I’m very happy to report that after 237 days, I have finally been able to recover the sats that were locked up in my malfunctioning Blockstream “experimental” Lightning wallet!
This was a strange journey, spanning nearly eight months, involving multiple support tickets, and fending off Telegram scammers pretending to be engineers to try to find someone who could help diagnose and solve my problem.
In July, after no progress had been made for close to half a year, I found the Blockstream booth while I was at the conference in Nashville. I started chatting with a friendly engineer named Randy about this problem, and we continued messaging for the next several weeks as he tried to look deeper into what was going on. The logs showed that the node connected to my app had gone hopelessly out of sync, and the best solution would be to close the channel, but the app wasn’t allowing me to do that. He suggested talking to someone on the Greenlight team at Breez ⚡️ who would be able to close it from their end.
After nothing happened for a few more weeks, I politely pinged my friend Umi last night, who was at that moment was on a flight from Singapore to Tokyo traveling between two conferences. She said I should talk to Ivan Makedonski, (proud new dad!) who in one day was able to finally get the channel closed, and allow me to finally complete the transaction I started back in January.
Thanks so much for your help. It’s not even about the money for me. I would have been able to move on if I had lost these sats, but my thoughts are with people around the world who need a reliable way to transact, free of censorship, and not worry that they will be stuck without access to their funds for long stretches of time. The new users, just discovering bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, and other freedom technologies for the first time are the reason I feel so compelled to try all the things, break them, and try again.
💜⚡️🤙 