I will not understand Bitcoiners that in 2023 onboarding newcomers to the custodial wallets and their claims are “because it’s easier” sorry but do more work to explain self custody and onboard ! There are trade offs in self custody on lightning but I would choose these trade offs vs custodial wallets!
Discussion
I understand it. There are many situations where it makes sense.
from a UX perspective, as someone who produces/maintains technical documentation, customers of a product or service (especially one that’s novel to them) simply won’t start out by digesting all the detailed minutia listed in the “Best Practices”
it’s best to treat lightning like pocket change that’s loose in your back pocket
inter-generational #butcoin should never touch the lightning network, nevermind the argument of whether it’s in custodial/non-custodial
- if we see newcomers express the attention and interest in learning the nuance as they get to grips with sending/receiving #zaps, I agree that non-custodial education is important
for on-boarding your typical normie with <$5 of sats, you’re going lose their attention
“#butcoin”
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Adam, I think that's the point.
I use the argument that we can introduce it and then show how to improve it.
It is hard enough for a new user to handle private keys and etc... then, in my personal scale and considering the final goal for every bitcoiner is to mine their own btc to avoid kyc'd (ok, hard, but stills).
So:
1) introduce through lightning network and having the smooth experience of fast and cheap
2) understanding more deep economic concepts
3) understanding the importance to handle their own wallets and auto-custody
4) Withdraw from exchanges to cold/hardware wallets
5) Understanding more deep tech concepts
6) Running btc and ln nodes
7) Mining (even with a nerd miner)
The education about Bitcoin is harder than other topics because there are a bunch of dense layers. And for the user who never had contact with it, I start from the highest/easy level.
This is why I just repost nostr questions instead of commenting. I know self custody is way better but to explain why es mucho para mi 😅
Start them off the right way, not the easy way
🎯
I will divide my answer into two parts:
on-chain must be in self custody!
lightning for the first sats i think it can also be a custodial solution (temporarily). however, I have heard so many positive announcements in this area in the last few days that I also think to recommend only non custodial solutions in the future
This is how “temporary” looks like! 
the picture is a little scary 🧐
I did not expect non custodial to stagnate like this
Nostr did this 🤣
nostr:npub1z4m7gkva6yxgvdyclc7zp0vz4ta0s2d9jh8g83w03tp5vdf3kzdsxana6p where is the source of the chart pls? I want to show it and discuss it during my show
It is crucial to consider the economic concept of the unseen in relation to information overload. While many individuals choose custodial solutions in the realm of Bitcoin, we must also recognize the untold number of people who never entered the network or remained on exchanges due to overwhelming information at the initial touch point.
Absolutely! These days it's super easy to onboard people into self custodial wallet in two steps.
1) download Phoenix Wallet
2) write down seed
Done. Help your buddies if they have questions later.
I'm pretty pragmatic. I've decades of experience training normies on using software & know that there's a select few in any group that can handle the 'tech user' side. I call them super users & most Bitcoiners at this stage of the game seem to fit into this category. They're not Devs but they're interested in the tradeoffs & how to get around certain features.
My go to app for demonstrating the potential Bitcoin speed & ease of use is generally Phoenix. It was previously WoS and before that Muun.
My strategy is to first get them exposure to Bitcoin & to see the value. If this has an impact, the second contact is either more general questions or how do I buy it?
I take a different approach for someone who was stacking for the future. I usually go with a Bitbox O2 for those folks. This conversation then focuses more on seed phrase storage.
Aww shit - i didn't mean to wrap that in a content warning (fat fingers 🤣)
Yeap! Not too many people have a skill to teach in easy way! I can drive a car but I can’t teach my wife and better would pay for someone who can handle this better 😁
We should avoid onboarding via custodial wallets that’s it!
I will always look for the solution with the least tradeoffs/risks & the best user experience. I want the best outcome for these folks but acknowledge that they may not be able to go the whole way.
I love the AGES model to learning design. The A in AGES stands for Attention & is a requirement to achieve any learning outcome. You have to get & maintain the learners attention for learning to occur. The G is generating insight happens over time & the S acknowledges the requirement for Spacing the learning. E acknowledges that you need to generate Emotion to have learning cement in their mind.
Teaching your wife to drive a manual car is the best way to have a memorable argument 🤣
On a longer Bitcoin adoption time frame, I see shared bitcoin custodial solutions where the risk is pushed to the edges (rather than centralised), playing a bigger role. I know that this triggers many Bitcoiners & I've had heated arguments around it. I just don't think that we get to 1 billion users without shared custody solutions.
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I am all for self custody. But I would not underestimate the power of making things easy for beginners. Bitcoin is a long trip and one often needs to make one step at a time.
The problem I see is that someone might assume that since their first step was free (custodial without fees) it will always be like that. And of course you can try to educate later on why self-custodial has a price, but generally people are so used to free stuff that most likely they'll expect it just by laziness and feeling of entitlement. And they might treat the custodial solution as something good enought to keep bigger sums. I don't want to have bad feeling on my conscious later if that gets rug pulled.
For example, nostr:npub14wxtsrj7g2jugh70pfkzjln43vgn4p7655pgky9j9w9d75u465pqvagcye adviced bar baazar to install bluewallet lightning custodial.
I image when he realized that people using the custodial LN were advised to move their funds out because they'll close it and it was past the deadline the feeling that you advised someone and now they might loose money because of you is something I don't ever want to feel.
Luckyly everything turned out ok, it was not a rug pull and they payed the funds even past deadline.
But I prefer to avoid the worst possible outcome.
Self custodial education is better then just going for easy but risky solutions just for increasing adoption.
If someone is not willing to accept that education, it just means they're still not ready/needing bitcoin.
I still believe that you can not orange pill anybody, they must decide to do it themselves. You can help educate them of course and that is very precious value.
Convincing some merchant to install custodial wallet just so that you can pay them in sats does not mean you oranged pill them IMO.