rabble on Nostr: So I tried the npub.cash thing, and honestly it’s not so easy to setup. I know ...

So I tried the npub.cash thing, and honestly it’s not so easy to setup. I know it’s a proof of concept, so I expect things to be less than smooth. That’s fine. I’m providing feedback in the hopes it gets better.

It took several tries to login, when I tried with Nostore and my iPad, it didn’t work at first. After a few tries it did, and I was able to try and claim a username, but then it presented a QR code on my iPad to pay. The mobile wallet apps I’ve got can’t scan a QR code from a web page I’m looking at on the same device.

I have a wallet in Primal… nifty, it’s powered by Strike and I was able to load up some sats via apple pay, not a good exchange rate, but it was damned easy. The thing is, Primal’s iOS wallet lets me scan a QR code using my device’s camera, send sats to a nostr contact I have (which is a really cool feature) or to a lighting address… I’m not sure how to tell if something’s a valid address or if it validates them, what happens if you paste in a bitcoin wallet address or say ethereum one? The thing is, npub.cash only shows a QR code. How do I scan a QR code on my phone from my phone? Dunno. I’m guessing npub.cash could have given an option to copy the lightning address as text… but that’s not there yet, that would have been helpful. I failed and gave up on npub.cash, went to sleep.

Then today I decided to give it another try. I went to my desktop, then used nos2x to connect, the login worked fine, but then I also got a QR code, this time on my computer. I thought, great, I’ve got an Alby wallet… but when I went to go scan the QR code in Alby it says I need to enable the camera. The thing is, the QR code is right here, on the same web page from which I loaded the Alby extension. What’s implied is that I should maybe print out the QR code? Or perhaps take a picture of it on my phone, then present that to the computer camera? All so I can make a transaction from chrome to a chrome extension in the same window?

The npub.cash payment screen suggests I copy the QR code… copy it and do what exactly? As far as I know, the wallet apps don’t accept pasting in images of QR codes, at least not that I’ve found.

I was able to open up primal’s wallet, scan my desktop QR code and pay the 5000 sats… So I now have a cashu wallet and address of rabble@npub.cash. Not sure what to do with it, but it was easy to setup… Mostly because the full version is at rabble (npub1wmr…g240)@npub.cash and I think it worked without me even logging in… kind of a we’ll hold all of your sats until you login with nostr to retrieve them. Which is cool.

I don’t really want to learn how cashu or lightning work under the hood, because if we have to understand them to use them, then it’ll be too complicated still for most people. This is getting closer.

Lastly, the code claims it’s open source, but that’s also not strictly true. It appears to be published publicaly on GitHub without a license at all, so while we can view the code, we can’t modify it or use it for our own purposes. This seems to be an oversight that applies to all of Lightning Digital Entertainment’s repos: https://github.com/orgs/lightning-digital-entertainment/repositories?type=all