What do I do with my BTC IF Umbrel goes bust ?
Umbrel is NOT a company. Is just a community maintained node solution. That’s it
Same as DarthCoin suggested. Its a community effort, but lets take it a little further.
Let’s say the Umbrel Twitter account gets locked, the web page goes dark taking this forum with it. It’s built on open source software on the most inclusive network on the planet. Simply go to the Github and download the newest implementation from there, or upgrade your node as normal. There is currently 25 active contributors that have submitted code updates for Umbrel.
Let’s take that a bit further. Suppose for some reason devs decided not to continually upgrade Umbrel software. There’s other node software that would take an Umbrel backup and spin it up as if it were its own, Raspi-Blitz is one iirc. Now with Umbrel down other software devs would implement similar features cause we don’t want a number of nodes to fall off the network due to one piece of software not being updated.
Lets take it even further, If Umbrel stops updating your node will continue to run just fine for years. Bitcoin is backwards compatible. You can take node software from 2013 and it will run just fine, minus Lightning, Segwit and any other updates since then If there’s an exploit to one of the included apps simply uninstall it.
Let’s take it to the extreme, suppose it never gets updated and no other software will work seamlessly to transfer data. You can close your channels, send the funds to another node software wallet and open new channels to those same peers.
TLDR:
Your operating on the most inclusive network ever invented maintained by volunteers who are driven to make the world a better place. This is nothing to worry about.
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This is a good question and something we think about a lot. Everything we do is done in a way to make sure that Umbrel, the project, continues to live on even if we — the core team that works full time at Umbrel, Inc. (the company) — go bust.
Like @full_node pointed out, the beauty of having your project’s source code open for the community to fork, develop and maintain freely is that users no longer have to depend on the original authors of the project.
And the worst case is not necessarily about going bust or bankrupt either. Let’s say if we stop acting in the best interest of our community and slip in malicious code, etc — there would most likely be a strong reaction from the community, which would then immediately fork and remove the malicious code. We’ll lose everyone’s trust, and most of our users will end up switching to the fork.
So it also aligns our incentives to do everything that’s in the best interest of our users and the community.
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