to reconnect. It may also incentivise “Uncle Jims” to store all the connections for each of their friends and family so that it is easier to reconnect them in the future if required without the need to create an entirely new connection for them and transfer their funds to this new connection. Thus while the intention of not being able to reveal the NWC connection secret again is to increase security it may actually harm security if users take it upon themselves to store these secrets in insecure ways. Additionally I do not actually see how hiding the NWC connection secret improves security as anyone with access to the Alby Hub is able to spend all the funds regardless of seeing old connections.

It is worth noting that although it is not possible to view the NWC connection secrets again in the hub this is not the case with all apps. For example in Amethyst you are able to view the connection details again after they have been saved.

These user experience deficiencies could be mitigated by allowing previously created NWC connection secrets to be seen again after creation however I think the best solution to these problems would be if isolated connections had the ability to create sub-connections in the same way that you can create connections under the main/master wallet.

This would have the additional benefit of allowing isolated connections to create sub-connections with limited permissions such as receive only access to be linked to an app such as Buzz Pay. Additionally this would also allow friends and family users to create isolated connections of their own which they may want to create for all the same reasons that the owner of the Hub would. It could be visualised as a branching tree where the trunk is the main/master wallet, each branch is a friend & family isolated connection and then the friends & family connections are able to have many leaves that are all sub-connections with varying permissions.

Again as I said initially I do not know if there are technical limitations that make this difficult or impossible however I feel that from the user experience side this would be ideal to really bring the Uncle Jim Hub vision to reality. I also do not want to sound like I am demanding new features. I understand that friends and family has only just been released and I am very excited by the state that the hub is in currently and am only posting my thoughts here after being encouraged to do so on discord. I have loved everything that I have seen with the hub so far and look forward to seeing what the future brings.

When deleting an isolated connection I think it would be good if there was a message advising what happens to the sats that are associated with that connection.

I think it could be easy to get the fear that sats may be lost. Perhaps a line advising people that no funds will be removed and will still be available from the main wallet could be added to the message in the included screenshot.

Maybe it's silly, but I miss it in almost all wallets.
I would like to see the accumulated balance under the amount of each transaction in the history.
Thank you very much for this

I love Alby Hub and I want to support Alby, but I am not interested in the cloud services as it feels "less than" full self custody

I would be super interested in a 1000-2100 sat a month (or 1 dollar a month) product where Alby helps me set up a custom LN address that points from my own domain to the Alby Hub I run.

Sort of similar to buy a protonmail account... they have a wizard that tells me what to put in my domain DNS settings, and then wala you have an email from your own domain. It'd be great to have something similar where after editing my DNS as Alby instructs, that would hopefully forward to alby's servers and back to my node.

Not sure this is even possible, but if so, please offer this service!

I would like to be able to run an alby hub instance for multiple users.

"Send appears to accept bolt11 invoice only. If it accepts lightning address or lnurl then the text could be more clear. Send in Alby Web has a camera option, Hub does not.
In web, receive displays a QR and create invoice option. Would be nice if hub did the same. And if the user doesnt have an alby account then a bolt12 qr could be displayed instead."