It was about a year ago that I made my first purchase with Bitcoin Lightning. It was a tasty cappuccino from a vendor at Bitcoin Miami. I had read about Lightning but hadn’t had an opportunity to use it before. I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to do realtime, peer-to-peer transactions. The first Bitcoin Lightning wallet I used was Wallet of Satoshi.

I’ve continued to use Bitcoin Lightning. Unfortunately not for payment of goods. But my son has a Lightning wallet and we exchange funds with Lightning regularly. I’ve also onboarded at least 20 different people to Bitcoin by having them install Wallet of Satoshi, and then I put 1,000 sats (Satoshis, or 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin) in their wallet. It is simple, fast, and an eye opening experience.

All of this is to say that I was sad to hear about a month ago that Wallet of Satoshi is not going to operate in the United States anymore.

Here is an excerpt from their post on Nostr:

We’ve dedicated ourselves to providing the best Bitcoin experience with Wallet of Satoshi, being at the forefront of Lightning usability and adoption. However, we’ve made the difficult decision to remove our app from the U.S. Apple and Google app stores, and will not serve U.S. customers going forward.

They aren’t specific about why they are doing this. I suspect it likely has to do with Know Your Customer requirements. Wallet of Satoshi doesn’t require anything. You can just install it, receive funds, and send funds. It is super simple.

Since they are not allowing transfers into US accounts I sent all my sats from Wallet of Satoshi to my Strike account, via Lightning of course. It was fast and free. No worries. I’m going to keep Wallet of Satoshi installed and hope that someday in the future I can again start using my favorite Lightning wallet. ⚡️