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What's the failsafe for spending/receiving bark bitcoin via LN in the event that the bark gateway goes down?
Your wallet can always exit all your VTXOs when the server goes down. That counts for all your VTXOs, whether they are lightning ones or not.
idk what a vtxo is and I couldnt see it on your landing page.
If it's similar to a UTXO, then I would think, in our scenario where your servers go kaput, then sure, I can unilaterally exit, but isn't the risk that these become unspendable on chain?
A vtxo is an off-chain utxo backed by funds that have been escrowed on-chain. There's always a series of presigned transactions that can take you from the on-chain transaction to getting your vtxo published on-chain (effectively turning it into a regular utxo). Your Bark wallet will make sure it has these presigned transactions before it registers any incoming payments so you'll never see funds that you won't be able to unilaterally exit from
Thanks for clarifying. There may still be a part I am missing.
Is this exit mechanism similar to a LN channel close, in the sense that funds get sent to a new address?
Your wallet can always exit all your VTXOs when the server goes down
This is messing with my head. If I am using this and lose my phone and only have my seed phrase, is that sufficient to reconstruct my full balance and the entire VTXO transaction chain from on-chain data alone? Is there per-VTXO state stored on-device (indices, round data, specific tx chains) that I'd also need to have backed up to recover?
Yes. Your wallet's database is necessary for you to access your funds and you should always back it up properly. We're looking into ways to help our integrators do this, but currently it's a single file that they can encrypt and store anywhere.
We are also working as a last-resort recovery with the Ark server. This will obviously only work if the Ark server is being cooperative.
Yes, there's per-vtxo state stored on-device. You need the metadata associated with your vtxos to recover your wallet. One of the threads on Second's forum discusses making a backup format for this if you're interested in reading more:
https://community.second.tech/t/announcing-v-pack-independent-verification-and-visualization-for-the-vtxo-ecosystem/183
A Lightning payment from a Bark-based wallet is handled trustlessly, the transaction is atomic. If the payment isn't delivered, the Ark balance isn't spent. It uses similar HTLC constructions to pure Lightning transactions. Full details on the trust model here: https://second.tech/docs/learn/payments-lightning