When I launch lightningd it generates hsm_secret in ~/.lightning/bitcoin
whereas launching lightningd with network=testnet generates hsm_secret in ~/.lightning/testnet.
These two files seem to be different as confirmed by
diff ~/.lightning/bitcoin/hsm_secret ~/.lightning/testnet/hsm_secret
returning some output.
Having in mind that hsm_secret may get corrupted and being concerned with the security of my funds I decided to generate hsm_secret from BIP-39 words
and back up both the phrase and the file.
After compiling c-lightning from source and generating [the mnemonic with Python, I then followed the documentation and run:
~/lightning/tools/lightning-hsmtool generatehsm hsm_secret
It generated hsm_secret in the current directory.
After trying ~/lightning/tools/lightning-hsmtool generatehsm hsm_secret testnet and finding out that it does not work I decided
to try using the same hsm_secret file for both the testnet and the mainnet, i.e. I
launched lightningd with network=testnet and replaced the auto-generated hsm_secret in
~/.lightning/testnet with the one I generated from my mnemonic and than did the same with network=bitcoin and ~/.lightning/bitcoin/hsm_secret. I was surprized to see that all seems to work fine,
e.g. newaddr generates tb1 addresses when on testnet and bc1 addresses when on mainnet.
What are the pros and cons of using the seperate hsm_secret files vs using only one file for both networks.?
