hot take: I get that custodial lightning is not remotely decentralized, sovereign, trustless, etc. - all that good shit …

… but is nobody else outrageously excited by how much of an improvement over fiat it is? not just in its own right but even explicitly in terms of decentralisation, sovereignty, and trustlessness?

it strikes me as a key vector of bitcoin driving jurisdictional arbitrage, for one. say some authoritarian regime cracks down on bitcoin (whatever that ends up meaning in practice, doesn’t really matter) and makes it politically risky to run a node, or manage liquidity, or be seen as “transmitting money”, or whatever. if there is a trustworthy custodial lightning provider *literally anywhere in the world* you can anonymously spin up the ability to receive payments in seconds. “anonymously” and “in seconds” are both groundbreaking advances if you have any familiarity whatsoever with fiat banking and payment rails.

if you think about it, you actually can’t get this with “real” lightning either. it’s not instant (to set up) and you need to know people who presumably trust you to some small extent to get to the point of workable liquidity and stay there (perhaps under-discussed, but if channel partners “don’t trust you”, they will close or never open, and you can’t use lightning at all. WhO’s TrUsTlEsS nOw HuH?!?)

so yes, this requires trust, but like, fuck me, so does everything in real life 😂 - being overly negative on this strikes me as a kind of core fallacy of appreciating open and decentralized systems: that it’s a spectrum, not a binary. how open and decentralized the foundation is represents the maximum openness and decentralisation of anything built on top, *not the minimum*!

moving away from completely closed and centralised does not necessitate the opposite, it opens up an entire range of new possibilities, all of which come with tradeoffs. but tradeoffs are relative to circumstances in real life, and in real life, selective trust is very much a thing because We LiVe In A sOcIeTy 🤪 - talking about tradeoffs in absolute terms as if the decision to accept them can be made entirely devoid of context is highly regarded. and this isn’t even to get into the rather obvious line of argument that if you want people to ever get to the extreme, having a spectrum to gradually move along is far more appealing than requiring them to jump in at the deep end. i.e. it’s also amazing for adoption.

in conclusion, don’t be highly regarded. support adoption. agree with my hot take. gm, pv 🤙