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How to create a Spark Wallet on SN

  1. Click your nym in the upper right corner, then click Wallets from the Dropdown menu. You'll be taken to the wallets management screen.
  2. Click Add wallet
  3. Search for Spark, then click it.
  4. You'll be greeted with the creation screen for the Spark Wallet:

  • On the screen, you'll see the seed mnemonic. It's unmasked in the screenshot so I can show you what it looks like, but by default it's hidden. (Don't worry, this is a mnemonic from an uncreated wallet that I didn't follow through on).
  • You'll also see the identity pubkey of the wallet.
  • My guess is you'd do well to write these two pieces of information down.
  1. Click save wallet
  2. Boom your Spark Wallet is ready to use

Receiving sats into your spark wallet from Lightning

  1. First thing I did is pay myself 10,000 sats via Lightning invoice.

  • 300 of the 10,000 was taken in fees.
  • Notification says 10,000 were "proxied" to me though. (Not sure what that means, specifically).

Zapping

  1. Made it my default wallet and used it to zap @Natalia's post 500 sats. Success!

Withdrawing

  1. Now to try sending 5,000 back to myself by paying a Lightning invoice with my Spark Wallet

  1. Successfully received on my Alby Wallet!

Evaluation

The process was really smooth and easy. I think creating the wallet only takes 2-3 clicks. Then, things work as intended.

I would say this is a pretty successful launch and UX improvement. Kudos the SN team.

Noooooooo you can not make your life better nooooooo!!!!11111111!!!! You have to mine the copper yourself and carve a rack out of stone with your bare hands and then drop a single droplet of water at the right time of the day so that it will concentrate the light of the sun at the exact coordinates and intensity so that it will carve a bit out of a solid ruby disk until you get the exact machine code in a single try and...

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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 14h

cocaine from Bolivia and hookers from Columbia will improve my life

and yes, I am that shallow

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The market has spoken!

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CLINK is the way forward for linking wallets here for both send and receive, and for LN generally - easier for users, safer, and more flexible than anything else available, custodially or not - wallets are beginning to integrate (zeus/electrum) recently, realising it's advantages.

It's a natural successor to LN URL, and will become widespread/default moving forward, as it basically speaking, does LN better.

https://github.com/shocknet/CLINK

https://clinkme.dev/

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I think Shocknet is working on this

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Had a lightbulb moment when I was admonishing @Scoresby yesterday...

SN referral links mapping to the referrers CLINK nprofile. Instant onboarding where the trust stays as implied.

#1556999

Gonna prototype this in Bxrd or something

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19 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 17h

Im glad my waywardness serves some purpose.

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is it possible to exchange CC's for sats and pull them out through this or any wallet ?

i've mostly been away during the standardization of CC's on SN and it seems dishonest for people to be paying sats on my posts, but to only be receiving CC's

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2 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21h
it seems dishonest for people to be paying sats on my posts, but to only be receiving CC's

I'm open to alternatives, but afaik the only thing we could do instead is show an error which is worse imo.

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To my knowledge, there is still no direct way to convert CCs to withdrawable sats, other than making side deals with other users

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278 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 29 Aug

I think the smoothness is what a lot of people don’t like about Spark. It’s a bit of an illusion that hides the unpleasantness of real lightning/Bitcoin and may prevent us from making real lightning/bitcoin better. It’s like 2026’s Muun.

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eh, to that I'd say we call it a wallet and not a vault for a reason

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But this is really bad practice: sharing seed words on a third-party site, that's before talking about spark. What if beginners think this is normal and start putting their seed words like this on other sites randomly?

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oh just to be clear: these aren't seed words that you input from somewhere else, they're the automatically generated seed words for your newly create Spark Wallet

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But how can a beginner tell the difference between Spark wallet seeds and real Bitcoin wallet seeds? 👀 Or worst they might think it's okay to do that.

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that's fair. some more instructions about what this "mnemonic" means and what it's for might be helpful for new users.

tbh, I don't fully understand how it's used myself: #1557622

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My rule of thumb is never share seed words, never. 👀

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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 23h

I just realized that I misunderstood the photo, now I see what you actually means.

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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @john_doe 17h

I tested as well.
With 1 sat I had 1 sat of fee and 100 sats I had 1 sat of fee. I used Minibits to send. Since I experienced higher fees on Radar I was expecting more fees.
Overall for a beginner it looks good.

To me it seems quite unfair though to write a warning for Spark when Wallet of Satoshi and Blink advertise using Spark as well... In terms of UI adding a warning and an asterisk only there feels weird also.
So I think removing all warnings for Spark or add a warning for all custodial wallets to make it consistent would be better.
e.g.: I use Minibits with Stacker News, this is definitely custodial.

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Fake L2s work until fake L2s don't work, I'm firmly in the CLINK camp, if someone has designed a workable solution that utilises Lightning and Nostr, what's not to love?!

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124 sats \ 7 replies \ @k00b 29 Aug

Thanks! The signup flow is easier wrt the Spark part. It skips the wallet configuration form/screen. But it does require storing the passphrase before getting to that part.

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my guess is the browser is storing all the credentials?

i wrote down the seed phrase but i don't know enough about spark as to whether that's all i need to recover my funds should I lose access to this browser

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74 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 29 Aug

We use your SN wallet passphrase (which is stored in the browser) to encrypt your Spark mnemonic and store it on the server. So if you have your passphrase (and we haven’t deleted your encrypted mnemonic), you don’t need to separately store your Spark mnemonic. Although it doesn’t hurt to store it - and you can load it into other Spark wallets and use it with SN simultaneously.

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  • Does that mean you can decrypt our Spark mnemonic too?
  • Can we recover our SN Spark wallet funds with the mnemonic if SN disappears?
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No! We don’t have your wallet passphrase. That’s why you have to input it on everyone of your devices.

  • Can we recover our SN Spark wallet funds with the mnemonic if SN disappears?

Yes, assuming Spark doesn’t also disappear.

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I guess I was confused by this:

So if you have your passphrase (and we haven’t deleted your encrypted mnemonic), you don’t need to separately store your Spark mnemonic

So, what you mean is that if we have our SN passphrase and we forgot our Spark mnemonic, we can still operate our Spark Wallet on SN, including withdrawing funds.

However, if we lose the Spark mnemonic and somehow SN goes down, then we won't be able to recover those Spark wallet funds, correct?

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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 29 Aug

correct

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deleted by author

104 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 29 Aug

Mussolini finally got the trains running on time in Italy 😀

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If I were an Italian in the 1930s I might've been a fascist, who knows

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44 sats \ 3 replies \ @virshawn 20h

I really would like to input my own key instead being given a key.

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I think you can? @k00b

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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @virshawn 19h

It automatically chooses a mnemonic for you and you can't type in the field to change it. Even if you go to configure you still can't change the mnemonic phrase.

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oh, didn't realize you can't type into it.

good to know.

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Round-trip fee competitive with lightning wallet payments...?

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Don't think so. They took 300 out of my initial 10,000 deposit, which feels hefty.

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Yeah, saw that... Nothing else e.g. when withdrawing...?

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as far as i could tell, nothing

i withdrew 5000 and received 5000

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I am curious to see if this really helps growth or not.

But if this nerfs/removes CCs then I think it’s an overall win.

So let’s say my NWC fails my sats will fall back to my default spark wallet and I can still use SN?

The CC was always clunky for me plus people “gamed” it to use CC and extract sats.

While I’m no Spark champion I understand why devs choose it especially if they don’t want to be liable for being a MSB

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I think having two currencies (CCs/sats) is also just confusing for new users

making it all sats would be nice

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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 17h

Fuck Spark.
Last time I ever post on SN. Bye.

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How much to cash out The whole Spark wallet?

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When I withdrew 5000 from my Spark wallet to my external lightning wallet, I wasn't charged any fees.

(I do have a direct channel between my lightning wallet and SN)

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Ngl I remember reading that the fee is crazy high. Can't find it now though. Can you try transferring all balance?

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I see a lot of people are very upset about this whole Spark thing. Personally, I don't have time to run a full LN node and I don't think there's anything wrong with choosing convenience as long as you understand the tradeoffs. That being said, is there an explanation somewhere of what precisely the tradeoffs are?

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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 29 Aug
Notification says 10,000 were "proxied" to me though.

I should probably update that notification with some details.

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