most of you maxi crackheads would invite Tone Vays to come over your house and sodomize your grandmother if you were sure it would make the price of bitcoin go up. you don't care about the details, you just want bitcoin to have a higher price. some of you still need a story about why it should happen, and you need a way to square the circle of creating a good store of value without accessible self-custody.

lightning enables a larger number of people to interact with bitcoin by mostly sacrificing self-custody. you need to own at least one UTXO on L1 to preserve your own self-custody on lightning. to protect decentralization, you actually need to own several UTXOs on L1 and you need to keep acquiring them. otherwise it turns into a centralized hub and spoke model. and there is not even enough room for lots of people to get a single UTXO on L1, so most people will just use a custodian even if they would rather not. if the bitcoin religion sees a huge influx of new believers, either the UTXOs become way too costly to acquire or people just go straight to a glorified bank account.

this is just one of the problems with lightning and I think it's the worst problem. it reintroduces banking into the system, and that makes it a terrible store of value. its biggest cheerleaders think this is totally fine. they keep building more ruggable custodial garbage on top of lightning, like all this stuff they are doing with chaumian ecash and fedimints. I couldn't count the number of people who proudly told me that bitcoin makes XYZ coin obsolete because they built something on lightning that is ultimately custodial. how can you call bitcoin a good store of value when so much of the development is building towards custodial usage? if the maximalist nutjobs truly believed in making the best store of value, they would have scrapped lightning in favor of a different path that makes self-custody more accessible to lots of people.