Not sure what you mean. If using a custodial Lightning provider, then yes, of course. Many users stop here. This is effectively “banking on Bitcoin”.
There’s a gray area when it comes to LSPs, hosted servers, etc., although these are still exponential improvements over the various systems that society had had up until now.
And fully self-custody Lightning is an option for anyone willing to put in the work. So it really depends
I think the real full self custody lightning is just on-chain Bitcoin
In that you control your UTXOs, yes. The multi-sig transactions to open and close a channel with your counterpart are the on-chain footprint, with the “layer two” Lightning protocol representing the ownership of your portion of that UTXO at any given time. So while there is always the self-custodie on-chain anchor underneath those Lightning transactions, the exchange of L2 sats is also happening via an open-source protocol where both parties cryptographically secure their own funds, while the amount that each party owns is changing and being updated off-chain. Maybe over simplified (I’m no expert) but this is how I understand it
The fact that the amounts are updated off-chain is what makes it the same as other third-party custody
It does have a few more assurances than, for example, mints. Every L2 solution is essentially batching. There's a whole spectrum of trade-offs between speed, throughput, and security. On chain is king. On chain nostr zaps would be an incredible innovation. Mints have single points of failure. Lighting is a good middle ground. But just one of many solutions.
Good points!
Except that it’s not a third party who is updating balances or having custody of funds. It’s you and the code you’re running, in collaboration with another free user who controls their own funds.
It’s not at all the same as letting someone else hold your Bitcoin and hope that they’ll play nice when you ask for it back…
Ready or not I am putting a non-lightning Bitcoin address on my profile tomorrow and encouraging people to send me value for value sats there on all my content creation posts too.
For far too long we have depended on adding a layer of complexity for the sake of convenience. Sure lightning is cool when all the stars align and you don't lose your sats, but that is DEFINITELY not the case for most people. I feel getting back to our roots and not forgetting where we came from is important as bitcoiners too.
If you believe in this too. Feel free to add one to your own profile description until enough developers take notice and make it a standard option in addition to lightning zaps. Like it should have always been in the fucking first place.
