I no longer believe the concept of Lightning Network channel capacity can be abstracted away from the user. I now believe channels should be a major focus of education, UX/UI in self-custodial wallets.
Discussion
So 99.9% of users will use custodial lightning? 😀
More generally, I feel like that tends to come from a goal of rarely opening channels/splicing, rather than seeking to reduce fees compared to on-chain. If the outcome for noncustodial lightning is just that you save 75% on fees, is that accomplishing a goal?
Is your reply related to my post? Either way, I don’t know about the percentage, but most people don’t have savings, don’t buy anything controversial and have access to apps from politically stable places, so custodial wallets are fine for them. It’s important others can interact with them from self-custodial platforms, though.
My point was I don’t think it’s possible to educate users about channels - if that’s the car everyone is gonna be in custodial.
I’m optimistic! I often compare it to a prepaid debit card. It has a total amount printed on the front, that’s the capacity. Now imagine you could refill and use the card as often as you like with minimal fees, but if you want to hold more than what’s printed on the front, you gotta buy a new card for a fee. People usually get it.
Prepaid debits are user-unfriendly af, they’re not commonly used, doubly so for regular usage, they’re just gifts.
Yeah that may be, but capacity limits aren’t unheard of, and they’re not hard to explain.
Phoenix Wallet already does a great job hiding the complexity from the user
I disagree. Watched somebody use Phoenix at the last Bitcoin meetup, at the end of the event they had three channels over ~50,000 sats, spent 9,000 in fees to Phoenix and ~20,000 in block fees. That’s a terrible experience resulting from *hiding* complexity where it should be *emphasized*
I agree that's a bit too much fees, I always send new phoenix users 300k sats and let them send it back so they have a channel >300k sats for 3k sats fee.
Once you have some bigger channels established its a great wallet tough and fees are pretty low when staying offchain
Yeah that I agree with entirely. It makes the entire onboarding experience a bit awkward though. I think ideally the recipient could just set their desired inbound, e.g. 1M sats, then the first 10,000 sats into their wallet get taken as a fee.
Nah I think it all should be abstracted away for the user.
Maybe in decentralized mints using the fedimint standard.
Where people can choose mints based on how well they audit their “reserves”